O'Keefe Under Fire for Hubble, ISS Decisions 498
chuckpeters writes "The battle over saving Hubble is just starting to heat up! The House Science Committee Democrats released their views and
estimates report. Recommendation number two was that
until Congress gets better information on the long term costs of Bush's
Moon/Mars initiative, NASA's 2005 funding requests should go to existing
programs. The House Science Committee has also decided that
they want to hear from outside experts on Bush's space initiative.
Just as Hubble isn't going quietly into the night, Bush's Moon/Mars plan
isn't going quickly into space!"
Re:Of Course (Score:1, Informative)
Sure, when the Superconducting Supercollider was killed during 1993, the President was roundly criticized...
Oh wait, when the SSC was killed, it was not Clinton, but Bush who was ridiculed in the media --- evidently because he had dared to support scientific research with tax dollars during his term in office.
Sorry, my bad!
Re:The Usefulness of HST (Score:5, Informative)
I am an astronomer. I do not want to see Hubble decommissioned, nor do I consider it useless. Nor does any astronomer I've talked to. Nor does the American Astronomical Society, the largest professional society of astrnomers. Your statement is simply absurd. HST time continues to be heavily oversubscribed, and numerous papers using HST data are produced daily.
Your argument seems to arise from HST having a planned succesor, JWST, which will be better in many, but not all, respects than HST. That does not make HST useless. Take a look at ground-based telescopes; despite the 10-meter Keck telescopes, the 5-meter Palomar telescope remains a very useful astronomical tool, and so does the 60-inch Palomar telescope, which was recently renovated and automated. HST would not become "useless" even if JWST existed today, and is sure as hell not "useless" with JWST years away.
SSC Cancellation (Score:4, Informative)
Re:O'Keefe (Score:5, Informative)
Well there is certainly military value in space, so that point is moot. Also the NASA budget DECREASED under Clinton a number of times and was actually lower when he left office than when he started( and this doesn't include inflation either) and this was during the prime years of the dot-com boom too where the government was rolling in money. Bush is INCREASING the total budget. Data is below:
1993 $14.309 billion, existing NASA budget when Clinton took office;
1994 $14.568 billion, $259 million increase, first Clinton budget;
1995 $13.853 billion, $715 million decrease;
1996 $13.885 billion, $32 million increase;
1997 $13.709 billion, $176 million decrease;
1998 $13.648 billion, $61 million decrease;
1999 $13.654 billion, $6 million increase;
2000 $13.601 billion, $53 million decrease;
2001 $14.253 billion, $652 million increase;
2002 $14.892 billion, $639 million increase, first Bush budget;
2003 $15.000 billion, $108 million increase (estimated);
2004 $15.469 billion, $469 million increase (proposed);
>and this new program simply isn't viable
Why? Not that I agree or disagree but this is a pretty sweeping statement to claim without backup. Which parts of the Moon and Mars plans are not viable? What do you like about the Hubble, and ISS which you would like spared? Give us details, not generalized Bush bashing.
-Comedian
Re:O'Keefe (Score:3, Informative)
Spacelaunch for orbital flight, or interplanetary missions is a WHOLE differnt game. And when you have to guarantee the safety of people who live in cities downrange from your launch site, or the people onboard the craft, you're talking about a huge testing infrastructure cost, that you can't really do without. X-Prize is doing without, because these are suborbital flights, without the liability involved of having a booster stage, or an out of control rocket coming down into a populated area.
"Privatization" isn't some magic voodoo formula that automatically saves money and produces quality products in 1 tenth the time. All it is is a massive simplification of the rules that prevent abuses in traditional government contractor agencies. Once you cut out that regulatory structure, yes, things are cheaper, and business runs more smoothly - and the potential for abuse and fraud is multiplied 100-fold.
Re:HERES THE ANSWER (Score:3, Informative)
No, I'm not kidding - because by introducing a relay satellite, you've significantly increased the chance of a very drastic failure. Bad enough the telescope itself might fail; now you risk a failure of the satellite, which renders a perfectly-operational lunar telescope perfectly useless.
Additionally, there's no benefit to having a telescope on the far side of the moon. The far and near sides of the moon both receive sunlight - the difference is that the far side never faces Earth.
Re:Too much "Safety" (Score:1, Informative)
Huh? As someone who worked at Space Telescope Science Institute, and monitored the telescope health and safety when they did the first servicing mission, I can tell you that they had truckloads of contingency plans. Going into such an endeavor *without* contingency plans and backups would truly be a foolhardy thing to do.
Re:All the intelligent analysis is arth-bound anyw (Score:2, Informative)
Harrison H. Schmitt [nasa.gov]. Although he might be pushing the age limit a bit for a Mars mission ;) And of course, many of the astronauts that have worked on the ISS are scientists. Prominent? Maybe not, but definately qualified.
Re:Where have I heard this before? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes [nw.net]
they [marsinstitute.info]
certainly [nasa.gov]
have. [amazon.com]
Not just pie in the sky stuff either but detailed plans by experts with proven technology. Read up on it and you'll realize the only thing keeping humans off of Mars is politics.
Re:Get rid of hubble (Score:3, Informative)
How on Earth did this get modded as insightful? This is absolutely 100% wrong. Go to the Astrophysical Journal or the Astronomical Journal for the last 5 years and count how many citations have Hubble data in them compared to any other telescope and you will find that Hubble has been one of the most productive telescopes ever built.
Other telescopes can do some of the things that Hubble can do, but no telescope can do everything it can do. Yes, all of you have heard of adaptive optics. Wonderful. You know that ground-based telescopes can now make images almost as sharp as Hubble. However, if anyone would bother to actually try and understand how AO works compared to HST, you would find out that no ground-based AO system can compete with what Hubble can do on a number of fronts -- they can never detect UV radiation, the field of view is tiny, and doing precise photometry on an AO image is almost impossible.
Re:Hubble being replaced by better telescope (Score:3, Informative)
Even worse, without the Hubble SM4 repair missions, the Hubble could be non-operation as soon as this year. They're hoping to stretch it out to 2007 but that still leaves a *5* year gap with no wide field UV/optical/IR telescope. The SM4 mission is supposed to get the Hubble running out to 2010 which would allow it to overlap the Webb telescope if we're careful. The Webb isn't a good Hubble replacement but better than nothing. As far as replacing the UV/visible cabailities of the Hubble, a replacement telescope isn't even on the *drawing board* yet.
To make things even better, when the Hubble loses control, it will start tunbmling and basically make repairs impossible. Furthermore, at that point, we won't be able to control the Hubble deorbit. The Hubble is big enough to have large pieces of debris hit the ground and the orbital plane goes over some densely populated areas. So, unless we want to play 'Pin the Hubble on the City', we've got to send SOMETHING up to bring it out of orbit in a controlled manner.
Re:you don't know (Score:3, Informative)
The original wavelengths ARE known. Every piece of observation evidence ever collected supports the idea that the laws of physics that regulate spectral emission have not changed at any point in the visible history of the universe. Those spectral lines are very well known and very accurate. By looking how a particular hydrogen line has redshifted, you immediately know what the redshift is to a great deal of accuracy. The uncertainty has been determining the distance to an object. Unless you have something like a class 1a supernova to use as an absolute distance gauge, you know the object's speed but not distance. The determination of an accurate Hubble constant require both values.
Again, the dark era is pretty damned certain. We know that the universe is expanding away from us. This implies that the visible matter of the universe was once much more compact and dense. Therefore, it simply a matter of back extrapolation to calculate the density of the matter at a given point in time. The dark era is simply when the density of matter would have caused enough light-matter interaction to ionize bulk interstellar gas, making it impermeable to light. There is nothing controversial or speculative about this - the microwave background radiation we can observe is a direct image of this plasma. Optical observations haven't been able to see back to that point yet but we're getting close.
I guess that if you posit that the Big Bang didn't happen and that the universe isn't expanding that it is possible the dark era didn't happen but otherwise, it is a forgone conclusion. There are still some theories like 'lazy light' and alternate gravitational behaviour that are competitors to the Big Bang but they are matching actual data even more poorly as time goes along. Mostly, astrophysicists argue over details on the Big Bang theory these days. Very little serious effort is given to alternate theories since the Big Bang theory fits the data so much better than everything else.
Also, you've completely missed my point. We aren't sitting around and looking at pretty pictures - this is serious science, some of which - like studying interstellar plasma behavior may have practical benefits to building the very space infrastructure you talk about. Cancelling the Hubble will have almost no positive effect upon building a space infrastructure but it WILL have a major negative effect on scientific studies.
I wholeheartedly support robotic and manned missions to Mars and other planets to get hands on sample to work with. However, we have learned FAR more about the solar system and the universe and physics from remote observational tools like Hubble than all the the planetary landers and moon landings put together. Hell, most of the data we have on Mars comes from remote imaging just like what Hubble does.
Further, insisting upon some nebulous, huge space infrastructure is necessary to get to Mars is false. The Mars Direct plan by Zubrin, while having some flaws, demonstrates that you need little to no infrastructure to get to Mars. Big lunar mines make no sense in terms of orbital energetics. It's as if the settlers of the old West had waited for the US government to build a freeway system to be built before heading out. IF that had been the case, the US would still be stranded at the Mississippi river and the native Americans would probably have been much better happier.
If we want to go to Mars, we should go to Mars. If we want to build space telescopes, we should build htem on the ground and launch them. If we just go to Mars and start making colonies, we will eventually build the space infrastructure you talk about as it becomes necessary. There is no way that taxpayers will invest in the infrastructure first and then go - the Shuttle is a prime example of what happens when you start working that way.
Mars FAQs (Score:3, Informative)