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NASA To Determine Hubble's Fate
clickclickdrone writes "According to the BBC NASA is debating whether or not to send astronauts in to space to service the Hubble telescope. Without intervention it is thought to be good for another 24-36months.
Given the quality of images and data it has produced since it's launch, it sounds like a no brainer to me but the people who hold the purse strings are rarely predictable when it comes to spending money."
ebay.
Sell it off to the highest bidder. Some other space agency may well want to take over the maintenance and running of the telescope. Or maybe Google to grab it turn it round and use it to map the earth down to the smallest pebble.
Deleted
Tell them Hubble might have found oil on a distant planet, and that we need to take another look.
Running Windows^H^H^H^H^H^H^H OSX and Linux in the home. (I don't have time for Solitaire any more.)
it sounds like a no brainer to me but the people who hold the purse strings are rarely predictable when it comes to spending money.
There's way more than money at stake here. Maybe Hubble is worth the risk to the astronaut's lives, but you can't just ignore that issue.
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
According to the BBC NASA is debating whether or not to send astronauts in to space to service the Hubble telescope.
So, they're looking into the issue?
Have you read my journal today?
Sigh. Everyone in the world knows more about what's going on in the USA than the US media...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well, Cassini-Huygens did find hydrocarbons on Titan. Don't know if Hubble was involved.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini-Huygens
science is a religion
Still not dead.
Well, frankly, if none of them want to do it, I'll go!
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Besides, our current president is (seemingly) not quite sharp enought to get most of what science discovers using the HST. He'd rather have "feet on the ground" as it were, telling him things like "We've landed and claimed Mars in the name of the USA" rather than "We've made a startling discovery regarding the dynamics of planetary formation within stellar nurseries".
That said, maybe it is time we went back to the true promise of space exploration - getting mankind out into the Galaxy. There is a certain attraction to the notion of manned space exploration versus robotic/remote methods. Certainly a kind of heroic appeal to the act itself; and all of our robotic/remote exploration was and is intended to ultimately pave the way for manned exploration anyhow. Perhaps we know enough now to take those first tenative steps into space.
Like most coins, this one appears to have two sides.
Is the cost of building and launching a new and better satellite going to much more expensive than training astronauts, sending them to hubble to fix it and bringing them back down again?
Perhaps they could take the space elevator...:b
Zap Brannigan is just going to blow it up anyway.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Don't.
Yeah I know, the astronauts know the risks involved. Yet the risk is bigger to who manned space program should something go wrong, especially something going wrong on a mission that is "largely" optional.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
If they decide not to do anything, couldn't some company claim it as salvage or abandoned property and then hire the Russians (or someone) to get up there an repair it?
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
They should send a temp up there to fix it, perhaps the one who busted the damn thing in the first place. That'd teach him.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
If its going to cost millions/billions to fix hubble we could just replace it with modern technology. Better yet, we could have a H Prize to replace hubble. Let the private sector try to launch their own. I mean, if they can launch a shuttle to space let them do other things. NASA Cant seem to do it for under a billion.
As the whole world has benefited maybe we could pass around the hat to get this funded
Is it just me or does it seem like a space gocart at the ISS might be a good idea? or atleast a UAV. probably would cost about the same as a launch. NASA fix things that cost like 500 quadrillion dollars instead letting them become spacejunk. It would also allow the astronuts that are up there for like six months to go for a little golf outing once-n-while .
after the Satellite of Love crashed into it.....
Monstar L
There is a certain attraction to the notion of manned space exploration versus robotic/remote methods. Certainly a kind of heroic appeal to the act itself; and all of our robotic/remote exploration was and is intended to ultimately pave the way for manned exploration anyhow
So refit Hubble with a secondary camera/lens to be able to track the maned explorations and sell it as a new reality TV show. Really. The best part of The Space Race was that everyone actually cared. Imagine if people were as excited about real science as they are about "Lost".
We are all just people.
"There is a certain attraction to the notion of manned space exploration versus robotic/remote methods."
The biggest benefit is all is the endless supply of resources and energy one could harvest, it certainly would change the dynamics of have vs. have not, there are enough resources out there to give everyone on earth a standard of living many times higher then it is now.
That and manned spaceflight would no doubt help enable us to learn to make better spacecraft overtime, and advance our knowledge on how to live in hostile environments on remote planets should anything happen to our original.
The Hubble telescope has been an absolute wonder, however...
it is getting rather old and has many major technical problems becoming more frequent.
Sometimes it is better and cheaper to build a new electronic device than try to fix/upgrade an old one.
Do you pay to upgrade an old 386 pc?
OR
Do you buy a NEW pc with superior performance for a small fraction of the 386 upgrade costs?
At some point it is necessary to let hardware reach its end of life-cycle to move on toward newer, better, cheaper hardware.
Consider that while the push to put a human on the moon was mostly a marketing campaign the end result was that the public was happy to see large sums of their money spent on it. The shuttle program had similar hype but it has faded away, both from explosions and from the fact that people are bored with seeing the same thing. The Mars rovers generated some excitement as well but it was short lived.
So the administration may well be trying to generate the same kind of public support for space exploration that it had in the Apollo era. Quite often, if you let the marketing people do their thing, the end result is a gain in resources that will eventually fund more important work. Like it or don't, "We've landed and claimed Mars in the name of the USA" will result in a lot more cheering and bumper ribbons and T shirt sales than "We've made a startling discovery regarding the dynamics of planetary formation within stellar nurseries".
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
I can't imagine NASA doing it for loss of face, but since a Soyuz launch is $5m vs $50M for the shuttle (which is anyway overbooked for the short remainder of it's lifetime), couldn't NASA just pay the Ruskies to take their Hubble repairman up for a day trip?
I love posts like this. I am so glad the poster had all the information NASA officials have in front of them. Plus a distinguished panel of experts to advise them. One minute we say NASA is great for having the foresight to put Hubble up their. Then we rag on them when they think the money could get more bang for the buck somewhere else.
That concept won't work in this scenario. Hubble was sent to observe and further our knowledge of Universe. Beyond that it has no commercial value. Corporates work on commercial returns (RoR). If they launch a Hubble, it will be mostly to detect Oil/precious metals on Earth or scout nearby asteroids for Gold, etc.
Acquiring knowledge solely for knowledge and not for returns is not a corporate's mandate. I do NOT denigrate them: it just ain't their job.
The H prize would be a waste as much as a bicycle is useful to a Fish.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Actually, several astronauts have spoken out in the past few years saying they were willing to go service Hubble again, despite the risks. Ie, they understand the huge scientific output that are at stake should Hubble be shut down. Additionally, the risks aren't greater than previous Hubble servicing missions, it's just that there are problems of which we were blissfully unaware previously.
make world, not war
I agree, I think they'd make a ton of money selling it on Ebay regardless of what the intended use of the buyer for it was :)
Is it just me or is it not going to upgrade to Vista in here?
Wasn't there a new telescope that uses corrective optics which produce images just as good, if not better, than Hubble?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Of course we should take into account the willingness of astronauts to go into space for this mission. Especially because astronauts are not prone to ignoring safety considerations, and so if they are willing they probably think it is reasonably safe to do so. But it is worth pointing out that in a certain sense an astronaut is not entirely a private citizen. When we lose an astronaut, it's a blow to the entire nation.
I'm just saying that just because we have astronauts willing to go doesn't mean we can neglect to take into consideration the risk to their lives.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
Something popular - like the two-front war we're waging in and around the Middle East? ;^)
But I'm afraid you're right - our government has historically spent arount two to three hundred times more on our military than on scientific exploration. The Pentagon could practically fund NASA at twice it's current budget from their "petty cash" drawer! How is this hidden? Simple - keep rerunning footage of the disastrous attacks of 9/11. Keep the sheeple from looking too hard at where the money really goes. "Don't look at my left hand! Look at my right hand, where we're getting back on track to mine Mars for diamonds and uranium!"
Hell, I'm just suffering a sour stomach today - I am beginning to think that private space exploration offers a better hope to put mankind out there among the planets (the stars will have to come later). The government (in my opinion) shouldn't be so quick to abandon a multi-million dollar piece of equipment just because of the cost of upkeep. This is like junking a two year old Lamborghini because the tires are worn out and because we want to own a fleet of semi tractor-trailers instead. Note that I said junking, nost selling!
No one is saying not to develop new instruemnts (ie, JWST is in progress, but also Chandra and SIRTF have been launched recently and others are also on the drawing board), but Hubble is responsible for HUGE amounts of scientific research, all of which will all be brought to an abrupt halt if funding is cut off.
make world, not war
Here's a dirty secret that NASA doesn't talk about much: the sphericity of Hubble's main receiver array was off, so they had to send astronauts to put an extra lens in. This tends to damp the brightness of the spectra Hubble collects. The upshot? Observatories in Hawaii and New Mexico do better. Astronomers use THOSE observatories for cutting-edge research. After an initial bout of useful work, now Hubble just produces pretty pictures for screensavers (and boy has NASA played those up...'look at the 'startingly brilliance of' etc etc). So now the public loves the hubble thing, but for the most part astronomers don't care, save from a PR standpoint. Let it burn.
our current president is (seemingly) not quite sharp enought to get most of what science discovers using the HST. He'd rather have "feet on the ground" ... maybe it is time we went back to the true promise of space exploration - getting mankind out into the Galaxy. There is a certain attraction to the notion of manned space exploration versus robotic/remote methods. Certainly a kind of heroic appeal to the act itself
... why, just the other day Barak Obama was talking about how poor urban people in Chicago would really benefit from a better understanding of non-interacting massive particle clouds.. NOT!)? But it's maybe smart to get people fired back up about the space program by having actual humans that they can mentally relate to doing interesting things? Smart, just not smart enough for anyone in the administration to in any way appreciate?
Well, which is it? He's dumb if he's not, himself, able to process the cosmological coolness of seeing dark matter findings in a galaxy (since, you know, ALL of his political opponents totally get that
Come on, now. It's about getting the public to embrace it - something besides pop culture thugs and celebrity jocks having tantrums over their million-dollar paychecks. Personally, I can evoke a sense of adventure when I see the data from the Mars rovers properly, and dramatically rendered and set to some music... but it's a stretch that you sure don't have to make when there's someone telling you what it feels like to flip over a rock on Mars and look at what got washed up there a million years ago. A kid standing in his backyard with binoculars looking at the moon will get a lot more passion knowing that a cool group of people are working there right now than he will hearing about how a burst of x-rays was gravity lensed a little more than we thought it was, which makes that white paper from that PhD he read last week, like, totally bogus, dude.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Just trying to see obverse and reverse, that's all.
The government (in my opinion) shouldn't be so quick to abandon a multi-million dollar piece of equipment just because of the cost of upkeep
... but there's plenty of new stuff for newer, better equipment to look at, too.
Never mind whether the device is technilogically past its prime (and, BTW, we do have new hardware scheduled to go up - better than Hubble). But consider this: in just the last few years, the average cost per shuttle flight has gone down to a mere $750 million dollars. Per flight.
Don't you think that newer toys should be seriously considered, over servicing the old ones? That's a lot of money to spend, and lives to risk, without covering newer ground. Yes, there's plenty of new stuff for Hubble to look at
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
There you go! You've placed all the blaim on Bush! And without a single link to any actual fact! Now you should be able to get an American paper interested enough in publishing a short article on a back page. Now, if you could add the phrase "empeach Bush", then it might move up to one of the earlier pages. And if you could come up with a newer silly name for Bush, instead of one of the overly time worn versions, then you might actually get on the front page!
Don't forget to include a "America is the most evil country ever" bit, to really stick it to the front page.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
"Oil is the result of biomass getting compressed in the earth over a very long period of time."
2 6/0040204 use varients of the same processes used in the semiconductor industry to grow
And diamonds are the result of carbon being squished under heat and pressure in extinct volcanoes...except when their not. Many of the artificial diamonds talked about in the earlier article http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/
The thing is, Titan is much colder than anything around here. Its "rocks" are likely water ice, it snows methane, etc. Different chemical reactions than what we're used to can happen if you lower the ambient temperature by that much.
science is a religion
Yeah I know, the astronauts know the risks involved. Yet the risk is bigger to who manned space program should something go wrong, especially something going wrong on a mission that is "largely" optional.
The only space missions that are not entirely optional are the ones that involve recovering crew from a space station.
If we can't afford the risk to service Hubble, then we can't afford the risk to do anything else in space and should just mothball the entire manned space program right now.
The shuttle is not that big a risk. While it has flown less than expected, it has actually had better safety and reliability than was originally calculated. There have been two terrible disasters, but many flying successes. The safety of the space shuttle right now has never been higher. So if it was worth the risk to put the HST up in the first place, then it is worth the lesser risk that exists now to go up and service it.
I'm serious. Hubble is one of the space shuttle's greatest successes. If we can't risk servicing Hubble, then our entire manned space program is useless and should be scrapped. If we are going to even pretend that it isn't useless, then we should service Hubble.
The enemies of Democracy are
As I understand it, the real problem is that a service mission would cost more than a replacement for the Hubble; which would have better optics, improved insturments, better reliability, etc.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
That reminds me - why did we abandon work with the Voyager probes, which were still providing new scientific insights into the nature of our solar system? Was it because we had a new, better probe questing towards the heliopause? Don't tell me we couldn't afford 'em - after all, they were both already up and running, built, paid for, launched, working, and still costing less per year than one day at war in the Middle East.
Let me guess - you're gonna buy a new PC when Vista ships, because upgrading your old XP machine wouldn't be as cool, right? That does seem to be the logic of your position.
Servicing Hubble may be equivalent to getting a memory upgrade for that old 386 in the corner that only accepts EDO-RAM and that can only run a custom-patched version of Red Hat 2 of which you have lost the CDs. You might as well throw it out and replace it with something more up to date.
Aside from the fact that we've already stopped funding work on the only two space probes in human history to hit the heliopause and still be capable of producing usable data for analysis?
Aside from the fact that we're spending tremendously greater sums to prosecute a two-front war with debatable benefits and at best lukewarm approval from the voting public?
Oh, you wanted a link! Here you go!.
So why don't we have a hubble2 yet? IMHO NASA should send up a new version of the hubble every 2-4 years.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
New processors = small gates != rad hard (able to withstand radiation in space)
That's why most of the space computers are made with older parts. Only newer FPGAs are capable of faster speeds at rad hard ratings.
Why is it that a Hubble repair mission to near Earth orbit is considered more risky than a manned expedition to Mars?
One thing he doesn't have is a slew of politicians to answer to.
I rather see my tax dollars spent on some 1.2b dollar rocket that blows up on launch then helping some drugged up welfare dude. Or any other silly government programs that are just a constant drain on the economy. I work for my money and expect others to do the same. Nobody should be getting a free lunch.
Rod
Don't believe I've ever seen a non-two sided coin: Have you?
damaged by dogma
The only thing that would really get their attention would be something out there that would jeopardize their power... ... like an invasion fleet. Assuming those aliens only wanted to enslave us (you know, everything but eating us or
putting eggs or larvae in our bodies), we might even be better of with our new alien overlords than the scum we have
in power.
yeah, but the money for the hubble and for its successors come from the same purse. prolonging hubble means delaying the successor.
> Besides, our current president is (seemingly) not quite sharp enough
> to get most of what science discovers using the HST.
"Seemingly" is quite appropriate here since Bush's grades were higher than Gore's.
The Army reading list
Sec DoD "Mr President, we have been using the Hubble Telescope pointed towards Earch, and we believe that we found Osama Bin Laden."
Pres "Yippy, show me the images!"
Sec DoD "Calm down Mr President" shows photos
Pres "So which one is him?"
Sec DoD "This streak here"
Pres "Fine send Special Forces."
12 hours later
Pres "How did that operation Kill Osama to improve my ratings go?"
Sec DoD "Well Mr President, we encountered a problem"
Pres "How serious?"
Sec DoD "It was a mis-calculation in the time and where the hubble was pointed at the time. To sum things down, the white/black streak was actually a island off of Hawaii, not sure which one, but once strategic forces determined where to drop the special forces team, no one realized until it was too late."
Pres "Too late for what?"
Sec DoD "Sharks sir."
Sec DoD "The hubble was never ment to be used pointed towards Earth, so we didn't really lose out... We just basically took some of our military budget and moved the money to NASAs budget. Either way, we are 5 special forces squads short now."
"Don't Forget to Salt the Fries"
The primary driver for NASA's decision is the fact that the replacement for the aging Hubble is the much improved Webb telescope, which is already under construction and scheduled for launch in 2011. Webb will have a 6.5-meter diameter segmented main mirror made from berillium, compared with Hubble's 2.4-meter glass mirror, giving it more than 7 times the light gathering power of hubble and improving its resolution by nearly a factor of 3. So NASA's choice is to save the $$-billions that a Hubble fix-up mission would cost and accept the risk that Hubble will go down a couple of years before the Webb telescope is deployed in 2011. Seems like a pretty good decision to me. Earthbound telescopes are fundamentally limited by atmospheric turbulence, which causes the familiar 'twinkling' you can see with the naked eye. Spaceborne scopes, despite their cost and servicing difficulties, are the way to go.
Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain. --Friederich Schiller
While I don't expect DOD-funded research to produce private-sector gains anytime soon (mostly CLASSIFIED research I think, yes?), you're quite right to point out that there are literally TENS OF BILLIONS of dollars annually wasted on pork-barrel projects, ill-concieved federal programs and outright graft/fraud. Such a shame that we can't just divert even two percent of that to NASA (which is actually a very small slice of the federal budget pie).
What, like when SkyLab came "showering" down all over Australia? Does the Hubble have a high gold content or something? I don't get it.
Construction began on the Hubble in 1979. It's almost as old as I am.
The original launch date was supposed to be in 1983. For most of the 80's it sat in storage, waiting for the Shuttle program to recover after the Challenger disaster. Instead it launched in 1990 - and it wasn't until 1993 that the optics could be fixed.
Pieces of the Hubble are now 27 years old. Computers (as we know them) essentially did not exist to aid with the design.
It was designed to have a 10-year mission - that mission was up in 2003. It's time for the sacred cow to be killed, replaced with something easier to maintain, more modern, significantly more capable - and cheaper.
More info is on Wikipedia.
Somehow, it just doesn't come across when the man speaks in public. Yes, I chose the word "seemingly" with some care, as I've often had to remind my (very liberal) friends that regardless of the general opinion, President Bush is in fact an educated man.
Ohhh, my head hurts! Where's that Klien bottle of aspirin?
If there's no more Hubble, where do I get my computer desktops?
Sell it to the NSA. Get around the "don't point it at the ground" limitation. Sell it on the basis of our need to see down every cleavage in the world, in case they're carrying bombs in there.
> Somehow, it just doesn't come across when the man speaks in public.
:-)
Quite true. I remember after the first Bush-Kerry debate (in which Bush was trounced soundly by all accounts) my one consolation was someone's quote to the effect of "it's not much of a victory when you beat George Bush in a talking contest"
The Army reading list
The numbers are not promising (unlike politicians, who are always promising - everything).
And where are the flying cars? They promised me flying cars!
NASA has lots of smart people working for it. I'm sure they've gone over the risk/rewards calculations for the mission better than any of us can, but here's my attempt at laying out the pros and cons -
Pros:
- Hubble's useful life can be extended to another 6-7 years.
- PR benefit of a successful repair mission
Cons:
- cost of another shuttle mission plus training the crew
- opportunity cost of using a shuttle mission for Hubble vs. using it for the ISS
- risk to astronauts (due to higher orbit)
- possible loss of a shuttle (putting entire manned spaceflight program at risk)
From NASA's perspective, a loss of the shuttle and crew would be catastrophic. It would shutdown the manned spaceflight program for at least a couple of years and endanger the ISS since almost all the remaining shuttle flights are needed for the space station. Politically it would be devastating as well since the public would demand that Something Be Done, and there would be calls to end the program for being too dangerous. This has to be weighed versus the best possible outcome - extending Hubble's lifespan by at most 5 years beyond its current one. And by the time the mission would be launched, the Hubble would be almost 18 years old. Given improved technology and the reduced quality of the Hubble due to a previous repair, a new satelite telescope may be a better investment.
A lot of people are saying hubble should simply be replaced. Hubble IS being replaced. Work is currently underway on the James Webb Space Telescope. The trouble is that it isn't due for launch until 2011.
Hubble's replacement is the James Webb Telescope, and has been in the works for a long time. Slated for launch in 2013, it will have a 6.5 meter primary mirror (Hubble's is 2.4 meters), be optimized for the near-infrared (so it can see through dust clouds, and further back in time and/or farther away), and orbit at the second Lagrange point about a million miles from Earth, instead of right around Earth like Hubble. That means it won't be bothered by light from the Earth, so it can see far dimmer things, and also that it can point steadily without having to compensate for its rapid orbital motion, unlike Hubble.
Hubble is certainly very nice for crowd-pleasing photos, and it's done valuable science, but I think the astrophysics community is a lot more interested in JWST. Near IR astronomy seems much more fruitful in terms of actual science than visible, is my impression. Considering a Shuttle mission costs something like $250 million, it is not clear that the money is best spent prolonging the aging Hubble's lifetime another few years. Bear in mind the Shuttle fleet is to be grounded in 2010 anyway, so there can be no more servicing missions, and Hubble's hardware is beginning to wear out.
I'd have to agree with Dubya if you mean spending a whole lot of money to see what happens when you light a match in space. As far as I can tell, the net result of the shuttle program (Hubble aside) is a better understanding of how the human body reacts to low gravity. Have there been any meaningful discoveries from research by humans in space or is the shuttle program simply expensive (and dangerous) "joy-rides" for a very select few? I have a hard time believing that the best minds at nasa couldn't devise a more cost effective way of maintaining Hubble (and other satellites) using robotics. Wouldn't the money saved be better spent on more useful research?
The sooner we let it go, the sooner we get a bigger better space telescope. Hubble's low hanging fruit has been harvested. Time to upgrade.
Ummm, did you fail to notice the mentioning of CPU was only in terms of an analogy about repairing an older thing versus building a newer thing?
make world, not war
I don't want to be cynical, but aside from the tiny fraction of people people with philosophical interests in space or who like pictures of nebulae on their desktop, nobody benefits from hubble. It doesn't pay your bills, it doesn't get you laid, it doesn't stop war, it can do zilch against hunger on earth, it basically doesn't solve any practical, every day problems at all.
Anything in the universe can and eventually will be blamed on Bush.
Given that space telescopes seem to need more servicing than other satellites and we're retiring the shuttle that can service them, and even while still in service we don't seem to want to do it, would it make sense to make a Hubble replacement that's attached to, or in reach of, the ISS?
Hey if a 386 board or two is all they need, I'll be glad to give them one of mine. I think I still have a Biostar mb with an early K6 processor still in it somewhere.
Seriously,
Just think how many Hubble Space Telecopes we could have for the money we are pissing away in Iraq. The same idiots who don't blink at pissing away 300 billion in a grand effort to alienate all humanity from us, can't seem to find a few bucks here or there for a telescope or robotic probe or two.
As Jerry Pournelle has pointed out, we could have built a whole fleet of orbital solar power stations for the cost of the Iraq fiasco. (yah I understand some of the problems with that. Still, it would have been better than wasting it on this stupid war).
Surely you jest. The intelligent scientist part of NASA has virtually zero say over this kind of decision. The political appointee C-student administrator part of NASA makes the decision. And they probably have less of a clue than the original poster.
GoldenPalace would sponsor people to get their logo tattooed onto themselves and also to have their logo painted on objects like exotic vehicles and unusual buildings.
So you could have the GoldenPalace telescope.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Ignoring optical imperfections (negligible for the VLT and Hubble) and blurring by the Earth's atmosphere (irrelevant for Hubble and partially corrected by the adaptive optics system for the VLT), image "sharpness" (angular resolution for an astronomer) depends on telescope diameter and wavelength of light. The VLT beats Hubble at near-IR wavelengths (let's say 1.6 microns) because a VLT mirror has an 8 meter diameter, whereas Hubble has a 2.4 meter diameter. However, Hubble still achieve diffraction-limited performance at visible wavelength (say 0.4 microns), so the sharpness of Hubble images at 0.4 microns is 4 times sharper than at 1.6 microns. If an astronomer wants the sharpest picture, she will use Hubble at a wavelength of 0.4 microns, not Hubble at 1.6 microns or the VLT at 1.6 microns. As an added bonus, Hubble has the same image quality over a larger field of view, whereas the adaptive optics systems can only correct a somewhat smaller patch of sky. Eventually, adaptive optics will work in the visible and cover a larger field of view, but not for several years. Ground based telescopes will never be able to work at X-ray (Chandra), ultraviolet (Hubble), or roughly half the infrared wavelength because the Earth's atmosphere absorbs at these wavelengths.
Throwing in even a shuttle flight would massively increase (probably more than double) the price & how would the purchaser keep their shiny new shuttle working? Those are not cheap toys to own...
I'm thinking that we can probably build a new Hubble now for about what it would cost to fix the old one. What could we do with that? Make it easier to service? Increase its resolution? Add more instruments?
I don't disagree with the gist of the message in the parent post here. Just some details are egregiously wrong and allow me to correct them.
And besides, the current Hubble successor (JWST) is near IR and loses the visible.
It retains the visual coverage (more or less), but it completely loses near and far UV coverage, which cannot be compensated from ground. The key advantage of JWST is the gain in sensitivity (i.e., ability to detect a very faint stuff in sky). Ground telescopes can actually do very well to compensate the shortcomings of the JWST. As for UV, there is no replacement for the Hubble.
And ground-based telescopes don't provide the same quality of spectra that space-based telescopes can, nor can they provide as quiet long-time (many-orbit) acquisitions.
Ground telescopes usually provide a higher quality of spectral data than any spece-based telescope has ever achieved. Of course it depends on how you judge "quality" here. In my mind the quality is determined by the spectral resolution; if you base your judgement in spatial resolution, then you might be correct. Sub-arcsecond spectral imaging data are quite unobtainable from ground (possible in NIR, though).
And about the acquisition, spectral observations from the ground can be a long one (a few hours continuous),depending on the part of the sky. For the HST, the visibility doesn't necessarily last a few orbits. Usually less than one orbit, because the telescope boresight is obscured by the Earth itself. There is a continuous visibility zone (part of the sky that is visible throughout an orbit), but these are rare.
Hubble is responsible for HUGE amounts of scientific research
It's not that huge in terms of scientific discovery, though a number of supported scientists per mission (FTE) are ridiculously large compared to any other mission (Chandra, Spitzer, etc).
I usually refrain, but this post was damned near unreadable. Punctuation and capitalization are important.
Anyway, no one has disputed the fact that Hubble can still do good science. The argument was whether or not a manned mission to perform service on the telescope is money well spent.
To use your car analogy, if your old car is breaking down, and you've already ordered a new one which will be delivered in a couple of months, is it a good idea to spend thousands of dollars repairing your existing one, or is it better to use that money to buy extras for your new car?
One of my neighbors at my apartments says he helped build the telescope some years back, and is very proud to say it. He's a retired mechanical engineer, and loves to build model-scaled planes, cars, boats and helicopters. He helped me buy my first telescope today, and though it wasn't very clean (second hand) he started to teach me how to use it. It's freaking awesome. I have hero worship for the guy because he has been closer to space than I'll ever get!!