F**k the moon. "Get your ass to Mars!"
Posted on 01/21/2005 2:25:17 PM PST by purple haze
WASHINGTON – The White House has eliminated funding for a mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope from its 2006 budget request and directed NASA to focus solely on de-orbiting the popular spacecraft at the end of its life, according to government and industry sources.
NASA is debating when and how to announce the change of plans. Sources told Space News that outgoing NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe likely will make the announcement Feb. 7 during the public presentation of the U.S. space agency’s 2006 budget request.
That budget request, according to government and industry sources, will not include any money for Hubble servicing but will include some money for a mission to attach a propulsion module to Hubble needed to safely de-orbit the spacecraft with a controlled re-entry into the Pacific Ocean. NASA would not need to launch such a mission before the end of the decade to guide the massive telescope safely into the ocean.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
But we'll keep sending billions on that space station - the UN office with the best view.
Who the devil is making the space exploration recommendations to the Bush administration. Whom ever it is - is a crack addict and knows absolutely NOTHING about it. Probably some number crunching desk jocky.
Hubble has been money WELL specnt by NASA standards-- that said, screw the ISS and let's get back to the moon and beyond!!!
I'm glad to hear it. I think most of NASAs budget is a total waste anyway.
If someone could figure a way of making money on it then it would get done. But that isn't going to happen unless the government, eh.. you and I .... foot the bill.
What a shame. There's nothing that replaces Hubble for years. Next Generation Space Telescope is still being designed....no where near ready to fly.
Shame.
I agree with the NASA budget being wasteful. However, since Bush's Mission to Mars statement, interest in Engineering is booming. (If I may draw a line with a single data point.)
A friend teaching a nuclear lab stated he's gone from having two labs to 4 labs with overflow in one year.
Getting kids interested in science and engineering is good news.
We can build another Hubble better than the one we have and launch it for less than the cost to service the current one.
Bush (wisely) plans to shelve the Shuttle, if you read between the lines of his announcements.
This is part of the shelving process.
Build a new one, spend the launch funds on good optics, and lauch it from a regular old rocket.
There is plenty of dough for space science if you take the humans out of the spacecraft. They are no longer needed, especially at the massive cost adder.
No need to, it's just been announced.
and with the money left over build a 100foot optical telescope here on the ground!
Penny wise and pound foolish.
The Hubble telescope is one of the few recent NASA success stories. It's not only very popular, but it does real scientific investigation into the nature of the universe and some of its curious details. They should scrap the international space station, which is one of the most expensive and stupidest boondoggles ever, and use a tiny portion of that wasted money to service the Hubble. The big money has already been spent building it and getting it up there.
But evidently they've made their decision.
Isn't it true that one shuttle service mission to Hubble costs more than the cost to build Hubble and place it in orbit?
You just keep Hubble stable (not necessarily usable) until the last or next-to-last shuttle mission and then send a shuttle to service it. The reason they don't want to go, the possible loss of an orbiter leaving us without a rescue ship and not enough inventory to sustain regular launches, will then at that point no longer exist.
"National Academy of Sciences"
Didn't these guys come out in favor of the Kyoto protocols.
The problem with the ISS is lack of vision. If they used an inflatable module to provide a pressurized space to assemble other space vehicles (or even to repair the shuttle) then it would serve a useful purpose. It should be a staging place for further exploration, not an end unto itself where we study how spiders weave webs in space or how to dispense Coke from a fountain.
We can? Do tell.
Do you have any idea what it cost to build HST? Do you know what the servicing mission was estimated to cost? Do you know what the next generation space telescope is costing?
We have a working telescope in space. There is no guarantee, and not even good odds, that a replacement would be a success.
Probably. They are, after all, scientists.
Do you think the HST specifically has been a waste of money?
Agreed; instead of using the booster to deorbit the HST, they could just as easily boost it into a parking orbit for the time being.
And even if we ultimately decide we can't service it with a shuttle, it will be available to be serviced by whatever eventually replaces the shuttle.
I'm pretty sure they are working on a new telescope to replace the Hubble. My son is working on the project. I do think it will be several years before it is ready though.
White House needs the money to carry out Bush's silly "free the world of tyranny" policy
What idiot really made this decisIon?
F**k the moon. "Get your ass to Mars!"
I'm not talking about building a next generation space telescope; I'm talking about a Hubble replacement. I don't have the figures in front of me, but as I've read several times the technology that made the Hubble possible has both improved, is less expensive and lighter. The cost of sending a manned mission to service the Hubble or development of a robot to service the Hubble is more expensive than replacement with modern improvements.
At $500 million per shuttle flight something has to give.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a lack of interest in science in the Bush administration. This is just another sign.
Couldn't say it better myself. Bush is singularly unimaginative. Given the sheer scale of FedGov, the fact that they can't find the money to save the Hubble says a lot about the puny brains running it.Pennies for science, dollars for welfare. Just gotta be sure that the media won't say bad things about republicans, because that would be bad.
Good move! Common sense.
What idiot wants me to pay for it?
We lament the fact that kids are not interested in science, which is actually vital to national security, yet we can't find the a relatively few bucks to fund the most important telescope since Galileo made his and started discovering.
This is a science issue. Most people don't care, yet science drives our national security efforts.
We ought to be concentrating on how to militarize space instead of looking away from earth.
The next global conflict will be won by whoever controls the high ground.
China will be launching a space telescope at about the ame time Hubble will be burning up in the atmosphere. Nice to know that soon the world be looking to China for leadership in science isn't it.
3He
What a shame. There's nothing that replaces Hubble for years. Next Generation Space Telescope is still being designed....no where near ready to fly.
Except that's wrong:
Work begins on Hubble's replacement
Published Monday 29th November 2004 18:01 GMTWork has begun on the primary mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope at a new, state-of-the-art facility in Alabama. The mirror pieces will be shaped, but not polished, in a $1.2m, 20,000 square foot facility opened this month.The primary mirror is 6.5m in diameter, and composed of 18 hexagonal pieces. Each of these 1.3m pieces will be made of beryllium. Beryllium tolerates extremely low temperatures very well, deforming much less than glass would in the same conditions. It is also extremely light, and the mirror will have less mass than Hubble's, much smaller, primary mirror.
The mirror will be machined to an extremely high degree of precision. Variations of no more than four thousandths of an inch are considered acceptable.
Four companies are involved in manufacturing the mirrors. First, Brush Wellman compressed beryllium into so-called blanks. Axsys then machines the blanks into their correct shapes. This process reduces the mass of the components by 92 per cent: the final segments will weigh just 21kg. Next, Tinsley Laboratories will grind and polish the mirrors and finally Ball builds the telescope. The whole process will take around four and a half years.
The James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to launch in 2011. It will hang in space at the Lagrange-2 point of balance between the gravitational influences of the Earth and the sun. Astronomers will use the telescope to look back in the infra-red to the youngest days of the universe in the hope of finding out more about the birth of galaxies and stars, and gaining a better understanding of the size and shape of the universe. ®
Continuing to throw money at a 1970s design to "stretch the life" (really for emotional "feel good" purposes) is what got us into the trouble with the Space Shuttle. Shuttle was designed for one mission and one mission only: bringing stuff back from space. There is no other reason for it to be designed as it is. We won't be bringing back large things from space for quite some time and, if we were to design how to best do it now, it wouldn't be a space plane covered in fragile tiles held on with glue on a piece of felt.
We need to move on to the next generation stuff and quit limping along on the old stuff just because it's a make work job for Barbara Mikulski's constituents.
I agree with those that want to dump ISS and move back to the moon. Bush has agreed to finish what we committed to on ISS and then he's left it out of future NASA plans. You've got to live up to commitments made, even when they were made by a piece of crap like Clinton.
Bttt
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