Astronauts, Robots to Save Hubble 213
BungoMan85 writes "Astronauts who serviced the Hubble Space Telescope, among others, feel that NASA's administrator Sean O'Keefe shouldn't be too quick to abandon the now 14 year old space telescope because of safety concerns arising from the Columbia disaster." And an anonymous reader writes "At the insistance of congress, NASA is looking for a way to save the Hubble. "It's the most unpopular decision I could have made," Sean O'Keefe said of his decision to cancel the shuttle mission planned to fix Hubble. He has authorized his engineers to pursue the possiblity of a robotic rescue mission. This could be a great opportunity for private industry contractors."
Why is everyone suddenly so eager to save Hubble? (Score:2, Insightful)
Or is this really about hating Bush's attempt to bring a man to Mars, and undermining it anyway possible just because he's Bush? I can't see why people are suddenly spendthrift when a Republican president wants to do something, but we can spend billions on welfare and hike taxes up to strangulating levels without anyone complaining under a Democrat.
I would have to agree... (Score:1, Insightful)
scared (Score:3, Insightful)
people have been saying that tehse shuttles are unsafe for years http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystor
How about the Russians? (Score:4, Insightful)
They seem to have manned launch technology available with a decent reliability and safety record.
It may well be cheaper that it would cost to do it ourselves, as well. Outsourcing, right?
Plan all along? (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Scrap really popular program.
2) Get everyone yelling to bring it back
3) Say you can't unless because you lack the budget
4) Profit!!
Because Republicans create huge deficits???? (Score:-1, Insightful)
Just a guess.
Re:Why is everyone suddenly so eager to save Hubbl (Score:5, Insightful)
Risk factors?... (Score:5, Insightful)
The risk factors haven't changed, those running the space program have always known the risks. It's not like Columbia's terrible accident made those in charge suddenly go "oh, maybe this space stuff is dangerous after all..."
It's not the risk factors that have changed, it's the public's view of the risks that have changed.
Re:I would have to agree... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you have *any* basis for a claim like this, other than "your gut feeling"?
14 years is a long time, around 10 iterations of the "performance doubling every 12-18 months" if you're talking about computer technology. But optical technology has been stable for quite some time. Or, do also claim to have binoculars 512x-1024x better than your dad's?
Remember, Hubble is not a computer - it's a telescope. And, since image processing is done on the ground, advances in computer technology are likely largely irrelevant to the Hubble.
Re:Why is everyone suddenly so eager to save Hubbl (Score:5, Insightful)
And, the additional Hubble instruments have already been built and are just waiting to be launched!
Re:I would have to agree... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, we have much better technology now to make a lighter, cheaper telescope with a much better eyesight, but nothing can escape the allure of those awesome pictures Hubble has returned to us. Since Webb is looking to be more like an infrared telescope, Hubble's the only imaging device we will have to take pictures like these..
Re:How about the Russians? (Score:4, Insightful)
They seem to have manned launch technology available with a decent reliability and safety record.
Yes, they do have a decent reliability and safety record.
Unfortunately, what they don't have is a space shuttle for transporting the components that need to be replaced.
Re:Why is everyone suddenly so eager to save Hubbl (Score:5, Insightful)
Politics aside, we've made an investment. 15 years of a working Hubble telescope. That time runs out next year and we're still a solid 6 years behind on a solid replacement (which, is still questionable, since everything I read tells me it is planned to be like the Spitzer telescope and take pictures in Infrared). We also made the investment on 200 Million USD on upgrades to Hubble. 200 Million dollars is a lot of money to put towards something that can probably never be used with any other piece of equipment except Hubble, and not put it to use.
And I don't buy this Bullshit O'Queef is selling us about the worries of the shuttles. They're operable as is already, and what happened on Columbia was a freak accident that nobody thought to try to explain until it was too late. Maybe the money that could be going to building these "robots" could instead be used to build a wing crawler, to crawl out and service the underbelly of the Shuttle in case of such a disaster.
Re:I would have to agree... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Uh huh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I would have to agree... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because something is old, in no way makes it obsolete.. We still use virtually the same aircraft since the 1980's, the Boeing 737 and 747 have been obsoleted many times over by the 777 and other new aircraft, but the 737's and 747's are still in constant usage. Why? Expense and Risk Management. It's simply cheaper to use and maintain a working platform, than to build a new one and have it fail in some catastrophic way nobody could have planned for.
When Hubble was first launched, the disaster struck and it couldn't take pictures correctly, it taught us how to repair it, and since then, maintainance has been a breeze. Something tells me new telescopes will be prone to lots of problems like this, especially with the new ideas of building cheap and launching cheap that NASA's subscribed to.
Wrongheaded policy (Score:5, Insightful)
Chances are, if we crash it, we'll never get another. I'm getting old, I want to see some of those ancient mysteries of space solved in my lifetime.
Re:Why is everyone suddenly so eager to save Hubbl (Score:5, Insightful)
As time passes, especially after a SNAFU [space.com] or a poorly executed Let's Go To Mars! speech, the public's perceived value of NASA falls. Everyone's talkin' trash, saying "Why do we need to spend billions to develop a pen that can write upside down when people are starving?" and the like.
However, if the government, unprovoked, says "Hey everybody, we're going to disintigrate the Hubble and how do you like that" then the people apparently have the opposite reaction. Most people do not know anything about the Hubble other than it's a Good Thing. What a shame it would be to destroy it! So, by announcing plans to toss the Hubble in the garbage, NASA effectively primed the public to be willing to spend more dollars on space-related stuff.
Eh... (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno. I suppose I'm still bitter about the whole Columbia thing. Millions of people who a week ago didn't know of either the mission or the astronouts on the flight suddenly took it upon themselves to be morally outraged. The astronouts became greater heroes in death rather than life, and even then only to the masses who two months down the line wouldn't be able to remember a single, solitary name.
Re:Why is everyone suddenly so eager to save Hubbl (Score:1, Insightful)
Pardon me while I raise my hand (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why is everyone suddenly so eager to save Hubbl (Score:1, Insightful)
They allocated only a small token amount, enough to get the press for supporting this "bold initiative", but nowhere near enough to really accomplish such a mission (or enough to materially effect the budget).
This was the same thing as the Anti-Gay Marriage Constitutional amendment.. They know it has no chance of actually getting passed, but they throw it around to gain support from the fuckwits on election day.
Sort of like the crusade against steroids kicked off in the state of the union address. Yeah, we're in an unpopular war with more soldiers being killed, and we have the threat of terrorism... but what we really need is the fucking president to take a stand against steroids! Bringing down a wealthy black man like Barry Bonds should really secure Bush's power base.
"Mission Accomplished"?
"Bring 'em On"?
STFU!
The diffrence between responsibility and derring d (Score:5, Insightful)
We have three shuttles left out of five (which means that we can only do 3/5 of the mission flights we had planned to do every year), we have much more hardware for ISS, which is even more expensive then the repair and replacement parts for Hubble, sitting around in Florida. We have numerous international treaty commitments to our partners, many of whom are supposed to be paid with flight time on ISS for their contributions, which have to be honored. And after the Columbia boards recommendations any NASA administrator that decided to still go ahead with shuttle mission, at those orbital parameters, would be putting himself out on a very long limb, far, far above the ground, and inviting old man Murphy to come along with a saw. Commonsense says "Sorry, but this is a bridge to far." Understand that the game is changed. We got burned once, thought we had learned our mistakes, fixed the obvious problems we saw and went back to flying it. Now we've been burned again, and a LOT of the reasons sound hauntingly familiar. Well fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. NASA manned flight has suddenly gotten VERY, VERY RISK ADVERSE. The idea that "Oh well we fixed these problems, now it's all better" suddenly sounds like a lot of Pollyannaish nonsense. NASA will do what it must with the shuttles, but it will hold its collective breath every time it launches one from now on. Safety is no longer our watchword; it's the ONLY damn thing I hear about nowadays. Congress might vote to override O'Keefe, if they do then on their heads be it. If they do then they better get ready to collectively resign if anything goes wrong, and they better have the letters to the families written in advance, just in case, cause that's what Shawn O'Keefe would have to do if he had made the decision and it went pants, as the Brits say. Those who are so quick to judge aren't the people that will have to explain it to the president, congress, the families, and the general public, until they are, they can darn well be a lot less dogmatic about this. And that's my view for whatever it's worth.
Re:Why is everyone suddenly so eager to save Hubbl (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are asking that question honestly, then its obvious to the scientists among us that you have little or no appreciation for the information that this great instrument has brought us, and will continue to bring us for quite some time if its maintained. That instrument has single-handedly multiplied our knowledge of the universe we live in by a factor of at least 100, and refined some of our +- 50% guesses down to +- 5%, simply by being beyond the reach of the limitations in optical bandwidth that our planets atmosphere places on all the ground based scopes. Its done things that all the active optical stuff we've put on mountains so high that they are run by remote control still couldn't do.
The "next generation" telescope everyone is drooling over is designed to do an entirely different job, and is in no way capable of overlapping what the Hubble can do in the visible and near infrared spectrum. And it will be like the Hubble in terms of delays, so I don't see it going up in my remaining lifetime since I'm 69 now. Yes, it will also do good science when it goes up, but it cannot do what the Hubble is doing in the wavelength range between visible light and near infrared, say an octave either way from yellow/green as our eyes see color. IIRC its designed to work in the far infrared and into the microwave, where its resolution at best will be 1/10th that of the Hubble. But it will see thru dust clouds the Hubble can't too. We won't know what the region around Sag A really looks like until it does go up, Sag A IIRC, is supposedly very near if not the black hole this galaxy spins around.
As far as a manned mission to mars is concerned, thats where I feel that the remoteness and generally inhospitable conditions which combine to make it a one way trip preclude using anything but prisoners already sentenced to death for such a mission.
Considering the intelligence level of someone dumb enough to have gotten themselves in such a predicament in the first place, I'm not too sure that we would gain much in the way of scientific knowledge by following that distastefull to many path.
I look at it as political posturing, an attempt at giving NASA a "reason de terre", as opposed to fireing that whole bunch and starting all over again. Thats something we should have done when the first one blew up. This new shuttle loss just confirms that the old boy network that covers their ass MOST of the time by sheer luck alone, is still in place.
Human nature being what it is, I'm not even 75% sure that a total housecleaning would even fix it now. But I think a wholesale fireing, and maybe even a highly public manslaughter prosecution of the decision maker who passed on the loose foam problem might have a sobering effect on all the pie in the sky folks NASA seems to have collected down thru the decades. Nobody learned anything about common sense safety after the fire in Houston (and the test admin who ordered that test should have been prosecuted for murder) nor from Apollo 13 when there was a clear indication of a problem with the tank heaters thermostat before they launched, the only thing actually fixed was the booster seals after the late 80's blowup, and this time the loose foam was known, and had been known for at least the last 20 launches, possibly for much more time than that. But nobody has stepped forward to actually admit that doing the launch was a bad idea, "after all, it hasn't been a problem before now, why should this time be any different?"
IMO that attitude will not change until someone actually does some hard time. The agency needs the same accountability as you and I would get in a prosecution for no less than manslaughter in 3 of these 4 "accidents".
Cheers, Gene
wouldnt be able to limp back to ISS ? (Score:3, Insightful)
be able to get to the ISS which is in an entirely different orbit?
presumably a fuel issue?
so they want to waste money researching and perhaps building
an untested robotic system, and then *launch that*.
couldn't they devise a method for using a soyuz to propel
a shuttle to the ISS. then launch at same time (or have ready
to launch) a soyuz? (or if the soyuz has the room, simply
take the shuttle astronuats home directly.)
surely paying the russians for a soyuz launch is cheaper
than a robotic development program that probably wont
do as well as human repairmen? and infusing money into
the russian space program may not be such a bad idea anyway.
oh wait, cant have other countries helping, that would be
just plain un-american. much less embarassing to abandon
useful technology.
oh well.
Hubble and Skylab (Score:5, Insightful)
How many times was it delayed and scaled back?
Do you honestly think that this new telescope will actually launch in 2012? It won't even be fully designed by then. The Hubble is not some old, obsolete piece of equipment. It's the best we've ever had, and will still be the best at what it does, even if the Webb telescope goes as planned.
The Webb telescope only sees infrared. It can't see what the Hubble can and never will. There will be no pictures from the Webb that can show what the human eye can see. The Webb telescope is intended to augment Hubble, not replace it.
Accounting for the alternatives (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe the EU could chip in the money and resources instead of launching a redundant GPS system of satellites?
Re:Accounting for the alternatives (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why is everyone suddenly so eager to save Hubbl (Score:3, Insightful)
This is why your analogy is bad. The point is that it is not a small investment. NASA would have to violate the recommendations of the CAIB report for safety, actually create known unsafe conditions, and risk the entire shuttle (and ISS) program just to keep the Hubble alive. This is most definitely not a small investment.
But is it worth the substantial risk? I'm not sure. I'd need to know more about what progress can be achieved in the few years between Hubble's planned shutdown and James Webb coming online. Would this loss put science decades behind in progress, or just a few years? It's something the whole community (NASA, astronomers, Congress, public) would have to decide, with promises not to shut down NASA programs if things go awry.
Re:How about the Russians? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nor is there module capable of 'grabbing' the telescope, and has no airlock so even if they did they wouldn't be able to leave the module.
I think the module that would be capable of grabbing the telescope is called a 'man'. Not sure what the name is in Russian. I suspect they could also come up with a technology called a 'tether' or maybe a 'bar' that could be used to attach the telescope and the Russian craft together in orbit.
And why would an airlock be necessary? That's not how they did EVA with the Apollo. Just vent the atmosphere in the capsule and open the door.
Maybe this discussion is indicative of the mental problem that got us to where we are with the shuttle?
Sometimes simpler is just better.
Re:Why is everyone suddenly so eager to save Hubbl (Score:2, Insightful)
It's more like you have that $4000 bill to fix the truck, and while you can buy a new truck for $4000, you can't take delivery for a few years.
So, either you're without a truck, or you suck it up and spend the money to fix it in the mean time, while ordering that other truck.
Re:Why is everyone suddenly so eager to save Hubbl (Score:3, Insightful)