NASA Preparing Manned Hubble Service Mission

danimrich writes "According to an article at Space.com, 'NASA's new Administrator Mike Griffin told reporters today [April 29] that he informed key members of Congress Thursday evening that he would direct engineers at Goddard Spaceflight center to start preparing for a space shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope on the assumption that one ultimately will go forward.'"

Comments

Re:Handling too much?

[Richard_at_work]

The Russians cannot budget enough for much more than they do now, which is why the Russians are asking NASA to get on with getting the Shuttle back up so they can resume some of the supply missions. NASA did look into funding the Russian program to a certain extent, but its forbidden from doing so because of legislation forbidding funding of states which provide support to Iran.

Re:Safety Concerns

[Sargent1]

The safety concern was that, if the shuttle had its tiles damaged by foam (or ice from the external tank) so that it couldn't come back to Earth, the shuttle couldn't transfer its orbit to the ISS for safe docking. Instead, NASA would have to send a second shuttle up and try an on-orbit shuttle-to-shuttle dock. That's why the Hubble mission was deemed "more dangerous than any other" -- the "other" missions are to the ISS, which can act as a safe harbor.