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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."
I guess it would be poetic justice if it fell down to Earth and landed on Fred Gregory.
...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.
NASA really knew what they were doing. they spent quite a bit of money, but we did Apollo, we did Skylab, we did Hubble, and they managed to maintain public support. Then they just somehow fucked it up. I get the feeling it had something to do with the ISS, because that's around when the problems really began. The ISS is not a sustainable or viable presence in space. What we really need to look toward is 1) commercial development in space, which will lead to 2) a continued stay there for humanity. I usually don't like privatisation of government programs, but in this case, I think there may be companies that can construct and launch, for example, inflatable habitats as mentioned in previous slashdot articles, at a low cost. NASA hasn't even really seriously considered something like this, and now look at what we have. A space station that is important for scientific research, yes, but the actual value we're getting out of it for the money we spent is HIGHLY questionable.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
The last eight years of NASA history have been a basic running thing of massive administrative incompetence and poor oversight at NASA resulting in consistent disaster and the only results being that since "NASA isn't working" we're cutting science out of NASA and putting more power in the hands of the administrators that failed to provide appropriate oversight in the first place.
People keep questioning whether NASA should continue, given the disaster it's been. Man, NASA's fine. It's people like Sean O'Keefe that have to go. Thank God he's retiring. Unfortunately I'm afraid of who his replacement will be, especially since his replacement seems to be coming in as part of a program to cut out what little science is left in NASA's programs in order to dump all the budget to a vague "let's go to mars!" plan that seems about as well-conceived and likely to turn out as planned as any of those five unsuccessful shuttle replacement programs NASA blew its budget on at the end of the 90s.
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.
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.
So many people are making so much fuss about the decision to let the Hubble die, when there are ALREADY better telescopes in operation, and MUCH better telescopes planned. If NASA has to go fix the old one, not only are they just delaying the inevitable, but they're also delaying other, more useful missions.
I hate to see something like Hubble just fall to Earth. There are EXPLORERS willing to risk their lives, and people will to risk their equipment. From what I understand NASA astronauts are WELL AWARE of the risks presented by doing such missions. What is sad to me is that we use spin-off and related knowledge and technologies from things like the Hubble launch, but that the actual results of it seem to just be icing. It's the process of doing it that seems more important than the "End Result". Strangely, you would think in-orbit manned repairs would really take priority (considering the amount of pricey objects up there: in life and in money). But I guess if you don't once, why would you bother to do it again? Outer space and inner space are two of the most important human agendas. To see them back-seated to political and financial concern are reflective of our state as a people.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
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.
Loose consensus at sci.space.tech is that O'Keefe's decision has virtually nothing to do with safety and everything to do with the extremely tight schedule necessary to complete ISS (International Space Station).
O'Keefe stated that he would abide by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) report. My understanding is that board did not insist that the Shuttle be able to seek refuge at ISS.
It's interesting that the article speaks of "risk" but doesn't explicitly use the term " safety risk" which is assumed. Indeed, the risks of any extra Shuttle flights go beyond the safety of the crew. Consider that the Shutle's only mission is ISS assembly after which the fleet will be retired -- and rightfully so. If a Shuttle were even to be reparably damaged with no injuries to the crew, the ISS program would be seriously threatened.
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You could, its just that Hubble is so massive that it world take a ridiculous amount of fuel.
For instance to get Hubble to the same orbit as ISS you are looking at about 40 tonnes of fuel. To get to a gravity neutral point (say earth-moon LaGrangian) would take a lot more than that.
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It's really sad how far NASA has plummeted down the priority list since it wasn't being pushed to 'defeat' communism. The decline in NASA's quality and quantity of work are inevitable given how their budget seems to be the sacrificial lamb in Washington so often. I, for one, will continue to be interested in the heavens. As was said in my favorite commercial: "We've always watched the stars. If you look at the sky you can see the beginning of time."
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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...
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We should just beat up the enterprise fans with their lunchboxes and take their money.
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.
My work requires both high spatial resolution and spectral resolution from the UV through NIR (esp. in UV and blue wavelengths); the HST was undoubtedly most suitable for achieving my objectives. However, it no longer carries the working spectroscopic instrument and hence the HST is no longer a viable asset for my need.
Today, it is probably more cost-effective to go back to expendable space missions. It's not at all hard to build a 2-m class space telescope. It's not servicable, but for the cost of servicing, we can build another telescope with a similar specification. So if one breaks, we can launch another.
The only retarded thinking I have is that I don't want to feed the STScI to create the monopoly in the space-based astronomy. The HST is costing a lot more than other missions (x2 FTE is what I heard, compared to other major missions) for little return in terms of the telescope operation and calibration. This is the institution that produces very crappy software to handle the HST data (I've written my own code to process and done my own calibration to improve its science return...why was the STScI not doing that?). They allocate their budgest lucratively toward the support for scientists (not operator or calibration staffs) while other missions suffer from severe budget cuts and RIF'ing their science staffs.
I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone about the Hubble Origins Probe, a proposal to replace Hubble with a cheaper and better (and, dare I say, faster) craft:
An international team led by Johns Hopkins University astronomers have proposed an alternative to sending a robotic or manned repair mission to the ailing Hubble Space Telescope. Their proposal is to build a new Hubble Origins Probe, reusing the Hubble design but using lighter and more cost-effective technologies. The probe would include instruments currently waiting to be installed on Hubble, as well as a Japanese-built imager which 'will allow scientists to map the heavens more than 20 times faster than even a refurbished Hubble Space Telescope could.' It would take an estimated 65 months and $1 billion to build and launch, approximately the same cost as a robotic service mission.
Here's the official web site, with slideshows and posters explaining the planned scientific instruments:
http://www.pha.jhu.edu/hop/
In my opinion the original Hubble is mostly valuable for sentimental/historical reasons. From a pure cost/benefit analysis, replacing it seems the best solution in pretty much every possible way.
... if I'm not wildly mistaken the hubble service has already been paid for, we just need to get up there and install it.
You are mistaken. Although one HST instrument (COS) is already built and WF3 has been developped, the cost for launching a shuttle and serving the HST is not paid up.
In any case, the STScI will continue to operate the HST even if it is left only with two surviving gyros. At the current rate, that mode of operation will last til 2007 to 2008 maybe (or longer if the battery lasts). In a mean time what we could do is to submit a proposal for SMEX or MIDEX (probably not EXPLORER) class mission for UV astronomy. Something as small as GALEX or FUSE would do just as good as the HST can serve today.
Just because it is not in the budget plan right now, it doesn't mean it is not doable in 5 -- 10 years timescale.
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.
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parent suggested waiting until hubble falls enough to be relatively close to ISS's orbit. (by relatively i mean close enough to transfer to ISS orbit and dock with ISS in the event of trouble)
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I don't think this is possible even if they were at the same level orbit.
Hubble's inclination is about as low as you can get (launching from kennedy that is), about 28.5 degrees. ISS's orbit was optimized for revinue (passing over as many countries as possible so as to get funding) and is about 51.6 degrees.
http://www.spacetelescope.org/about/general/orbit
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast01dec_
The delta-V required for an inclination change is much greater than that required for a transfer (from high low orbit).
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But a friend of mine (and a robotics engineer) made a good point: Hubble sure kicks ass, but we've got bigger and better technology now. Maybe we can spend all the "Hubble Rescue" money on something even more impressive, which would yield even better imagery than our good ol' HST.
Sure, I'll be very sad when (not if, apparently) NASA de-orbits the instrument, but as long as we can get something better up there beforehand, we're not going to be losing all that much, except the memories. (Well, that, and all the shared time astronomers could be logging on the HST in the future.)
Though it would be kind of cool to bring the HST back to Earth in a shuttle hold, and analyze the surfaces and instruments. Then we could put the sucker in the Air and Space museum, which would be totally awsome.
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This guy in Space Daily a year and a half ago wrote an interesting article that proposed the idea of using an ESA hosted launch of a Soyuz (or two) to service Hubble. I have no idea if its feasible, but I wonder if anyone in NASA is considering ideas like this.
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...if they can send a robot mission to attach some rockets to it, to make it *come down*, seems like they could just re-aim it for a higher orbit and park the thing so it stays up longer, and eventually space flight will be cheaper/easier and etc and it can be rebuilt and reused. I mean what's the diff? so they got to use a scosh more powerful rocket propulsion dealie, again, so what? still cheap enough to do most likely. It's not like there are thousands of advanced space telescopes to go around for all the researchers who would like to use one. It's built, launched, up there,paid for, still at least half way working and cost a bundle already, seems sorta nutso to just trash it on purpose when they can park it until such a time as they can get to it.
Actually if you remember Bush kicked off his campaing with a new mission for Nasa on mars exploration and congress introduced bills making Nasa do this.
They are now servely cash stripped and its impossible with a mere 8 billion dollar budget to put man on mars. The figure could be ten times that.
But yes this killed Hubble since it would make it expensive and distract for Nasa's new mission.
Nasa does risk assesments for everything. Its odd nasa would make such a quick decision if it were not political.
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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.
Hubble can see in wavelengths that don't make it to the ground.
For ground based telescopes to equal Hubble, you'll need to either remove the atmosphere, or fix Hubble (or replace it).
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.
OK, first of all, the white house doesn't make budget choices. They gin up a budget request, but all the decisions get made by congress. That's in the document. In fact, congress can completely ignore the president in budgetary matters, provided they're willing to override a veto. I real life that doesn't happen, but the truth is GWB can't do squat on his own.
the "other places" are the comparatively pointless mars and dangerous militarization of orbital space missions, which are both bush pet projects.
This displays a stunning lack of understanding of how things really work. NASA's budget has nothing to do with the military budget or even what NASA does. The whole reason NASA isn't a fraction of its current size is it creates jobs in key congressional districts, and since the manned space program generates the most publicity that's what gets fully funded. Politics and NASA are absolutely inseperable. I'm sure we could all find a more efficient way to spend that money, but the reality is the taxpayers are less interested in the kind of basic science you get from hubble and more in tune with Buck Rogers and Captain Kirk. It was once said of Carl Sagan (I wish I could find the attribution) "every time he convinces someone we don't need manned spaceflight where robots will suffice we lose an advocate for the space program." NASA has taken that to heart.
The mars missions were campaign fluff that will never get funded at all, never mind fully. Anytime a politician promises a program that'll be funded after he leaves office you can pretty much assume it's not serious.
no war would equal billions more a month for other purposes, like scientifically useful space missions.
Not really. They're borrowing money for the war, so the real impact of not having a war is taxes would be a little lower in ten years or so. The idea that the overall budget is a fixed size and funding one program means cutting another is naive to say the least. The only way to get "scientifically useful space missions" funded is to get the public interested in them.
i'm tired of wasting my time on you, so futher responses from you will be ignored. and as Mr. Malda apparently doesn't really care about mismoderation, i probably won't be bothering to respond to comments on mismoderated posts at all, since nobody will see them. fark off. and that goes double for the biased mismoderators, wtf you are.
In other words, "I can't make a cogent argument or back up anything I say, so I'm going to ignore you when you pick apart my incoherent ramblings." That about right? And are you really so foolish as to think Rob Malda reads every post and weighs it carefully to decide if the moderation is correct?
Also, you still never provided a link for all that "militarization of space" poppycock. The reality is space has been militarized from day one in the form of spy satellites. As far as I know, there aren't any plans to put actual weapons in space, and I'd appreciate a link from anyone who has other information. My search for space weapons came up with this link, which describes programs which are either white-paper pipe dreams or technology demonstrators. The ground-based ASAT programs have been around for decades.
Sure, but as I point out in my response to another poster, none of that is funded to the level you would need to fix Hubble.
They are now servely cash stripped and its impossible with a mere 8 billion dollar budget to put man on mars. The figure could be ten times that.
But yes this killed Hubble since it would make it expensive and distract for Nasa's new mission.
I doubt it. I don't think Hubble or the mars mission will be funded. The real money for Mars is supposed to be spent after Bush leaves office, so I can virtually gaurentee you it'll never happen. I think the whole thing is kind of a dodge to defund everything but ISS and the Space Shuttle, since doing otherwise would cause a reallocation in jobs across congressional districts.
Nasa does risk assesments for everything. Its odd nasa would make such a quick decision if it were not political.
But that's the point. Politics is the major component of every decision at (or about) NASA. Did you ever wonder why the space shuttle has windows?