deorbit the hubble

[totient]

Over the years, I've heard a lot of proposals for what to do with the Hubble as it reaches the end of its design lifetime (which is pretty much now). The latest plan involves an unmanned upgrade mission for $2B. To put this number in perspective, the original cost of the Hubble was $1.5B, and the Next Generation Space Telescope is being projected as costing $1B. Sure, that number would grow if we built it, but so would the cost of the upgrade mission.

One might argue that the whole problem is that we're not willing to fly a shuttle mission, and that it'd be a no-brainer if we were. I'm not sure about that either. One of the parameters of the NGST is for it to fly on an Atlas; if we had a shuttle flight available we'd probably do better to fly a copy of Hubble than to fix the one that's up there. It will be a shame to lose Hubble, but it would be more of one to lose its replacement.

Comments

[johnromkey.livejournal.com]

Perhaps if the new telescope had a catchy name people would be more willing to give up on the Hubble... we could orbit The Madonna or The Big Mac...

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Can they bring it down and upgrade it, or would it burn up on descent?

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

We could bring it down in the shuttle, but shuttle flights cost about $500M and it would probably be cheaper than that to build another Hubble on the ground.

[hotpoint.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a reasonable idea, and I think that with the upgraded External Tank the Shuttle would be able to put a new Hubble into the ISS's orbit, fitting with current mission rules and allowing for the potential of servicing missions from the station.

I think part of the reason for sizing the new telescope to fly on an Atlas is that they didn't want it to be dependent on a Shuttle launch mission. Considering the state the Shuttle program is in at the moment, predicting that the Shuttle will still be around in 2010 may not be so safe. Would a Hubble-sized replacement be ready sooner?

[donnad.livejournal.com]

But they are expecting to be flying the shuttle again by May or June this year. At least thats what they are saying...

It's about time. Two plus years is just too long for them to have been grounded.

[johnromkey.livejournal.com]

I think forever is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to keep them grounded if they're going to keep exploding when you fly them.

[donnad.livejournal.com]

Two accidents in more than 20 years is a pretty good record if you ask me. Airplanes crash way more often, hundreds of people die and we don't ground them.

[johnromkey.livejournal.com]

Two accidents out of 113 missions - a little lower than a 2% fatal failure rate. That's much, much worse than the rate we see with airplanes. I wouldn't fly on an airplane if 2% of the flights blew up.

I have no informed opinion about whether NASA is being too slow about putting the shuttles back in service; I'm simply saying that putting them back in service without correcting the known problems would be extremely irresponsible.

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

What's irresponsible is putting people in a vehicle that can fly itself.