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Senator Calls on NASA to Service Hubble
Avantare writes "Senator Calls on NASA to Service Hubble
In a sternly worded letter to acting NASA Administrator Frederick D. Gregory, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said she expects the U.S. space agency to heed the will of the Congress and keep preparations for a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission on track.
Congress, in passing an omnibus spending bill late last year, directed NASA to set aside $291 million of its 2005 budget to spend planning and preparing for a servicing mission to Hubble by 2008. When NASA informed Congress just weeks later that it intended to spend only $175 million of that amount on the Hubble repair effort, some saw the move as an indication that the agency was preparing to abandon plans to service Hubble robotically and rely instead on a space shuttle crew to fix the telescope."
Good for Senator Mikulski! As far as I'm concerned, NASA has been putzing around on this issue for no reason WHAT-SO-EVER. The shuttles are no more dangerous now then they were for the earlier two decades they've been in service. If people were allowed to do their jobs, then NASA would have known about the shuttle damage *before* Columbia's reentry.
These mumblings about robotic repair sound like a whiny way of getting out of doing the job. If you'll pardon my French, "Just launch the damn space shuttle and fix the bloody thing!" It's not that hard, and I'm sure there's no shortage of qualified volunteers. Do I hear an Amen?!?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
From an article in Discover Magazine
Also see the John Hopkins Newsletter.
Great. Have Barbra pay for it.
Someone you trust is one of us.
But I really think we would be better off with a new more powerful telescope.
Someone takes my money at gun point to pay for something THEY want, they're a thief. ...or a politician. Same thing.
If the Senator wants Hubble serviced, he can join or start a voluntary organization to do exactly that. And, funny thing, I'd likely contribute to it too.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Senator's don't usually care this much about what is essentially a technology budgeting decision. Who's got her ear, and why?
The problems is not that they are more dangrerous now. They have always been this dangerous. It is just that now the danger is better understood. Ignoring risk does not make it go away.
That said, I am not against using a manned (sorry, crewed) mission to repair the Hubble if that is the best option. In any case, the risks needed to be understood, reduced as much as possible and accepted or rejected; not just ignored.
It's worth remembering the Mikulski's motives aren't driven by pure science. Goddard and other Hubble-related facilities are in Maryland. This is a pork barrel and jobs issue for her.
And for those who argue that repairing Hubble now is no riskier than in the past, you're missing the point. Every Shuttle flight is risky and Hubble repair missions are even riskier because rendevousing with Hubble means no chance of taking reguge at the ISS and slim to zero chance of rescue by a second Shuttle.
Loss of a Shuttle during a Hubble repair mission would have political repercussions that woujld likely kill the Shuttle program and, possibly, kill any further crewed spaceflight of any kind. The Hubble is a nice tool, but the purpose of space travel is to put people there, not to do science. Fixing it isn't worth the risk.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I really like having Ms. Mikulski as senator, and I've voted for her each time she's been elected, but I should point out that the reason that she's pushing this isn't that she cares about getting hi-res pictures of aliens. The Space Telescope Science Institute is in Baltimore, MD, her home state, as well as NASA's Goddard facility.
That's what representatives of any sort do: they fight for their local interests. If they didn't do that, the voters would elect somebody who did. Unfortunately, without a fixed budget cap, that generally means deals of the form "You vote for my thing, so I'll vote for your thing, and the only one who loses is the guy who eventually has to pay off the debt."
So while I like Ms. Mikulski, and I support the "measly" few dozens of millions of dollars it would take to keep getting great science from Hubble, I thought a bit of disclosure would be appropriate.
Maybe its just me, but doesnt it seem odd that Congress is meddling in NASA's affairs? Granted, when it all comes down to budget it is in Congress's hands, but don't you think NASA knows whats best for itself?
i might get modded down for this but it needs to be said.
/. all the time!
it's not about whether robots or humans are used. it's about the hubble being a piece of crap that needs to be replaced in order for us to move forward. the hubble is obsolete because of the fact that there are cheaper and better telescope projects out there that should be initiated. some of those programs are mentioned here on
it's a wonder that we haven't listened to the independant experts and just thrownit out to lagrange point to work as long as it can.
i really feel like NASA needs to let this one die so we can move forward.
Keep the faith, share the code
Sen Mikulski is the senator from Maryland, where the Hubble is HQ'd. IIRC, it was HQ'd in her old district when she was in the House.
I support the Hubble and think that we should fix it, but remember to follow the money as well. She has a lot of her voters that depend on Hubble for their paycheck.
I'd rather NASA spend the money on maintaining
contact with the Pioneer spavce probes. It has taken
30 years for them to get there, and now, when
they are at the edge of the solar system is where
the scientifically interesting data can be found.
Don't drop the ball!
Or join one already started and make a contribution.
Good argument!! Unfortunately for your argument, most scientists involved are in favor of repairing the Hubble, and it was a political decision by a non-scientist political appointee to NOT repair it.
Dumbshit.
(No, I don't think you're a dumbshit. It just fit the fecal theme of this post.)
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
...for $291 million, i better be able to get some nice shots of my hot neighbor in the shower.
Probably been mentioned already, but a work-around for one of the major limiting factors for the Hubble's lifetime has already been found, that being the number of working gyroscopes available.
After repair, the telescope has six gyroscopes (used for pointing and stabilising the device, without any messy reaction mass involved), and it needed at least three to point accurately. There are currently only four working ones left - they're somewhat unreliable.
However, a way of pointing the telescope with just two working gyroscopes has been tested recently, which should extend the lifespan a little - possibly until 2008. I still doubt that a full-scale repair mission will be launched, but this might help in filling the gap until a replacement is finalised...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
It's costing the U.S. taxpayers $175 million for NASA to determine it won't do anything to save the Hubble? Why does it take so much money to decide go/nogo? (Don't answer that. I already know: It's the government bureaucracy, stoopid.)
If they've already decided, what were they planning on spending that $175m on?
Sicko.
"But doesnt it seem odd that Congress is meddling in NASA's affairs?"
No. Congress does the budget, congress does the taxes. They have the right to insist the money is spent for what its allocated on.
If the Pentagon wants to build a bunch of battleships, but the congress gave them money for air craft carriers, I think congress would have a say in it.
This is no different.
They're stopping all funding of the Voyager probes as well:a .html
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/voyager1-05
Good. Infinite billions for a war, but 4.2 Million a year is too much for science....really shows the priorities here...
A couple of dats ago Slashdot posted a pointer to a big, bad NASA story suggesting that NASA HQ did not do all of its homework when deciding not to service Hubble. And we had lots of post both for and against, and I'm sure we'll see the same posts here.
By talking up this story, you are being played by political forces. NASA/Goddard is in Sen. Mikulski's jurisdiction -- so of course she is going to complain on behalf of those who will lose their paychecks.
She has a history of this. Several years ago, before her re-election, three California congressmen submitted legislation to move NASA/GSFC to NASA Ames in California. It was ridiculous on it face and went nowhere. But when election time came around, Sen. Mikulski ran radio ad after radio ad stating how she single handedly saved 3000 jobs at NASA/Goddard.
I said it before and I'll say it again. Time moves by. NASA HQ decided to decommission Hubble and divert the money to new programs. Some people will lose paychecks, that's life! Grow up! And if you currently get paid by Hubble related money, then try to find a job with JWST.
Since the shuttle accident NASA has been on the defensive about keeping the shuttles flying.
After proposing an obvious non-starter of fixing the Hubble robotically, suddenly everyone is pushing for another flight.
I'm on NASA's side but this is uncharacteristically political (and smart) move.
Here's a wild-and-crazy idea, and it only boils down to two steps:
1) Build a new Hubble telescope with current technology.
2) Launch it on an expendable booster.
This is already done for military imaging satellites every few years.
Everyone's focus is on 'fixing Hubble' when it should be on 'ensuring the availability of a high-quality astronomical observatory in orbit'.
Quick dickin' around and do the job right!
The Hubble could be replaced by newer technology, and they need to spend the money elsewhere (like on keeping Voyager et al data processing active).
I think it's hilarious to see the same people here congratulating the politician, and then getting mad at NASA not having the money to keep Voyager data processing going (instead, they spend it on stuff like repairing, or even worse, rescuing the Hubble).
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
The Hubble operational concept presumes periodic repair by human crews. It is extremely expensive and dangerous to send human crews into space. This is not likely to change anytime soon. And trying to develop robots to service Hubble is a neat idea, but doing it on a tight time frame before Hubble breaks down completely is like pushing a rope.
One way to proceed would be not to risk any more lives on service missions, but instead to fly a replacement of Hubble that can be serviced robotically. (And, of course, to build the robots to service it.)
For some of NASA's planned missions that are going to be orbiting at 4000 miles AGL, robotic servicing isn't just a good idea, it'll be necessary.
Wasn't there a Slashdot story a while back saying that we could send up a NEW space telescope for less? What's the sense in fixing Hubble if we can get a better, brand new, space telescope for less money.
Hubble has done great things for orbital astronomy. But there are better designs on the drawing-boards, and for the cost of a rescue mission for a 20-year old design (launched in 1990, designed earlier than that), we could have a superior instrument to use for the next 15 years.
If there's a need/desire to put it in the Smithsonian or something, perhaps a booster rocket can be built to dock with it, and push it higher into a parking orbit for later retrieval. A pusher-bot would be a lot easier/cheaper to build and operate than a repair-bot vehicle.
Chip H.
It's great that they were able to extend its life and get it to do things that it wasn't really designed to do originally.
But there is a replacement being designed/built. Let's go with that.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
Why is the US limited to a single launch vehicle for human payloads? The shuttle has proven hugely expensive to launch and maintain. Why don't we have our astronauts hitch a ride on a Russian rocket for this mission?
The shuttle was a good first try. I'm sure we've learned a lot about reusable space vehicles, and many other things. But it has proven hugely complex and dangerous. Get rid of it and move on to another launch vehicle. The sooner the better.
- Jasen.
Hell yeah! I know I voted for Barbara Mikulski for a reason.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
First of all, NASA almost never builds straight replacement instruments. They are always focused on something new. JWST will not replace Hubble by any means. In fact, if both were up at the same time (sustained, not about-to-be-junk), the amount of additional science able to come from their complementary instrumentation should be reason alone to keep Hubble strong until it launches.
Astronomy in the ultraviolet is all but mothballed for a decade if one of the instruments (Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, COS) slated for installation in Hubble does not make it to orbit somehow. The only functioning instrument right now is GALEX, an imaging experiment.
However, when we obtain spectra, the ultraviolet, more than any other waveband, gives us tremendous direct information about the atomic composition of many astronomical objects. (Molecules are best studied in the radio part of the spectrum. Solid particles [e.g. dust] in the infrared).
JWST will not fill this gap. It will be a great loss and put a halt to a wealth of knowledge gained from ultraviolet spectroscopy that began about three decades ago.
Where the Japanese and Chinese and Europeans have their acts together while we stop spending on Science.
Sigh.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Let me get this straight, we built a shuttle to enable easy cheap access to orbit, we have a billion dollar telescope in orbit that we can't afford to repair cause it costs too much to send people up there to fix it. hmmm...
I read somewhere that it would be cheaper to build a new better one. Why don't they just do that?
it's about the hubble being a piece of crap that needs to be replaced in order for us to move forward.
Well, maybe I'm biased being an astronomer and all, but with Hubble data being used in about 1 out of 2-3 papers I read, mentioned in about a similar number of talks, and proposed to by about 1/2 the astronomers I know at least every other year, I think (well, really I know) a lot of us "non-experts" would be happy to have the money spent to continue the "piece of crap".
But what do I know. I don't work for NASA. It's good to have opinions from independent sources like yourself to let us know when the field has become stagnant.
Of course all this means she is doing her job as a Congressional Representative. She is supposed to represent the interests of her district, even when discussing national intrests
No surprises here - this is pork barrel, nothing else.
You used an apostrophe to make a plural?
I believe that when the shuttle was designed it was expected to have a 1 in 50 failure rate.. 2 out of 101 is what was expected
Why would any scientific organization, including government created and funded ones, like NASA, listen to a senator? I will admit I know very little about this particular senator, but I'm fairly certain they are more lawyer/politician then scientist/explorer. If NASA keeps playing politics like this, they will hurt more then help our future in space. Do what is good for science, not what is good for some politican to get votes.
"I don't need drugs to enjoy this, just to enhance it" - Otto
The shuttles are no more dangerous now then they were
Not a single story can be posted on Slashdot without at least one person confusing then with than.
They aren't even pronounced the same. WTF is wrong with you people?
Wouldn't it be great if on your annual tax returns you could fill out a form to indicate what percentage of your taxes go to which area of government (defense, education, environment, health care) ?
If that happened, I bet the schools would have enough boooks for all the students and the Pentagon would have to hold bake sales to fund their wars.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
As a Marylander and a rabid Bush-hater, I am not a big fan of Mikulski's aggressively pork-filled political record, no matter how much it benefits me personally.
Barb's #1 legislative priority is Maryland jobs. If a proposal has impact on local employment, she will vote accordingly. Only if the bill is relatively job-neutral will she consider other factors (good of the nation, desires of constituents, party philosophy, etc).
For example, up until a few months ago when GM finally closed the AstroVan factory, Barb was notorious for giving Detroit big slobbering rim jobs at every opportunity.
While that might be a tolerable trait in a state official or a House Rep, Senators are *supposed* to look at the bigger picture and Do the Right Thing.
Personally, I don't know if repairing Hubble is a good idea or not. But I know for sure Senator Barb doesn't care about that at all, not while STSCI employs dozens of Marylanders.
Not to mention that the safety record of shuttle flights far exceeds what was expected. I remember NASA saying when Challenger blew up that we were very overdue for just such an incident, and it was a fluke that one hadn't happened sooner. Not to say that more shuttles should blow up, but the safety record of shuttle flights is exemplary.
Your memory is faulty. According to the Rogers Commission Report on the Challenger accident, NASA estimates on shuttle loss of vehicle/loss of life failure rate ranged from 1 in 100 (by the engineers) to 1 in 100,000 (by the paper-pushers). There's no way the shuttle would fly with the 4+% failure rate that would have meant the Challenger accident was in line with expectations.
I don't live anywhere near Maryland, don't stand to benefit from any Hubble related contracts, but I'm all for a Hubble rescue mission.
But in the interest of full disclosure, I do have a copy of the Hubble Deep Field as desktop wallpaper, and probably will have other, future Hubble images there, so by your standards I guess i venality accounts for my position.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
They already have the robots built to do the mission. They have tested them and CNN has filmed them. To cancel everything would be a huge waste of money. They are proceding with testing like the mission will actually happen. If it's truly canned - a lot of people will at least have work through this year. I'm torn in my feelings though. If they know the mission will be cancelled, it seems a waste to continue burning through the tax dollars allocated for FY05. Keeping people employed on the other hand is a good thing. Mikulski has been an avid supporter of the HST for years. She's on committees directly related to projects such as this.
The military actively recruits high school students and other members of the general population to fight in wars however sending highly trained scientists that know what they are doing into space is dangerous?
Ya, trying to protect your country from attack/invasion isn't as important as keeping a probe going. Ya right, moron
If we get wiped off the face of the earth due to some wacko towelheads because we didn't take steps protect ourselves, its sort of irrelevant if the probe had funding or not.
Retaining freedom costs lives AND money.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Um, two explosions out of 112 flights is a failure rate of roughly 1.7%, not 4%.
But my memory might well be faulty, I was 11 at the time.
They will never stop until somebody makes the
So a minority member of the legislative branch writes a letter to an executive branch employee. Who cares? This won't have any affect. He'll just point to his boss, the President, and say "talk to him." If she threatens to cut NASAs budget, he'll say "Fine, we'll close NASA Greenbelt, MD." Of course it would be an empty threat since she is in the minority in the Senate.
Geez, the only reason she is writing this letter is because her constituants want her to. Big deal
Just like a bull services a cow.
Expecting Babs to not ask for life support for HST would be like expecting Bill Clinton to announce he's giving up sex with interns, or W to announce that he's really a lib.
Babs could give a s**t about the science or the pretty pix, she's only interested in the jobs and the votes that follow.
Certainly REAL scientific space exploration is at least as valuable as a dramatic representation of it on network TV?
Why could the response not be something like this?
"Since you indicate you can comply with our orders to do a competent job of planning for the servicing mission at a cost only $175 million, please return the extra $116 million so that we can reduce the deficit. Thanks, your boss".
Ooooooooooh. . . Lucky Hubble.
So while it's good to see Congress directing NASA to focus on a top science mission (Hubble), I'm skeptical that rescuing Hubble is a good way to spend science mission dollars. We should be making new, better telescopes and instruments and pumping them into space -- we can and will vastly exceed Hubble's capabilities, let's get on with it!
Hubble has served its mission. It was designed to be serviced by humans, already a dated concept. Let it go.
Never eat anything bigger than your head.
That's a surprise!
p ace/missions/sts-103/hubble/archive/910702.html)
I agree that launching Hubble, of all things NASA has done since 1969, is one of the most valuable. However, supporting NASA itself is the problem we all want a solution to. I'm all for space exploration (cheaply, please). But let's not forget that Hubble was the telescope awarded to a contractor that ended up building faulty optics(http://www.chron.com/content/interactive/s
This telescope, while valuable, has been a money suck since it was first launch. NASA, similarly, has been flawed since the cold war ended.
NASA has been trying to remake themselves since the cold war ended, but I'm afraid they can't. We should start over, make a new organization focused on cheap results, and have them build a new telescope to be launched in the next decade.
But please, let's not continue to be the enabler for a flawed organization.
Yes, but is saving Hubble in the long-term best interests of the district she represents, or simply short-term pork which will help her get re-elected? Too many "representatives" seem to focus on the latter rather than the former.
Let me preface this by say that I am a scientist.
Really? Are you also the member of NASA?
...there's an idea out there that despite NASA having sent a small load of astronauts repeatedly to orbit and the moon and back in the sixties and early seventies with the current technology of the day, that somehow, we haven't advanced technologically enough in over thirty years to even manage to do as much as they did back then.
O.o
Does anyone else see that as completely cuckoo?
We can go to the moon right now. We can set up bases there right now. We can do space stations and space colonies right now. We merely don't seem to have the stones we used to.
When I was a kid we played with BB guns, kids taking knives to school and fighting hard behind the gym was a fact of life, we had no use for seatbelts, airbags didn't exist, we had lead paint all over the place, unbalanced diets, heavily sugared sodas, massively caffeinated coffees, and our cars s*cked on gas milage. We also walked to school instead of took the bus if we were closer than two miles away, our parents let us drink beer at home on special occaisions without fearing the foreign substance secret police, and we got to do archery at summer camp AND school gym class with real sharp arrows.
Welcome to the Wuss Age. We might as well let all the decisions be made by the lawyers and insurance adjusters and nanny state wackos now.
Why do I get the feeling the only way to get seriously needed scientific instruments aloft in the future will be to simply take them to China and Russia for launch?
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
http://www.pha.jhu.edu/hop/
The page has many more details regarding the actual science instruments and specifications.
So a crew rescue might take two Soyuz missions, but they are very cheap and reliable. As a standby crew rescue option, Soyuz is a no-brainer.
Just in time to save it after we get rid of Bush
But if it means losing the ability to do deep UV astronomy or anything else that Hubble I has proven to be very adept at, I don't think we should skimp out.
The parent poster didn't mention this, but the proposed Hubble Origins Probe would also add a brand new Japanese-built Very Wide Field Imager. According to their science info, on the proposed HOP "UV sensitivity reaches two magnitudes deeper than HST/STIS [original Hubble] and the number of backgrouns QSO's increases by a factor of 100 [no idea what a QSO is]." The new Very Wide Field Imager would have a 17-times-larger field of view, essentially allowing it to image 17 times as fast (I think).
Of course, I know jack about astronomy, so perhaps someone more knowledgeable than myself could check out the links and evaluate the proposal better. For whatever it's worth, their page says that "HOP offers all of the science a refurbished HST would provide in 2010, plus more."
Since much of the old design would be reused, the total program cost for all this (including launch) would be between $700 million and $1 billion, less than the cost of a robotic repair mission to Hubble. It also wouldn't require a shuttle launch, but could be launched on an Atlas 5 or Delta IV Heavy. Besides simply not knowing about the HOP, I'm really not sure why someone would want to repair Hubble instead of building a better one for less cost.
Actually, this smacks of a classic political turf battle. NASA has been a political agency since day one. The Houston Space Center was a payoff to Sen (later VP) LB Johnson of Texas. Mikulski is a Democrat from Maryland and unless she and her fellow Dems get more cooperative, her request is unlikely to amount to much. The Mars mission would be launched from Florida and run from Houston, both Bush states.
That being said, I think NASA should launch a Hubble rescue mission but announce it from the start as the last upgrade. Renew the equipment (gyros, fuel, instruments, etc) and attach the eventual de-orbit module rocket packs. Make a final schedule and publish some objective, engineer-certified, standards for when it will be de-orbitted. Then run it until that day/ hour and then plunk it.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Bear in mind that for 25 years Congress has been underfunding and stretching out every mission in the NASA budget. NASA can expect to have a ten year delay in the new telescope program, based on the funding record of the Shuttle, the International Space Station, various planetary missions, and the four space based observatories.
I wish I could suggest a solution to the multi-year funding quandry, but I'm not that smart!
I think that what we are seeing is an intricate political dance...
The skillset required to build/design the space shuttles no longer exists within NASA. Those who built the space shuttles retired or died off. With no space shuttles there would be no need for NASA. They are protecting the only justification for their jobs, the shuttles. The lives of the astronauts mean little/nothing to them.
Charles Angelich
The 'write-up' for this story consists of two paragraphs of cut-n-paste text taken directly from the link that ignores the most important fact in the story which is in the 3rd graf of the link - that the current plan isn't ANY kind of repair mission - but a de-orbiting mission.
Avantare's email address is cclayton [AT] dsli.com so I'm assuming it's not the same person as Brian Berger who wrote the story for Space.com
Work for Change & GET PAID!
MOD PERANT DOWNNOW!! SUICIDE IS NEVER AN 0PTI0N ONLY THE H0LY SPIRIT AND L0VE 0F JESUS CAN SAVE THE ASTR0NAUTS!!!!!
So despite the fact that Nasa estimated the cost to fix it in the billions, and despite the fact that there are tenative plans to launch a much more powerful and serviceable telescope in the near future, and despite the fact that right now our shuttles are dangerous and becoming geysers, and despite the fact that Nasa put out a report stating that the actual mission to fix the Hubble was too dangerous for astronaughts, this windbag of a senator(surprise surprise, an uninformed Democrat...sorry, but it's true) is going to demand we go ahead with fixing the Hubble. Quite typical of senators from either party to try to run some technical show they have little clue about, and also quite typical for a senator to make a valiant attempt to unwisely spend our tax dollars. Damn tired windbags.
"A four year delay does not seem that bad but its effect is culminative. Where we are now in terms of understanding what is out there and what we are doing out there is further pushed back."
Last time I checked the cosmos wasn't planning on going to the galactic equivalent of Bora Bora for a vacation. It'll still be there when we're ready.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Reason? NASA is required to design safe deorbit mechanisms into everything they deploy, though Hubble might have been grandfathered before this requirement took effect.
Hubble also has no propulsion, so it cannot boost itself into a higher orbit, nor can it deorbit at the precisely right moment to hit a specific targeted area.
So... unless Hubble is somehow deorbited by humans or robotic equipment, or has a servicing mission that adds some sort of propulsion... then Hubble will go down where and when 'nature' decides it should.
It's not easy pinpointing the impact zone with any real certainty if you lose the ability to control when and where an object starts its fiery plunge.
Mir had such an huge potential area of impact because they had lost sufficient control by that point. A number of nations in this potential area took out insurance in the event of impact causing problems. Definitely something of real concern, however remote.
I don't recall the exact odds of an uncontrolled Hubble hitting populated areas, but think it was somewhere in 1:500. Not great odds, and would truly be a public relations disaster for the U.S. government if it does hit populated areas and causes death or damage.
Ultimately, Hubble needs to be safely aimed towards a watery grave if its human creators don't wish to continue to run it. We can't just say 'ok, tired of that thing up there... we'll just stop funding and ignore it from now on. It's gonna come down one way or another.'
I've seen the robotic servicing demos being done at GSFC. Task by task, the hard parts are being checked off. There's a lot of work to be done, but I can tell you from personal experience that this mission WILL work if given the go-ahead. A year ago I'd have thought it was crazy to try to make a robot unscrew a connector or install WFC3, etc., etc. I could go on for hours. It's happening as we speak in hi-fi Hubble mockups.
I agree with other posters that we shouldn't be afraid to send humans to do things in space. BUT, this is an incredible opportunity to show what current robotic technology is capable of, AND do something intrinsically worthwhile at the same time.
Let the robots have this one, I say.
...for the first space elevator, rather than having to boost another large mass, which we are going to have to do sooner or later for this purpose anyway. This way, a much larger spool of cable can be sent up in the first SE mission thereby making the entire thing less expensive to start up.
Then, once the space elevator bulks up and begins accepting normal payloads, successive missions could be sent up at 20x lower launch costs to repair it, augment it, attach other scopes to it, you name it. Equipment sent up the SE wouldn't have to use such exotic and expensive materials as typical satellites do to save every last ounce of weight. For example: no need to shroud things in gold foil anymore...
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
What could we infer if it actually was just your observation?
"Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.)"
See, there's the motivation. Don't see it? Let me make it a little more clearer:
"Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Goddard SFC)"
Ain't pork-barrel politics grand?
Well, if this is the case somebody should inform Jim Lovell about it.c h-13-1.html
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-350/
nice troll man