Nasa plans to bring down Hubble

[MaineDem]

The Hubble Space Telescope and a mission to explore Jupiter's moons look to be the biggest casualties in Nasa's 2006 budget plans outlined on Monday.

Under the proposals, a mission to service Hubble would be scrapped and the telescope left to die in orbit.

Nasa's total budget would rise 2.4% over 2005 to about $16.5bn, but only $93m would be spent on Hubble.

About $75m of that will be aimed at bringing the observatory down to Earth safely, officials have announced.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4244451.stm

[Kolesar]

1. Ooops, miscalculated

Landed on Crawford. Seriously, though, we spend four times as much per year on Iraq. Why aren't Americans outraged? I don't get it.

[Bozita]

2. Hubble funds gone .... but Mission-to-Mars is still on

GWB, showing more of that inner cowboy.


from the article:

He reaffirmed that the space agency continued to be guided by President Bush's vision for space exploration, announced in January 2004.

This has included a major shift in emphasis towards human exploration, with the intention of returning astronauts to the Moon and, possibly, take them on to Mars.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

6. Mission-to-Mars the next Waxahachie?

GHW Bush was able to get 2 billion spent on the super collider in Waxahachie TX before it was scrapped. Maybe Bush II can get a few billion spent on another bad science project at the benefit of his 'Pioneers'?

[Placebo]

7. I read an article about the "Mission to Mars"...

Companies like Halliburton stand to make a huge amount of money from new drilling technologies which would be developed for the project. :grr:

I swear, these aren't politicians, they're just corporations masquerading as people.

[Supersedeas]

8. NASA certainly doesn't function like a vibrant scientific community

[rainbow4321]

11. NASA's new billboard

[oly]

3. Repugs want trillion dollar spectacular manned engineering

feats at the expense of science. If you want to know how the universe works, check with your bible babbler.

[spunky]

4. Shame. I have hubble pics in my screen saver and my desktop.

They've said this before haven't they? Maybe enough people will be upset that they'll continue servicing it. *crosses fingers*

[Placebo]

5. This new budget is insane...

they're coming out swinging, cutting everything they can, even cool things like this. damn them. :grr:

[LongTomH]

9. When we went to the moon.....

during the Apollo program era, we also had a number of unmanned scientific missions to the planets in the works:
- Mariner flyby missions to Mars, Venus and Mercury
- Pioneer flybys of Jupiter and Saturn
- Viking lander missions to Mars
- Voyager flybys or the outer planets

Now, the unmanned missions that have provided NASA's greatest triumphs since the Apollo era will be sacrificed to fund a few, incredibly expensive cowboy missions with little real science return. I'm just waiting for the announcement that a new director of NASA is looking to the manned Mars mission to provide "scientific evidence of the biblical account of Creation!" :scared:

Well, with the landing of Huygens on Titan, Europe has arrived as a space power. Scientific history now shifts back to Europe.

[Kolesar]

14. yes, I think the deep space probes are the most important missions

The humanned missions gobble up far too much of the budget.

[Ripley]

15. Don't forget China and Japan...they have space programs too.

The manned mission to Mars makes for great sci-fi movies and books, but it is an absolute joke right now. The old past-it's-life-expectancy shuttles haven't even been flying for years now. There is no vehicle to get to Mars and it ain't exactly like going a little further than the moon.

[CottonBear]

10. Could the "intelligent design crowd be behind this?

Hubble discoveries and scientific advances could provide more clues to the evolution of the universe.

[BillZBubb]

12. Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner!

Hubble keeps finding more and more evidence of an old universe. That's not what the right wing wackos want to hear. So, it's much better for them to turn attention to manned projects that don't threaten "Biblical truth".

[CottonBear]

19. Exactly.

I am a uge fan of NASA and Hubble. We are fools to let Hubble be abandoned and brought down. I wonder if government scientists could stage a mass protest? We should reach out to them. They could be an important part of our progressive coalition. I wonder how much they can speak out before they lose their jobs?

[Technowitch]

13. In a related story, dreams and aspirations also face budget axe

Republican congressmen and the White House deem them "a frivolous waste of taxpayer dollars... every minute spent dreaming is a minute of lost productivity."

[THUNDER HANDS]

17. Hubble is a waste of money

but then again, I think NASA as a whole is a waste of money.

NASA, war, farm subsidies - three things this country could do without.

[old blue]

23. How do you figure HST is a waste of money?

It has been a spectacular success for NASA and the astronomical community, as well as providing inspiring images to millions of people.

[w4rma]

16. The Republican leadership defunded Hubble, one of the most successful

space endeavors that the world has ever had.

Defunded over an amount of money equivalent to a few days in Iraq.

[Heddi]

18. This is the equivlalent of the "Burning Libraries" of our time

Hubble...oh how I love your pictures.

I have a feeling that future generations (certainly this one) will shake their heads at our shortsightedness.

Of course, this is the same maladministration that sees nothing wrong with basically destroying the archaelogical sites in Iraq :puke:

I fear that we are embarking upon a second Age of Darkness.

May the children of the future forgive the transgressors of this travesty. May they find our writings to see that we opposed this if for nothing more than to behold the constant beauty that the cosmos provides us.

:cries:

[ashmanonar]

20. better start printing then.

cuz computers, if there's some sort of massive disaster, won't be working.

[Psephos]

21. A third way

(I posted on this in the science forum, too.)

The cost of a mission, whether robotic or human, to service the Hubble, is at least $1.5 billion, maybe $2 billion, according to NASA figures cited in a meeting this week of the House Science Committee.

http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,66486,00.html?tw...

Just because the current budget (which has not been passed yet) doesn't contain funds for Hubble doesn't mean that the funds can't be restored. Budget priorities are driven by politics, and if there's a perception that enough people want Hubble fixed, the funds will be re-allocated, hopefully by slicing a little out of the International Space Boondoggle, err, I mean Station. (Hint hint: write your Congressperson.) This reversal already happened once, based on public outcry to the original plans to abandon Hubble. NASA quit saying that Hubble couldn't/wouldn't be serviced, and investigated whether a robot mission could do the job. (It turns out the robot mission costs roughly the same as a Shuttle mission, once you factor in the costs of developing the robot.)

Hubble was conceived in the 1970s and built in the 1980s, and like the Shuttles, its technology reflects its era. It may be that the best thing to do with Hubble is to use it up, and then move on...rather like you did with your old Windows 3.1 PC.

An international team of researchers led by Johns-Hopkins astronomers says instead of putting more cash into Hubble, we should put the money into a successor. Several powerful new instruments intended for a Hubble upgrade have already been built and paid for, and have been sitting in storage, awaiting a refurb mission. These could be used in a new telescope designed with up-to-date technology, producing major savings.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=16050

Hubble's main lens, as most people know, was ground incorrectly, and had to be corrected with a helper lens installed later by astronauts. While this correction restored much of the original design function, it did not restore it all, and also introduced lens aberrations into images that have to be digitally subtracted. In other words, Hubble not only uses old technology, it is also a bit hobbled.

The Johns-Hopkins team says that building a new telescope would take about five and a half years, and cost under $1 billion. That price includes the cost of launching on a Delta rocket (no Shuttle needed).

Check out the HOP page. This thing sounds very cool. You can do much better science with it than you can with Hubble.

http://www.pha.jhu.edu/hop /

Without servicing, Hubble will last another two to five years. In the worst case, if we followed the Johns-Hopkins team's recommendation, we might be without Hubble-like functionality for a few years. In exchange, we'd get a superior telescope, for less total money, and no more reliance on Shuttles.

I was a big proponent of servicing Hubble but I've changed my mind. Sometimes less is more.

[struggle4progress]

22. kick