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."

Comments

Re:Excellent News!

[lgw]

Hopefully this will go somewhere. Servicing the Hubble is clearly a waste of money from a narrow view (we'll have a newer telescope up in the not-too-distant future), but we should not delay an entire field of research for a couple of years regardless - it's still worth the money for the results.

OTOH, as others have pointed out, it would be cheaper to launch a new Hubble, and I don't see the problem with that.

Re:Excellent News!

[torpor]

whatever. the hubble is useless junk. i'd rather NASA stop spending million$ on 'missions' and spent it all - every single bit of it - on sustainable human living, space research and development.

we do not need to know more about some place we, the starving human species, have no chance yet whatsoever of going to, living at, or exploiting in some way to solve the problems of our species.

sure, lots of 'hard science' can be learned from gazing off into the distant universe, but even more can be learned from spending 20 million bucks on human survival.

send man to space, work out better ways to improve a humans life under adverse conditions, and turn that technology back into the human back yard .. astrophysics rarely solves hunger, starvation, or thirst ...