NASA Engineers Dispute Hubble Safety Claim 412
Zeinfeld writes "According to the administration, the Hubble space telescope is going to be allowed to die in the next three years because the shuttle mission required to save it would be too risky. Meanwhile the public plans say shuttle missions to the space station will resume. Papers leaked to the New York Times say hogwash. The article (free subscription required) reports claims that money and politics, not safety are the reason. The public NASA story is clearly nonsense, and if the science from Hubble does not justify a shuttle mission, then it's time to pull the plug on the space station. I suspect that is exactly what will happen after the November election."
safety issues (Score:5, Insightful)
She was good while she lasted (Score:3, Insightful)
You wanted tax cuts. You got them (Score:3, Insightful)
This being just one example of them.
As voters you chose bush and must live with that untill Novemember.
If you care about Hubble then vote for someone who will raise your taxes. One or the other.
Many americans are upset about the deficit but they keep voting for tax cuts again and again every couple of years after things are paid off.
Let the astronaughts take the risk (Score:5, Insightful)
If the adminstration were to let the astronaughts decide whether to go up to fix Hubble when required, I doubt they would have a shortage of them volunteering to do that. The last thing the late astronaughts aboard Columbia would have wanted was to see their deaths result in the grounding of the space program and the premature death of Hubble.
Re:safety issues (Score:5, Insightful)
That's assuming it will even happen. I can imagine how a few funding cuts and some unfortunate accidents can delay that until 2030, or at worst, cancel the whole program. (ie: there is a huge debt now - won't surprise me if the space program is the first to be cut).
my take on that (Score:2, Insightful)
Given that this change in the US space program is occuring during an election year, it's very likely that we'll get the good news now, and the bad news after the elections. The ISS is already in serious trouble since from what I've read of the new policy, it appears that we'll eventually discontinue involvement in the ISS after it's completed. That may mean that everyone will bail on the project confirming Zeinfeld's suspicions.
Re:safety issues (Score:5, Insightful)
Believe me, it is not NASA that is playing this silly little game.
Re:safety issues (Score:2, Insightful)
Think about it this way ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Hence Hubble. Its taken some pretty pictures dont get me wrong, but has it saved humanity? Do we owe our lives or some pretty pictures to hubble? I think its time to let it die and wait until we get the time to put a newer better space satellite in orbit.
I say don't intentionally kill it, but let it die on its own. AND if you get around to it, see if maybe there isn't a cost effective means to do a little repair work on it. I know I'd rather my tax dollars went to puting a base on the moon where a larger more powerful telescope can be placed on the darkside. Or a roundtrip to mars to begin the study of sustaining life there.
So yes, I'm in favor of killing the hubble if it means more advancement in space science, which it undoubtedly does. Out with the old and in with the new!!! (no comment on voyager though)
Just walk away? (Score:5, Insightful)
The last few Apollo missions were quietly turned into expensive scrap.
Viking landers where the budget to listen to them was cut before they stopped sending.
Skylab which was allowed to die while waiting for the shuttle to make it better.
Various of shuttle replacement projects that given a half-hearted try and dropped.
And with the amount of continuous program and budget changes, it's a miracle that the shuttle and ISS ever got off the ground. (The slow morph from Freedom to the ISS and now to this is extremely sickening.)
The cut-backs so that manned Mars exploration and a Moon base can go forward are a joke. After the cut-backs have been done, the new programs will never go forward.
Re:Political reasons... (Score:4, Insightful)
Is a promise from President Bush to be taken at face value? From a man that has no qualms about lying to the public with a regularity and a level never seen before from an US President?
Re:safety issues (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:safety issues (Score:2, Insightful)
No more lies in 2004 (Score:2, Insightful)
Every time I hear someone bragging about how he/she won't vote "because one vote won't make a difference" I get this almost uncontrollable urge to slap them around.
Now is the time to vote.
Re:lies in space (Score:1, Insightful)
urghh...
Re:STOP NYTIMES ARTICLES! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You wanted tax cuts. You got them (Score:2, Insightful)
Science is not the point of space... (Score:5, Insightful)
But in the mean time, humanity really needs a frontier. Our systems have a tendency to slowly but surely become slower and more mired as time passes, in part because power tends to be gravitational; it gets concentrated in the hands of smaller groups of people, who in turn often become more cautious and inflexible with regards to things that would rock the boat. Bureaucracy gets bigger, not smaller, and it becomes harder to try radically new ways of doing things. The best way for change to take place is often for it to be experimented with somewhere else, and then filter back; this is what happened in the past with America. These people, coming to a new place without any entrenched baggage, got to try to start a system from scratch, and when it was successful, other countries could observe and then emulate and improve on it as it filtered back. But there is no frontier to experiment with anymore. The whole world (the oceans don't count, they are too hard/expensive to colonize for now) has people living in it. I think it is important for our development as a species to move on to new places, where new laws can be tried (including new ways of thinking about stuff like IP and citizen participation), and so that no single entity will ever be able to easily control everyone.
For many people, I believe that the excitement, opportunity, etc. are worth the risk and sacrifice that it will take. The Hubble has been one of our most successful and productive projects, and one that wouldn't have been possible without astronauts; the space station, in contrast, has in fact been sort of a waste from the point of view of both science and exploration. But neither should be the sole reason to keep or get rid of the shuttle, or the concept of manned space flight. A certain amount of capital is needed to prime things, so to speak, before enough momentum can develop for space exploration to become self-sustaining without government aid. This large up front cost has been and will be difficult for many to swallow, especially in our notoriously money hungry Congress. But as a country, and a species, we need this, and it will pay back many times over. I apologize for my long windedness, but I am hopeful that eventually some politicians will try to get votes from people with some large vision and dream instead of simply the usual issues.
Re:You wanted tax cuts. You got them (Score:3, Insightful)
"Tax and spend" might be bad, but "Not tax and spend" is even worse.
Re:safety issues (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Think about it this way ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, new platforms would be nice. Its just we don't have any, and if HST is allowed to die there will be no true replacement. The Web Space Telescope is a successor not a replacement. And the moon base on is so far off that it really isn't a viable option, given the ebb and flow of plans in Washington (Clinton basically killed Bush's original lets go to the moon plan).
Going to the Moon, to Mars, and establishing permenant bases is great engineering. Velcro and Tang for everyone. But pocket calcuators, while essential to doing science in the '70s are not the science. If you look at the proposed plan, science is out the door at NASA. They did this once, flags and footsteps of the Apollo missions. They almost didn't take a geologist to the moon to look directly at it. Lets make sure they don't lose sight of the science and just go for the engineering glory.
Re:Did anyone expect... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, Bush has been increasing funding, and shows no sign of stopping. Tax cuts are an excuse to cut public funding - medicare, education, social security, NASA, intelligence, and the like - while boosting corporate welfare and payoffs to the richest 1% (which compose 99% of the Bush White House - big surprise!).
Re:You wanted tax cuts. You got them (Score:2, Insightful)
Seems they prefer spending it on needless and worthless wars instead.
Re:You wanted tax cuts. You got them (Score:3, Insightful)
It's really eye-opening when you look at just how our tax dollars are allocated. Here it is described with oreos. [e-tractions.com]
Re:Think about it this way ... (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing I've learned during my relatively short life to date (just over a quarter of a century now) is that things you learn from seemingly unrelated disciplines have applications to one another. Things you thought would never apply to one another have a direct bearing on each other and if you don't understand something about them both, you will flail. For example, prior to 1942 no one knew that the sun was a source of radio noise. This fact now affects the design of a great deal of equipment. Astronomy has a bearing on electronics? How amazing.
It would be great to stick a nice scope on the moon, but we should be going there anyway. The question we have to ask ourself is, how much time will be lost doing research by not fixing it, and where is that money going to go if we don't spend it on hubble? The safety aspect doesn't bother me much so long as there are astronauts willing to take the risks. If you have to force people to go, then I wouldn't do it. It's not worth a single unwilling loss of human life.
Re:She was good while she lasted (Score:5, Insightful)
Report doesn't make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
No such actions are possible on a mission to the Hubble. Because of the orbital parameters, it is impossible for the shuttle to be able to go to both places on one mission. So any inspection, repair or wait-for-rescue would have to occur right there at the telescope.
Now, the report claims that NASA plans "eventually" to create additional facilities for these operations, other than at the space station. But that's obviously going to take a great deal of time. For one thing, just consider building the docking mechanism to allow two shuttles to connect and transfer crews from one to the other. No such thing has ever been designed, while such facilities already exist at the space station. Plus, the space station has additional supplies and space to let the crew wait safely for rescue. And it can hold inspection and repair equipment.
So while NASA may eventually create off-station repair facilities, that won't happen for a long time. Their initial efforts will be very properly focused on getting these abilities set up at the space station itself. And that means that no such facilities can be available by 2006, when the mission to Hubble is needed.
Re:safety issues (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:She was good while she lasted (Score:3, Insightful)
Tough to call "working right now" technology "inferior" to something that doesn't exist yet. By the way, I don't buy for a second that ground-based telescopes will ever have better imaging than Hubble. Sorry.
But then again, nobody listens to the engineers anyway...
The real justification for the Shuttle (Score:3, Insightful)
die is that its true justification was deployment and maintenance of intelligence gathering satellites. Deployment of VERY LARGE array antennas in orbit required a vehicle like the shuttle. The science benefits from the shuttle program were just a cover story to allow congress to justify the expenditures. With the end of the cold war and recent repeated intelligence failures, it will be harder to justify the black budget support of the shuttle program. Not to mention the fact, that our current adversaries are relatively low tech, making technical spaceborn collection programs less valuable.
Re:You wanted tax cuts. You got them (Score:4, Insightful)
In short, nobody wants to raise taxes, so nobody pays for the service, so the quality of the service goes down. No need to point fingers, there's enough blame to go around for everybody.
Re:safety issues (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is, NASA is killing too many of them. Each shuttle was supposed to have an operational life of about 100 missions; the Challenger blew up on its 10th, and the Columbia crashed after its 28th. On the whole, the fleet has a failure rate of almost 2%. Excuse me if I find that unacceptably high.
NASA will probably be extra-vigilant for the next few years as they were after the Challenger, but then they'll slack off and we'll have another disaster. Hopefully by the time that happens, someone will've claimed the X-Prize and we won't have to rely on this bloated bureaucracy and its flying death-traps.
Re:You wanted tax cuts. You got them (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't make such broad statements. Over half of Americans voted for Gore. Bush won the presidency, but I sure as hell didn't vote for him.
And a manned Mars expedition is not dangerous??? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not about the flight crews. (Score:3, Insightful)
Depressing! (Score:5, Insightful)
Here we are in 2004 and basically nothing new has happened with manned space exploration. It's depressing to think that it'll take until 2020 just to get back to the moon! Will humans even reach Mars in my lifetime now?
All those dollars wasted on blowing up Iraq that could've been put toward much grander goals in space!
I guess I need to start building a Mars transport in my garage since nobody else is going to bother.
Re:Science is not the point of space... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or at least I should say, science is not the main point. [snip] We need manned missions, because we need actual manned colinization of space, for a great number of reasons.
The problem with today's manned program is that it has the goal of employing people, rather than colonizing space or anything else high-minded. The politicians who approve major programs like the ISS view this as pork-barrel to get relatively well-paid jobs for their constituents. Haven't you ever wondered why NASA centers for manned flight are distributed across so many states (compared with the unmanned program, which is nearly all at JPL)? Is that any way to foster communication and engineer complex systems? The tragic reality is that the astronauts killed on the Shuttle were not heroes in any scientific or exploratory sense, but were really just innocent bystanders in all of this.
I predict the manned program at NASA will continue to flounder until there is real competition from other nations. Global warming and asteroid impacts just don't make politicians feel threatened, but you can bet this would change if for example the Chinese took real steps toward their stated goal of a colony on the moon.
The other way to rejuvenate manned spaceflight is to do it privately. If the space entrepreneurs out there can bootstrap a profitable use of space (say, tourism for wealthy individuals), then this changes the game completely and creates an economic marketplace that could lead toward large-scale colonization. But this is still many years away.
Re:Did anyone expect... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think the issue is actually cost here, the issue is that the shuttle is too unsafe to fly for any reason at all. Clearly if it is safe enough to fly thirty odd missions for the space station it is safe enough to do one mission to save Hubble.
If the issue is cost, it is not Bush behind it. Bush is not Reagan. Reagan cut spending to pay for his tax cuts. Bush has not cut anything, has not vetoed any bill however pork laden. The current plot is to have him veto the highways bill so he looks tough on spending safe in the knowledge he will be overridden.
Hubble is the biggest contribution NASA has made to science in the past decade. There is more science comes out of Hubble each week than will ever come out of the space station. If the issue was cash it would be because the NASA brass either think they can get Congress to pay for an extra mission to save Hubble or they are so committed to the space station they will defend it at all costs.
The Mars crap is an obvious canard, its the 'vision thing'. Like dressing Bush up in a flight suit and landing on the deck of the US Lincoln. It is a typical election pledge and you can tell it is bogus because there is no extra money in the budget to pay for it. The unreported part of the speech gave the end of life date for the shuttle.
The shuttle is not going to fly before the election. Karl Rove is not going to risk having it blow up on the launchpad and have Bush be blamed for an election stunt that cost others lives. To lose one shuttle is a misfortune, two...
So far the shuttle has cost 16 lives. Both disasters showed that the management had failled. The top priority after November is going to be executing Bin Laden and sorting out the CIA. Fixing NASA as well is not going to be ralistic.
Re:She was good while she lasted (Score:3, Insightful)
ISTM that you've missed the context for this discussion, which was a reply to a post bemoaning the fact that JWST isn't a suitable replacement for hubble because it lacks visible light capability. There are certainly good reasons to have space-based platforms for observing the non-visible spectrum--which is why NASA has other space telescopes beside HST and why it plans to launch JWST. None for those reasons have much to do with hubble, however.
Re:Hubble, space station, which is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mir. You know, that old space station? The one where people lived for over a year at a time, far longer than any ISS mission?
We already know what we need to know about the long-term effects of weightlessness. The ISS is worthless, simply providing a destination for the shuttle. With 2 crew members aboard, there's not even time for science - it takes 2 crew just to run the thing.
I agree with this article that the only thing worth bringing the shuttle out of retirement for is a Hubble servicing mission. The STS and ISS programs aren't fit to hold the Space Telescope's jock.
-Isaac
Re:Did anyone expect... (Score:1, Insightful)
This is why Democrats and Republicans are equally bad for the USA. They all do welfare, but only to those people they choose. There is no equity in a system that steals from any group to give it to another whether rich or poor or black or whatever. There is no justice in such a system. There were no Democrats nor Republicans when the USA was founded, look how little time it took for us to forget our roots in this country.
Re:Did anyone expect... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hubble, space station, which is it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Does the hubble really count as a space station? Or is the author implying that if the Hubble is dangerous, so is the ISS? Just what is the problem.
Hubble Space Telescope is the single most successful scientific instrument ever (measured by the usual "articles published" metric). If HST is to be pulled due its "uselessness", one must ask why not down ISS with its questionable scientific yields? HST is big time success, ISS is waste of money. Why they give up on Hubble is beyond me.
Re:science from Hubble (Score:3, Insightful)
Scientific research is the single best investment the human race has ever learned how to make. Our government alone has made so many truly bad investments over the years that when I see it make one that pays off so handsomely
While it is true that one cannot predict whether a given line of research will have practical application, it is also true that investment made by the human race in such activity has paid for itself many, many times over. Furthermore, the data acquired from the Hubble's years in space are affecting so many different disciplines that I have no doubt that it will also pay for itself, if it hasn't already. Get the big picture, my friend: there are many other government programs far more worthy of complaint than the Hubble Space Telescope.
year in iraq == ten years of NASA (Score:1, Insightful)
I'd fly on the shuttle (Score:5, Insightful)
If NASA called me up and said, we're going to launch you on the shuttle, are you willing to go. You have a 1 in 50 chance in being killed during the mission, but, you'll get to go to space if you live. I would bet there are easily 100,000 people that would do this. Astronauts know the risks they are taking, and, there are plenty of people willing to take those risks.
It's my understanding that we are going to return to the moon by having NASA join in the military on the costs of an updated EELV. The new Atlas and Delta rockets already can do payload into GEO and LEO orbits for less than a 1/10th cost of the shuttle.
Re:Did anyone expect... (Score:5, Insightful)
Dropping taxes on Joe six-pack increases his disposable income and his ability to consume. It provides more opportunities for entrepreneurs to open new businesses. If you have lots of money to invest but no buyers for your product, that money is not going to do you any good.
Re:science from Hubble (Score:3, Insightful)
There is also the fact that some things are simply too expensive to be easily done by the private sector, if at all. Your logic could easily be applied to the Interstate Highway System: that was a massive investment of tax dollars made by the Federal Government. And yet, it is still in use to this very day after half a century, indeed it makes our entire economic system possible. So no, I don't agree that the government should, under no circumstances, be allowed to invest our tax dollars in our future. The question is really one of: what investments should they be allowed to make on our behalf. Ideally, those should be ones that have the biggest potential payoff. The industrialization of space would be the greatest payoff in the history of Man, exceeding the discovery of the New World by orders of magnitude.
And it will likely turn out that the private sector isn't up to doing it on its' own, at least initially, which means that tax dollars will have to be used. On the other hand, it is also very likely that the private sector will make more efficient use of those dollars, particularly if a competitive environment is encouraged. We'll see.
Let's See the Analysis (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh, and it pains me that that O'Keefe had to take a Hubble mission off the manifest, as I have an astronomy degree.......
Re:safety issues (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you think the Europeans and Japanese are all that keen on the ISS program at this point? If the US backs out they might only be too pleased to do so as well.
Re:Did anyone expect... (Score:2, Insightful)
Simply because the poorer people will need to spend all of that extra money, creating extra jobs.
Give that same amount of money to a multi-millionare, and its just going to pad his bank account. Sure a small portion of it will be reinvested into the economy, but it will not create as many jobs as if all of that money was spent directly.
Re:You wanted tax cuts. You got them (Score:2, Insightful)
A missile defense shield will only start a new arms rage- China only has 20 missiles that can reach the US, and they are all liquid fueled, all of which can be easily stoped by a defense shield. This will force them to develop solid fueled missiles, and hundreds of them, to maintain the current strategic position. This will also force Russia, India, Pakastan, and any other aspiring world power to follow suit. Most physicists are sure that solid fueled missiles are impossible to defend against, so the net result will be a massive proliferation of nuclear technology with no added protection for the US.
And of course, as 9/11 showed, its not soverign nations with ICBM's that threaten the US, its underground terrorists organizations that do. If the hundreds of billions of dollars required for the system was spent on intellegence, homeland security, or NOT pissing off everyone else in the world, you'd be much safer than with a missile shield.
Of course, the missile defense shield never had anything to do with protecting citizens- its always been about extending the american hedgemony, giving it's leaders uncontested nuclear superiority.
Re:Hubble, space station, which is it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Did anyone expect... (Score:5, Insightful)
This might have been a valid argument in the past but it doesn't work well any more. Most of the big corporations and the wealthy who have capital are not investing it to create good jobs and have zero allegiance to creating jobs in the U.S. since off shoring and outsourcing became the norm. These days investors are always looking for the cheapest labor they can find, capable of doing the work, in order to maximize their profit. That is a fundemental law of capitalism. That is why the new market bubble, in the post dot com bubble era, is in any stock with a China connection, the largest pool of the cheapest labor.
Jobs and working people in the U.S. are doomed thanks to the advent of:
- cheap telecommunications
- cheap container ships
- massive illegal immigration
- free trade
Cheap container ships allowed moving manufacturing jobs to the cheapest labor market. When NAFTA was first signed manufacturing jobs fled to Mexico and Canada. But even Mexican labor was been undercut by even cheaper labor in China coupled with ever larger and more efficient container ships. When longshoreman were largely removed from unloading of ships, manufacturing jobs in the U.S. were doomed
Cheap telecommunications is doing the same thing to information worker jobs. It started out as call centers, labor intensive programming and is moving into all kinds of information jobs. Paralegal work is an example of the newest wave.
This leaves us with jobs that required a warm body be in the United States to do the job, picking crops, doing the nails of rich laides, etc. This was easily solved. Big business applied political pressure and the government simply stopped enforcing the integrity of borders and in employment. This resulted in many low end jobs going to illegals and massive downward pressure on wages for American's at the low end. Bush's new worker program is ultimately designed to drive down wages. In some respects driving down wages is essential for American competitiveness in the global economy. Problem is it will be ugly for working Americans.
It is a fact of life in the modern capitalist world that capital is going to flee to the cheapest labor market and you can't easily stop it.
The massive stimulus the Bush administration is applying to the economy is doing a few things but job creation in the U.S is not really on the list.
- it juiced the stock market by cutting taxes on dividends and capital gains. The stock market can go up in the current environment even if the underlying economy is not. Lots of ordinary people benefit from the stock market going up today, but it benefits the wealthy much more than the average investor because they know how to play the market and they tend to get lots of edges ordinary investors don't. Small investors were hurt much more severely in the last down turn than large investors.
- its infusing large amount of tax money into the wealthy and large corporations further creating the facade of a booming economy. The massive funds the Medicare "reform" bill is going to pump in to drug companies is a good example. The Energy bill that was voted down would have done the same thing for energy companies. They might create some jobs but they are mostly going to make wealthy the executives and large stock holders of these large corporations who are the benefactors of the Bush administation.
- Its pumped the economy, short term, to help insure the Bush administration is reelected in November at the price of a massive deficit that will haunt us forever. Its simply not sound economics and that is exemplified by the fact the dollar is plunging against the Euro and even the lowly Canadian dollar. Its so unprecedent that the IMF and World Bank, typically lap dogs of the U.S., are raising serious warning flags about the danger of the Bush administrations reckless fiscal policies.
Re:Hubble, space station, which is it? (Score:2, Insightful)
However there is one thing the article mentions that puts a flaw in this rather shaky logic, missions to the ISS are safer because the shuttle can be checked for problems and worked on there, unlike at Hubble.
Assuming that there are resources available to exam and repair the shuttle in orbit this might be an almost valid argument. Who exactly in orbit is qualified to fix the shuttle, and where to they get the tools and parts?