Senator Calls on NASA to Service Hubble 322
Avantare writes "Senator Calls on NASA to Service Hubble
In a sternly worded letter to acting NASA Administrator Frederick D. Gregory, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said she expects the U.S. space agency to heed the will of the Congress and keep preparations for a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission on track.
Congress, in passing an omnibus spending bill late last year, directed NASA to set aside $291 million of its 2005 budget to spend planning and preparing for a servicing mission to Hubble by 2008. When NASA informed Congress just weeks later that it intended to spend only $175 million of that amount on the Hubble repair effort, some saw the move as an indication that the agency was preparing to abandon plans to service Hubble robotically and rely instead on a space shuttle crew to fix the telescope."
Excellent News! (Score:5, Insightful)
These mumblings about robotic repair sound like a whiny way of getting out of doing the job. If you'll pardon my French, "Just launch the damn space shuttle and fix the bloody thing!" It's not that hard, and I'm sure there's no shortage of qualified volunteers. Do I hear an Amen?!?
Re:Excellent News! (Score:2)
Understanding risk (Score:5, Informative)
The problems is not that they are more dangrerous now. They have always been this dangerous. It is just that now the danger is better understood. Ignoring risk does not make it go away.
That said, I am not against using a manned (sorry, crewed) mission to repair the Hubble if that is the best option. In any case, the risks needed to be understood, reduced as much as possible and accepted or rejected; not just ignored.
Re:Understanding risk (Score:5, Insightful)
As I said, there's no shortage of volunteers who fully understand the risks they are taking. So fly the damn space shuttle for something USEFUL, and keep our bird in the air.
You can't take the sky from me...
Re:Understanding risk (Score:4, Interesting)
And if we can't get them home, they carry 150mg doses of KCn to make things easier in the end. No doubt, astronauts fully understand what they are getting into: a personal sacrifice in the name of science.
Re:Understanding risk (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Excellent News! (Score:3, Informative)
Senator Barb, duchess of the pork barrel (Score:2)
Barb's #1 legislative priority is Maryland jobs. If a proposal has impact on local employment, she will vote accordingly. Only if the bill is relatively job-neutral will she consider other factors (good of the nation, desires of constituents, party philosophy, etc).
For example, up until a few months ago when GM finally closed the AstroVan factory,
Re:Senator Barb, duchess of the pork barrel (Score:2)
Says who? They still represent a state, and will generally do anything that benefits that state, even if it is against their party ideology. This is nothing new, and certainly not unique to Mikulski.
Re:Senator Barb, duchess of the pork barrel (Score:2)
Says the Founding Fathers [about.com]. The whole point of the House/Senate duality was to prevent fickle desires from quickly becoming law when the greater national interest is not being served.
Re:Senator Barb, duchess of the pork barrel (Score:2)
Re:Excellent News! (Score:2)
It is easy to be for something when you don't consider what you have to give up to make it happen.
Re:Excellent News! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Excellent News! (Score:5, Informative)
This is only a problem if you want to return HST safely to the ground in a Shuttle cargo hold. As you say, there is no longer a shuttle in which it will fit, because the external airlock for ISS makes the bay too short.
However, for a repair mission, HST does not have to fit in the cargo bay; it is mounted inside the bay sticking straight up out of it [www.cnes.fr].
Re:Excellent News! (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, this has nothing to do with the fact that NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is located in Mikulski's district. I'm sure she'd support a Hubble repair mission even if that wasn't the case...
Re:Excellent News! (Score:3, Insightful)
She has been in the forefront of defending NASA
from the pinhead bean-counters in the past. I
sure hope she is successful once again.
Regarding the SSTs (Shuttle Space Transports):
NASA changed the formulation of the insulation
on the external tanks, which made the ablative
foam insulation dangerous. The original formula
was environmentally "unfriendly" since it used
CFCs. Losing a shuttle and crew during reentry
was also environmentally "unfriendly". NASA
management
I see your bullshit and raise you a horseshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Dumbshit.
(No, I don't think you're a dumbshit. It just fit the fecal theme of this post.)
Re:I see your bullshit and raise you a horseshit (Score:2)
Re:I see your bullshit and raise you a horseshit (Score:3, Informative)
1. New version won't be ready for many years.
2. We are going to have to send a manned or robotic mission to saftly deorbit the satallie.
3. Cost of fixing hubble - cost we are going to have to spend to deorbit hubble is fairly low and I believe less than new version.
Re:I see your bullshit and raise you a horseshit (Score:2)
Because the energy requirements to do something like that are very high.
They'd have to build sattelites which had a whole lot of their weight taken up by fuel and/or propulsion equipment. That weight contrtibutes to the cost of raising the sattelite in th
Re:I see your bullshit and raise you a horseshit (Score:2)
As far as a gap period... yes, we would have a gap period. I somehow doubt, though, that in a multi-billion year old universe, that having a three or four year gap is going to lose data.
Yes, it would suck not having data coming in. But I would rather see the money go into building something with a wider wavelength capability, and with a longe
Re:I see your bullshit and raise you a horseshit (Score:3, Interesting)
A four year delay does not seem that bad but its effect is culminative. Where we are now in terms of understanding what is out there and what we are doing out there is further pushed back. The 60's seemed to be the decade of exploration and learning. We should be on the moon or mars by now, issues such as political games and money have already delayed our advancement. This delay would only add more to the pile of 30 years already accrewed.
However this delay is never seen nor tangible... thus pushed as
Re:I see your bullshit and raise you a horseshit (Score:2)
the problem is that with the war, there is no money to do either. and that is the politicians.
Re:I see your bullshit and raise you a horseshit (Score:2)
Re:Excellent News! (Score:3, Interesting)
Repairing means going up there and attaching stuff to it.
We already have repairs mapped out and upgrades built. if we're going to go up there and attach stuff to it, we might as well not be entirely destructive about it...
Re:Excellent News! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Excellent News! (Score:3, Insightful)
Apollo, at its peak, was using about 0.75% of our nation's *entire GDP* (not government funding, but GDP). In today's dollars, that's over 80 billion a year. Even with the tech advances since Apollo and the experience gained from it, getting t
Re:Excellent News! (Score:2)
Re:Excellent News! (Score:3, Insightful)
Mind you, I'm not of the type that believes that NASA should just use conventional off-the-shelf techno
Re:Excellent News! (Score:3)
I guess it all boils down to the single fact that NASA has be
Re:Excellent News! (Score:4, Interesting)
I think that would be a nice incentive system. If the same company doing the building is the one who is going to be operating the craft, they have a strong motivation to, during the design phase, keep later operating costs down instead of just "building to the spec" and "trying to make it look nice on paper".
The lower the operating costs, the bigger the demand, and consequently the more likely that private companies will start spending their *own* money on rocketry. Which is what we all want to see here
Re:Excellent News! (Score:2)
I don't see this as being very much different from edging into any new mar
Re:Excellent News! (Score:3, Informative)
You're confused. There is no "Mars Exploration Vision". There isn't even a Mars plan beyond "that's what we do after we get to the moon". What there *was* was the "Orbital Space Plane" project. The OSP started as a shuttle replacement program, but was quickly killed when it was realized that a spaceplane wasn't the most useful, reliable, and reusable craft we could build with current technology.
As a result, Bush
There is a better option (Score:5, Interesting)
From an article in Discover Magazine [discover.com]
Also see the John Hopkins Newsletter [jhunewsletter.com].
Re:There is a better option (Score:5, Funny)
Re:There is a better option (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There is a better option (Score:2)
Building a new Hubble would also allow for things that w
Re:There is a better option (Score:2)
Well, actually a "Hubble Lite", if it could be sent up in the near future is probably a lot better than waiting for NASA to come up with a new telescope. NASA has a history of delaying by amazing lengths of time important projects. For example, even now it doesn't hav
Re:There is a better option (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, NASA almost never builds straight replacement instruments. They are always focused on something new. JWST will not replace Hubble by any means. In fact, if both were up at the same time (sustained, not about-to-be-junk), the amount of additional science able to come from their complementary instrumentation should be reason alone to keep Hubble strong until it launches.
Astronomy in the ultraviolet is all but mothballed for a decade if one of the instruments (Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, COS) slated for installation in Hubble does not make it to orbit somehow. The only functioning instrument right now is GALEX [caltech.edu], an imaging experiment.
However, when we obtain spectra, the ultraviolet, more than any other waveband, gives us tremendous direct information about the atomic composition of many astronomical objects. (Molecules are best studied in the radio part of the spectrum. Solid particles [e.g. dust] in the infrared).
JWST will not fill this gap. It will be a great loss and put a halt to a wealth of knowledge gained from ultraviolet spectroscopy that began [nasa.gov] about three decades ago.
Re:There is a better option (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There is a better option (Score:2)
Any orbital device is just a platform anyway. They can build it in such a way that any number of devices could be mounted on it.
Now as far as dumping the Hubble into the ocean. The the ones screaming the loudest in the science community are the ones that either have a guarenteed time slot for the Hubble or are awaiting their turn and haven't gotten it yet. A new probe would potentially disrupt their cozy little situation and force them to compete for the opportunity to use the new probe or loose
Cool (Score:2)
Re:Cool (Score:3, Interesting)
I want to know why... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I want to know why... (Score:2, Informative)
I believe that was summarized in one of the previous stories about Hubble on Slashdot.
Re:I want to know why... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I want to know why... (Score:2)
Granted, it's not like having the old mill shut down and put several thousand workers out on the street, but no doubt a number of high paying jobs will be lost or moved. Also prestige and tourism that comes from it are affected.
That said, as a Democrat, I have a bit more tolerance for spending taxpayer money on scientific research than most of my Republican friends. Not all of them mind you, but most.
Re:I want to know why... (Score:2)
*Gasp* It's her constituents! How dare they!
Re:I want to know why... (Score:2)
Worth Remembering Mikulski's Motives (Score:5, Interesting)
And for those who argue that repairing Hubble now is no riskier than in the past, you're missing the point. Every Shuttle flight is risky and Hubble repair missions are even riskier because rendevousing with Hubble means no chance of taking reguge at the ISS and slim to zero chance of rescue by a second Shuttle.
Loss of a Shuttle during a Hubble repair mission would have political repercussions that woujld likely kill the Shuttle program and, possibly, kill any further crewed spaceflight of any kind. The Hubble is a nice tool, but the purpose of space travel is to put people there, not to do science. Fixing it isn't worth the risk.
Re:Worth Remembering Mikulski's Motives (Score:5, Interesting)
Another poster addressed that point here [slashdot.org].
And for those who argue that repairing Hubble now is no riskier than in the past, you're missing the point. Every Shuttle flight is risky and Hubble repair missions are even riskier because rendevousing with Hubble means no chance of taking reguge at the ISS and slim to zero chance of rescue by a second Shuttle.
The Shuttles were designed with hot-standby in mind. If the powers that be are THAT worried (which I'm not, we've done this several times before without incident) then get a second, unfueled shuttle on the pad. If something goes wrong, you have a day or two of turnaround. If everything goes fine, then the second shuttle will complete the next mission (probably IIS work). If possible, use the Endevour for servicing the Hubble. Not only is it newer and a bit sturdier, but it carries the extended mission, life support equipment just in case the astronauts have to cool their heels for a week or two while waiting for a rescue.
Loss of a Shuttle during a Hubble repair mission would have political repercussions that woujld likely kill the Shuttle program and, possibly, kill any further crewed spaceflight of any kind.
As sad as I am about it, the shuttle is dead. I see little chance that it will be flying for much longer. My only hope is that it hangs on long enough to push for the new launch technologies.
Re:Worth Remembering Mikulski's Motives (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you please explain to me why a Senator representing her constituants who, like most of us, want jobs, is a BAD thing? Isn't that why they're elected, to represent their constituants?
"Every Shuttle flight is risky"
Sure, just like every airplane landing is risky, just like crossing the street is risky. Most of them are former test pilots, so you'll have a hard time convincing me that the astronauts aren't willing to accept those risks. The fact that it's risky doesn't mean it istn't worth it.
Not to mention that the safety record of shuttle flights far exceeds what was expected. I remember NASA saying when Challenger blew up that we were very overdue for just such an incident, and it was a fluke that one hadn't happened sooner. Not to say that more shuttles should blow up, but the safety record of shuttle flights is exemplary.
"but the purpose of space travel is to put people there, not to do science."
Why must there be only one purpose for space travel? And what exactly do you think these "people" we "put there" are going to do, sit around and play pinochle? No, the people that went to the moon did science once they got there. So will the people we eventually send to Mars. Scientific research is a very valid purpose for space flight.
Re:Worth Remembering Mikulski's Motives (Score:3, Funny)
I propose an ongoing ISS experiment testing the effects of freefall on pinochle games.
Re:Worth Remembering Mikulski's Motives (Score:2)
Compared to what? So far, the Shuttle has killed 14 people in two crashes. Apollo lost three people in a ground test, of course, but nobody in flight. Mercury and Gemini never lost any. Soyuz had two fatal accidents, killing four people.
Re:Worth Remembering Mikulski's Motives (Score:2)
Your memory is faulty (Score:2)
Not to mention that the safety record of shuttle flights far exceeds what was expected. I remember NASA saying when Challenger blew up that we were very overdue for just such an incident, and it was a fluke that one hadn't happened sooner. Not to say that more shuttles should blow up, but the safety record of shuttle flights is exemplary.
Your memory is faulty. According to the Rogers Commission Report on the Challenger accident, NASA estimates on shuttle loss of vehicle/loss of life failure rate ranged
Your math is faulty (Score:2)
But my memory might well be faulty, I was 11 at the time.
Local interest: STSI (Score:4, Informative)
That's what representatives of any sort do: they fight for their local interests. If they didn't do that, the voters would elect somebody who did. Unfortunately, without a fixed budget cap, that generally means deals of the form "You vote for my thing, so I'll vote for your thing, and the only one who loses is the guy who eventually has to pay off the debt."
So while I like Ms. Mikulski, and I support the "measly" few dozens of millions of dollars it would take to keep getting great science from Hubble, I thought a bit of disclosure would be appropriate.
Re:Local interest: STSI (Score:2)
And as for the servicing...I'm willing to bet $100 that any attempt to a robotic rescue mission would fail. It's really hard to unscrew 100s of bolts in space. And the HST needs a deorbit module anyway.
So if we are to service the HST, my recommendation is to (1) design and complete a deorbit module right away, (2) complete the dev
Re:Local interest: STSI (Score:2)
And while I'm a huge fan of the Big Questions that the Hubble helps answer, those are questions we've been pursuing for five thousand years. They're not imperative, the way AIDS and cancer are. You'll learn more about
Re:Local interest: STSI (Score:2)
And the exit plan for the Hubble was to bring it back on earth with the Columbia. There was a concern that the landing gears may not hold up with all the
additional weight of the HST, but we were pretty sure that that was what NASA wanted to do.
it's not about that (Score:4, Insightful)
it's not about whether robots or humans are used. it's about the hubble being a piece of crap that needs to be replaced in order for us to move forward. the hubble is obsolete because of the fact that there are cheaper and better telescope projects out there that should be initiated. some of those programs are mentioned here on
it's a wonder that we haven't listened to the independant experts and just thrownit out to lagrange point to work as long as it can.
i really feel like NASA needs to let this one die so we can move forward.
Really? (Score:3)
Well, maybe I'm biased being an astronomer and all, but with Hubble data being used in about 1 out of 2-3 papers I read, mentioned in about a similar number of talks, and proposed to by about 1/2 the astronomers I know at least every other year, I think (well, really I know) a lot of us "non-experts" would be happy to have the money spent to continue the "piece of crap".
But what do I know. I don't work f
Follow the Money (Score:2, Insightful)
I support the Hubble and think that we should fix it, but remember to follow the money as well. She has a lot of her voters that depend on Hubble for their paycheck.
Re:Follow the Money (Score:2)
Well, (Score:2)
But in the interest of full disclosure, I do have a copy of the Hubble Deep Field as desktop wallpaper, and probably will have other, future Hubble images there, so by your standards I guess i venality accounts for my position.
Pork Barrel alert! (Score:3, Insightful)
contact with the Pioneer spavce probes. It has taken
30 years for them to get there, and now, when
they are at the edge of the solar system is where
the scientifically interesting data can be found.
Don't drop the ball!
Re:Pork Barrel alert! (Score:2)
Buying time on Hubble (Score:4, Informative)
After repair, the telescope has six gyroscopes (used for pointing and stabilising the device, without any messy reaction mass involved), and it needed at least three to point accurately. There are currently only four working ones left - they're somewhat unreliable.
However, a way of pointing the telescope with just two working gyroscopes [newscientist.com] has been tested recently, which should extend the lifespan a little - possibly until 2008. I still doubt that a full-scale repair mission will be launched, but this might help in filling the gap until a replacement is finalised...
Null Task = $175 Million (Score:2, Interesting)
If they've already decided, what were they planning on spending that $175m on?
Why the controversy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wanna know something even more ominous? (Score:2)
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/voyager1-05
Good. Infinite billions for a war, but 4.2 Million a year is too much for science....really shows the priorities here...
Re:Wanna know something even more ominous? (Score:3, Funny)
Heck, I do wonder if, before this thing runs out of gyroscopes, we could turn it around the other way and have it take pictures of Earth, permanently.
Re:Wanna know something even more ominous? (Score:2)
Priorities (Score:2)
If we get wiped off the face of the earth due to some wacko towelheads because we didn't take steps protect ourselves, its sort of irrelevant if the probe had funding or not.
Retaining freedom costs lives AND money.
Extraordinarily simple solution: (Score:2)
1) Build a new Hubble telescope with current technology.
2) Launch it on an expendable booster.
This is already done for military imaging satellites every few years.
Everyone's focus is on 'fixing Hubble' when it should be on 'ensuring the availability of a high-quality astronomical observatory in orbit'.
Quick dickin' around and do the job right!
It only makes sense (Score:2)
I think it's hilarious to see the same people here congratulating the politician, and then getting mad at NASA not having the money to keep Voyager data processing going (instead, they spend it on stuff like repairing, or even worse, rescuing the Hubble).
-Jesse
Wait a minute (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wait a minute (Score:2)
While it may make perfect sense to everyone outside D.C. to take the money originally appropriated, do something better with it, and use the remaining funds to do more cool NASA stuff, it doesn't quite click with t
Put Hubble out to pasture (Score:2)
If there's a need/desire to put it in the Smithsonian or something, perhaps a booster rocket can be built to dock with it, and push it higher into a parking orbit for later retrieval. A pusher-bot would be a lot easier/cheaper to
Space hardware is not designed to last forever! (Score:2, Insightful)
It's great that they were able to extend its life and get it to do things that it wasn't really designed to do originally.
But there is a replacement being designed/built. Let's go with that.
Maryland represent! (Score:3, Funny)
It's good to live in third-world nation America (Score:3, Insightful)
Sigh.
Re:It's good to live in third-world nation America (Score:2)
The problem isn't how much money NASA got. From TFA: "In the meantime, she said, she expects NASA to spend every penny of the $291 million included in the 2005 budget for Hubble servicing."
The problem is that NASA said they were going to do one thing with the money, then said that they'd do another thing with it instead. While that other thing may be better than the original plan, th
Let US decide where to spend the money (Score:3, Funny)
If that happened, I bet the schools would have enough boooks for all the students and the Pentagon would have to hold bake sales to fund their wars.
Re:Let US decide where to spend the money (Score:2)
Good one, they should really take that into consideration.
Re:Let US decide where to spend the money (Score:2)
So you're saying the people cannot be trusted to make decisions about where and how their money should be spent?
Re:Let US decide where to spend the money (Score:4, Interesting)
Being a Libertarian, I believe that we should eliminate income taxes all together. And since most of the government's money comes from other means (taxing corporations and such) anyway, they'll still have plenty left to fund cool things like wars and science (In order to make better weapons for wars).
If you want to give the government money to spend on non-military things, I don't see a problem with that other than how only a small fraction of what you originally give will likely reach the people it was intended for. I'd prefer to write a check to a local charity or the EFF myself, personally.
Re:Let US decide where to spend the money (Score:3, Insightful)
No. See: tyranny of the majority.
The thing is.. (Score:2, Interesting)
...or join one (Score:4, Interesting)
Or join one already started [savethehubble.org] and make a contribution [slooh.com].
Re:He can pay for it himself! (Score:2)
Incidentally, the reason he didn't pay them was that he chose to not support an unjustified war of agression led by a president of questionable mental ability. Gee, why does that sound familiar?
And you do know you can disenfranchise yourself form the government, right? Never pay taxes again, if you don't want. I await the joyous news of your disenfranchisement, AC.
Of all the things you could complain about your taxes being
Re:He can pay for it himself! (Score:2)
Re:Kill the Shuttle (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Shuttle failure rate accurate (Score:2)
Re:Maybe its me (Score:2)
It's just you. Please do some reading about how our government actually functions.
Re:This is the Problem with NASA (Score:2)
The answer is in your question: government created and funded. All government funding ultimately comes from Congress. The Senate is part of the Congress, and a Senator is a member of the Senate. QED.
Re:This is the Problem with NASA (Score:2)
Because the House and Senate Appropriations Committees are the people who pay their bills and let them exist.
From the article:
"Government agencies are required to seek permission from congressional appropriators before using money for purposes other than which it was originally approved."
The money was originally meant for a repair mission. NASA got the money (Over a quarter billio
Re:This is the Problem with NASA (Score:2)
Space Telescope Science Institute is in MD. Goddard Space Flight Center is in MD. Mikulski is a great defender of NASA's budget. They better listen to her if they like getting $.