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No Formal Risk Analysis of Hubble Rescue by NASA
Somegeek writes "
SpaceDaily.com is running a story that
NASA never performed a formal risk analysis of a shuttle mission to rescue the Hubble Space Telescope before they decided to cancel the mission on grounds of risk. The story quotes Fred Gregory, the current acting NASA administrator, as stating that previous NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe made the decision "based on what he perceived was the risk". This perceived risk is in performing a manned shuttle mission that is out of range of using the International Space Station as an emergency refuge. The Hubble's current batteries and gyroscopes will probably fail in a few years, leaving the dead telescope to crash back to earth around year 2020."
...then as NASAs competence ramps down, may be private space entrepreneurs' ramp up.
Perhaps like an abandoned sailing ship the Hubble will be salvaged--and rescued--by private a private space craft.
Got to make you wonder just how safe the shuttles are when the primary risk isn't repairing the Hubble telescope but being on a shuttle in the first place. Two blow up and now they hesitate to take them up unless it's in an orbit that crosses with the space station. After the Challenger I said I'd go up the next day on one because I trusted NASA. Now I'm not so sure. Sad because they used to have one of the best safety records in history given the massive risks involved in any space mission.
When you are dealing with Red Tape, you cannot just say "We want a new telescope" because the answer is "What is wrong with your current telescope? It sees the universe just fine, right?"
So, you say your current telescope is old and you need a budget for something new and bigger and better, technology progresses, right?
What we can infer is that NASA has something else they want to put up that, if they "rescued" the Hubble, would cut into the budget for their new thing they want to put up.
" Kinda OT but wouldn't the people who are paying millions of dollars to save the show Enterprise be better spent for the HST?"
What kind of trolling is this? Fans are having a hard time coming up with $32 million to continue the production of Enterprise and you expect them to be able to cough up $2 billion to save Hubble? Good luck.
Don't go throught the regular contractors because they want billions of dollars.
Contract small companies that are willing to build one for peanuts.
Find some other material other than glass to construct it from to save on weight. Maybe a thin ceramic that can be slightly bent with heat or electricity.
some facts:
# How big is it? This mirror measures 2.5 meters (98 inches) across and weighs 748 kilograms (1,650 pounds). The useable surface of the mirror in the Hubble was slightly smaller-about 2.4 meters (94 inches)-because the mirror mounting covered the outer edge.
# Why doesn't it look like a mirror? This mirror was never used, so it never received a reflective coating. The mirror in the Hubble was coated with a thin layer of aluminum and also overcoated with magnesium fluoride, so it could better reflect ultraviolet light.
# What is it made of? The mirror is made of Corning ultra-low expansion glass. The front and back surfaces are fused to a lattice core and to the inner and outer bands, creating a sturdy but lightweight structure.
The CAIB did a fairly large number of risk asessments for returning the Shuttle to flight. That covered just basic flight and the risks involved. The numbers for Hubble would be essentially those numbers.
I rather suspect that the risk analyis for Hubble would be something along the lines of "For non-strategic flights on Shuttle, we have to have a 99.5% chance of success". Since the baseline Shuttle analysis for the risks on return-to-flight are already outside that boundry, then it makes zero sense to spend money digging deeper.
With regard to the last slashdot story. I think allowing private corps access to any sort of space venture is bad news. But we all know it is going to happen anyway.
Jonathanjk.com
I don't know if this is what you are trying to say-- I can't quite tell. So please don't take this as an attack.
But just because public space development is good does not mean that NASA is bad, or that bad things happening to NASA are good.
I see a lot of people on slashdot, seemingly mostly libertarians, who seem to be cheering anything bad that happens to NASA on the theory this is somehow a victory for private space development. It isn't. This is not a zero sum game. NASA's loss is not private space development's gain. A gain for private space development is a gain for humanity's involvement in space; a loss for public space development is a loss for humanity's involvement in space, but nothing else.
The things NASA does in space don't supplant what private enterprise would be doing, they supplement it. NASA's goals in space are-- or should be-- to do the things that benefit humanity but which no clear profit model exists from. Meanwhile the advancements NASA creates in space can-- or should be-- models for private enterprise. NASA could and should do more to explicitly encourage private space development and explicitly see themselves as to some extent partners with private space enterprise (I don't know who owns the technology NASA uses in space, I assume the aerospace contractors who built everything do, but I think that technology should be publicly documented and the patents available to the public for use by private operators, since after all the public paid for it) but even as it is private space development can and will benefit from NASA and its presence, and vice versa. Private space development and NASA aren't enemies, this isn't football.
Meanwhile even in the areas where the actions of NASA and private space operators overlap, private space operators simply aren't ready to replace NASA even if they should. Private space development shows great promise but it is truly at an infant stage.
Aside from the above, I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying; you may well be right about salvaging or reclaiming Hubble. looks like Hubble will be entering the atmosphere sometime between 2010 and 2032. They're not there now, but it seems likely private space enterprise may get to the point where they can rescue it before it is lost forever even if NASA isn't interested...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
It's more important to kill a bunch of stupid third world people than to finance Social Security let alone further science.
Now they've just spent 2 years and hundreds of millions just developing the capabilities for inspecting and repairing based on the ISS option. The autonomous option is many years and probably billions of dollars away, and they only have a few years to repair Hubble before it goes down. Add to this that they're not supposed to be schedule-driven anymore by Recommendation R6.2-1:
So NASA's in a tight spot here. Don't be schedule driven yet develop all of these capabilities that take years and huge budgets to develop but do it in time to save Hubble. And then they're retiring the shuttle fleet a few years later anyway so all of this effort and cost for the "non-ISS" flights is really just for Hubble. I'm not saying O'Keefe made the right decision, but I hardly think he deserves the trashing he's been getting on this decision, which isn't even final yet. It seems like a very sound decision given the circumstances, but we'll see how the political will finally responds.
Basically, there are two sides to this story. First of all, any kind of talk about risks is complete bullshit. The risks are no greater than in all previous Shuttle missions, and flying within docking distance of ISS is not a magical solution that somehow makes the risks becaom significantly smaller. It's just that NASA became so politicized, that they routinely use purely political tricks, and this talk of risk is exactly that. They are just repeating their routine after the Challenger accident: back then it turned out that the Shuttle's lack of emergency escape system proved to be a bad idea. So, their solution was to invent a bogus, unuseable escape system to make everybody shut up. The only thing this system is good for, is torturing the crue very creatively for PR purposes. And now they came up with the "if it breaks, we'll dock at ISS" solution. A complete garbage. On the other hand, NASA is right in one thing: Hubble IS NOT WORTH REVIVING YET AGAIN. It's better to let it die gracefully and replace it with a new and better telescope. A Shuttle mision to repair Hubble is, at this point, a complete waste of resources and a tremendous hinderence to the NGST program. In short - NASA became a purely political organization, one that is incapable of telling people the hard truth, and consistenyly choosing to replace it with sweet lies. And this certainly didn't happen just yesterday. :(
It might have been an interesting idea if we were to discuss a decade ago. There are a number of problems:
(1) ISS is not equipped to "park" a trailer sized telescope,
(2) to make it possible, NASA will have to design a module for parking the HST and then redesign the ISS as a whole (it is not very flexible in design...which is why I hate this space station).
(3) this would cost NASA more shuttle visits and R&D for the new parking module,
(4) even if you achieve all of these, then there is no guarantee that the HST is repairable in future.
I am a user of the Hubble Space Telescope. I've used it over 100 orbits in the last seven years. And I say this: let it die. The HST has been a great telescope, but would I spend every penny we have to keep it up? No. I'd rather prefer building new space telescopes for the money.
Dude, start taking your meds. That tirade doesn't make any sense. You could accuse Bush of not caring whether or not the telescope lives, but you're gonna have to come up with some kind of source to make that allegation. As for the militarization stuff, that's not happening at NASA.
The reality is fixing the Hubble will be damn expensive, and there's some question as to what is the most reasonable allocation of funding. As much as I think the NASA is full of boondoggles, I'm not sure the amount of useful science in the Hubble is worth the cost of fixing it.
If I were in charge I'd send the shuttle up for its final mission to fix Hubble then scrap the shuttle and the ISS. Then I'd take the money they were soaking up and use it for robotic missions.
This is a common misconception. Ground based telescopes cannot see what Hubble can see because the earths atmosphere filters out over 99% of radiation useful to astronomers. To view anything other than the visible spectrum and x-ray you have to get into orbit.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
The political fallout from a disaster during a Hubble repair mission is something NASA can't absorb. No risk analysis can act as a buffer between NASA and a disillusioned public and a Congress full of people looking for reasons to gut NASA.
O'Keefe's decision was a political decision made for political reasons. Choosing not to fly the Shuttle's most dangerous mission was the right decision in the aftermath of Columbia. Not a popular decision, but the right decision.
Risk analysis is an engineering tool, but leading NASA is not an engineering task.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
"they're not supposed to be schedule-driven anymore"
t m#sectR)
False.
In fact, R6.2-1 says that "schedule deadlines are an important management tool." It simply says that meeting a schedule is not more important than recognizing and understanding risks that come during the schedule, and adjusting the schedule accordingly. This is true, whether you're scheduled to pick your child up at school (don't drive at extremely reckless speeds in a residential area just because you're running late), or if you're planning a mission with NASA (don't launch a shuttle to stay on schedule if the temperature is below the tolerance level of your SRB O-ring system). In either case, the goal of keeping a schedule is not worth the lives, equipment, and money involved.
Risk Analysis: a technique to identify and assess factors that may jeopardize the success of a project or achievement of a goal. (http://www.gao.gov/special.pubs/bprag/bprgloss.h
This is all we ask. Do a risk analysis for the Hubble mission. Identify and assess the risks and benefits of carrying out the mission. If the goal of continuing Hubble's mission (which is a very complex and dynamic issue to define in the first place) does not outweight the risks, then that's fine. But have the data to back it up. We are (supposed to be) scientists at NASA. We make up our minds based on analyzing as many of the associated facts as possible.
Sure, decisions need to be made. We cannot go to the Moon and Mars, build a space station, launch new Hubble-sized satellites, design the next generation of the shuttle, explore hypersonic flight, determine how to lower the effects of a sonic boom, and design new, safe, and more efficient ways to utilize our airspace (don't forget the first 'A'). Not all in the same year. Or decade, for that matter. These are only a portion of the things that NASA is currently involved in, with a much smaller fraction of the federal budget than when NASA was focused on getting a man to the moon.
We need to pick our battles and to prioritize our missions based on our available resources, financial and otherwise. The only good way to do that is through an analysis of the options and the associated risks.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
And I'm disputing your original incorrect claim that a replacement ground based telescope can give just as good images as the Hubble can.
A very narrow observing program is exactly what you get with a ground based telescope because these telescopes can only see a very narrow part of the observable universe.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
This was clearly a judgment call, not due to a formal analysis. NASA doesn't want to repair the Hubble, for various political and technical reasons.
And why should they do a formal analysis? The whole point of making Hubble human-serviceable was probably to serve as another ustification for the shuttle program. The rational, low-risk decision would have been to start planning on sending up an entire replacement telescope years ago, for less money and less risk than the service missions.
So, why start now with formal cost/risk/benefit analyses? No manned mission would survive that kind of analysis at this point: at this point, it's pretty much always cheaper and less risky to achieve whatever scientific or technological objective we have with unmanned missions.
No, a formal risk analysis for this is just a way to waste time and money. NASA has enough beurocracy (more than enough, really) already. It's actually refreshing, IMO, to see someone just make a decision. The reality is that after months of time and $$$ writing a risk analysis (probably heavily influenced by the people currently working on hubble, who are far from unbiased) someone would still have to make a judgement call, and a lot of the factors are intangibles that the risk analysis wouldn't cover in a factual manner anyway. Bottom line is that another shuttle accident will kill the program and take the ISS with it. That's not a risk worth taking for an old system like hubble.
This doesn't surprise me at all. What surprises me is that people continue to remain oblivious to the obvious and in denial of the damning. O'Keefe's decisions do not represent NASA, they represent the Bush administration. People seem to assume that because he was a NASA administrator then his decisions reflect those of NASA, well NO, he's a politician who joined the Bush administration on its very first day and whose niche is spinning budgets wherever he was dispatched to serve their political objectives. Does it surprise me that he made a decision without a formal study of the technical and scientific issues? No more so than the policies of the Bush administration on climate change that continue to ignore and defy all scientific and technical consensus, or for that matter, on embryonic stem cell research, the economy, or other issues. This is an administration that's driven by dogma and electoral politics. This is an administration whose core electorates and campaigners include evengelical creationists who continue to believe that God created man and woman 6000 years ago and that creation as told in Genesis ought to be reintroduced to science curriculae and taught to school children. This is an administration headed by a president who asserted that "On the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the Earth", which is an even more explicit assertion than the creationist campaigners' own "evolution is a theory, not a fact" stickers that they want on schools' science books. Anyone who cares enough about science to study its history and how its epistemological method came to be what it is today will be clear in knolwedge and mind that for many centuries from Copernicus through Kepler and Galileo and to Haley and Newton the the history of science was none other than the history of astronomy; the history of the struggle between the scientists who directly observed the heavens with their eyes and telescopes and the clergy who derived their authority from the scriptures that they claimed came from those very same heavens. Telescopes were the defning instrument of science that eventually led to societal secularism through Descartes and Bacon and Hubble is simply a fancy version of Galileo's own instrument that continues to inform us on how we came to exist by eyeing the birth of the universe that's evident in its distant depths and giving further credence to secular teachings, and many of Hubble's findings have found their way into university and school curriculae already. Anyone who believes that money for the Hubble servicing mission can not be found by an administration that provides tens and tens of billions in "faith-based initiatives" that amount to nothing more than handouts to their core campaigners and that deliberaly runs a budget deficit of hundreds and billions that will lead to nothing less than the cold-blooded collapse of the humanist institutions of social security and welfare programs is out of his mind. This is kleptocratic administration that seeks to reverse centuries of humanist progress and return us to our "original foundation" of being under the mercy of a criminal clergy and under the dominion of a militant marcantile. I suspect what I have written above may invite the diatribe of a kukluxitious clan whose ideas of political conduct derives from their tribalist tradition in spectator sports and who approach reasoned debates with the mentality of a dogfight, but I couldn't care less about responding to them, for it is all futile to reason with dogs, and they'll eventually get what they deserve in their trashtastic future from a political elite who couldn't care less about them beyond the expolitation of their mass stupidities.
Seems fair to me, since people with HST-blinders don't seem to care that making hubble last a couple of more years will take a fairly large chunk out of the total US science budget. There's a very limited amount of money that congress will spend on science in total, and hubble just ain't the best bang we can get for the bucks.