If you have a car and it will cost $1200 to fix it back to tip-top shape, the question to ask isn’t whether $1200 is too much. The question is whether it’s better it’s worth $1200 to get X more years out of a $10000 car (the cost of a new hubble these days is likely more than that). In that terms, it seems like a very wise investment.

I think people are making too much of the 111 screws in STIS. The challenge of dealing with 111 screws isn’t any harder than dealing with 15 screws. More tedious and time consuming, yes, but not any harder.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a serious challenge there, but everybody keeps talking about how many screws there are. Enough with the screws!

If you have a car and it will cost $1200 to fix it back to tip-top shape, the question to ask isn’t whether $1200 is too much. The question is whether it’s better it’s worth $1200 to get more years out of a $10000 car (the cost of a new hubble these days is likely more than that). In that terms, it seems like a very wise investment.

I think people are making too much of the 111 screws in STIS. The challenge of dealing with 111 screws isn’t any harder than dealing with 15 screws. More tedious and time consuming, yes, but not any harder.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a serious challenge there, but everybody keeps talking about how many screws there are. Enough with the screws!

What a tremendous investment is Hubble. Seeing to limits of the universe, nearly. It makes me proud to be human, “merely”.

Gary 7

$900 million is such a tiny amount in the scheme of things governmental that it would seem that no one would even notice it, much less complain about it.

And of course the science benefits more than just Americans – so $900e6 / 6.5e9 is, I think, about 14 cents a piece (and that’s rounding up). Oh, yeah – its well worth it.

jbs

Won’t they make back that money in the sale of calendars of Hubble photography? ;->

Rob

There will always be naysayers, but I am glad that NASA’s current administrators have the wherewithall to go ahead with a Hubble servicing mission.

Actually, I think it was 29 when I stumbled on Hubble’s Faint Object Spectrograph a few years back, before it was sent to the Smithsonian. I have some great pix of that…

The good folks here at Goddard who support the giant clean rooms in Building 29 might not appreciate your calling their facility a “warehouse!”

…I don’t think you have to worry too much about them. As it is, it doesn’t take much to convince the average person that Hubble, being space-based, can do a lot better optical science than ground-based telescopes (of course, ground wins when it comes to radio telescopy but… well… more surface area to play with).

Haha! I love this!

I just hope if they base some of the instruments for the NGST on the ones on Hubble, that they won’t mistakenly also include corrective optics! Then I’d cry.

Thanks,
Brad Henry