I think you are overstating. I know the original Hubble repair was significant, but not to the degree you state. First off, Hubble was designed from the ground up to be servicable with Shuttle. Tools were developed specifically for use with Hubble from the Shuttle. The repair in question was not quite within the original planned scope, but it wasn’t out of the ballpark, either. Yes, STS-61 was a big step in oribital EVA activity, though lunar EVAs had already reached those amounts of hours (lengths per EVA and repetition over days). Subsequent EVAs have included Intelsat recapture (3 person EVA, grab by hand, not tool), and ISS assembly and maintenance, including EVAs without Shuttle support (relying on SAFER as the backup safety device).

Though the upcoming Hubble servicing mission does have some new challenges.

SnakeHandler said:
> It was also a maintenance nightmare, plagued with problems, and generally a typical bad, grossly expensive design of the shuttle area.

That is an inaccurate and unfair description.

> The fact that the shuttle is the only way the thing could have been maintained worries me no end — risking lives for hubble is not worth it.

Lives get risked for a lot of things. People risk their lives to go to the mall. It is important to consider the amount of risk against the payoff.

True, for Hubble to be serviced, Shuttle is the only existing choice. True, an alternate plan could have been chosen that didn’t consider maintenance and servicing. It’s even arguable that given the launch costs of Shuttle, it would have been cheaper to make several Hubbles and launch them sequentially rather than try to reuse/upgrade the existing hardware. But given the existing design, it makes a lot of sense to complete the already planned mission to reservice and upgrade again, and this time prep for future controlled reentry that makes for a safer end of mission.

And because Hubble is taxpayer-funded, it’ll also be politicized. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t care less about some random astronomer’s career. It seems to me that if careerism ever raised its ugly head around the use and abuse of Hubble, that’s the astronomers’ problem, or, at most, astronomy’s problem, not mine as a taxpayer or as a “consumer” of the science they produce.

J. D.

Amen, Don…and scientists are some of the worst of the worst where that is concerned. They just take it for granted.

A professional astronomer asked me last night what was the whole fuss about returning to the moon and I asked him in return why he even bothered looking into the sky.

“There are things Hubble can do that ground-based telescopes simply cannot, so comparisons are difficult. But even an expensive telescope on the surface costs more than an order of magnitude less. Is it worth it?”

Let’s say there’s a wall in front of you that you want to see over, and you need a ten-foot stepladder to do it. The ten-foot ladder costs $100, but a seven-foot ladder is an order of magnitude less. You could buy TEN seven-foot ladders for the same price. But you still couldn’t see over the wall.

“People need to understand that, moving at the speed of their SUV, ISS is only a few hours overhead, but Mars, for example, is, umm, a really long way away.”

Here’s a few quotes about this which I’ll add here to put that in a bit more perspective :

“Space isn’t remote at all. Its only an hour away if your car could go straight upwards.”
- Sir Fred Hoyle, P.43, ‘The Wonderful World of Space’, Heather Couper, Octopus Books, 1980.

“If it were possible to drive straight from the Earth to Neptune, taking the shortest possible route and keeping up a steady 60 m.p.h., the journey would take nearly 5,200 years.”
- P. 57, ‘The Sky at night’, Patrick Moore, WW. Norton & Co, 1986.

&

“If you put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, that cathedral will be more densely packed with grains of sand than stars are found apart in space.”
- Sir James Jeans, British astronomer, quoted on page 28, ‘Skywatching’, David H. Levy, Ken Fin Books, 1995.

… & the nearest star is 4 years and many months away when you’re travelling at the speed of light which travels from Sun to Earth in about 8 minutes and reaches Pluto in 330 minutes or about 5 & a half hours.

“People need to understand that, moving at the speed of their SUV, ISS is only a few hours overhead, but Mars, for example, is, umm, a really long way away.”

… & the nearest star is 4 years and many months away when you’re travelling at the speed of light which travels from Sun to Earth in about 8 minutes and reaches Pluto in 330 minutes or about 5 & a half hours.

Please BA plesaelet us edit here – & while I’m onrequests could you please bring us the second part of that “No green stars” thread too ..?

It has taken us from the dusty deathn shroud of Eta Carinae’s swirling stellar nebuale clokaing the six million solar luminosities star
To mapping the round little world of Ceres
and mapping the ninth planet Pluto with its dark equatorial band and icecaps
All the way out to the colliding galaxies in their transitional splendour
The stars at the heart of M100
The X at thecore of the Whirlpool, M51
Out tothe ultimate depth of theultra-deep field toibringing us thesights ofnew found galaxies at the borders of visible spacetime.

Hubble is worth it! Heavens yes! The HST is one of our most fanatastic achievements ever & we should never forget it or cease marvelling at the things it has shown us from distances beyond anything our minds can imagine.

I just don’t see Hubble as expensive. The knowledge it brings is something we all, as a species, will benefit from…humans, looking outward and discovering.
I’d give up cheeseburgers for a second Hubble without hesitation.

“Looking ahead to future budgetary black holes like sending people back to the moon, we may be able to learn some lessons.”

In what way is sending humans back to the moon a “budgetary black hole”.
NASA has a budget of $17,600,000,000 for fiscal year 2009. This is for manned and unmanned spaceflight, as well as research and developement of new technologies.

Contrast this with the DOD Research and Developement dept. which has a fiscal year 2009 budget of more than $80,000,000,000.

Maybe it’s just me but I don’t see how any NASA project could be called a “budgetary black hole” when compared to numbers like what the DoD gets. Or even something like the Dept. of Education which has a budget of $90,000,000,000 plus next year.

Sorry, I don’t mean to sound preachy, but, to think of NASA as wastefull when they get what, about 2.5% of the entire budget of the DOD just kinda gets to me. The science, technology and knowledge gained from NASA missions, even the failed ones, continues to amaze me.

On the second point, yes the telescope was expensive, but its profile itself will provide a payback. Do you think a politician is more likely to approve increased funding for science after seeing the ultra deep field photograph? or being presented with six new papers on X-ray emissions from an obscure pulsar categorized by a terrestrial facility? Sure you might do more science with equivalent earth based funding, but without the flair, that funding will unfortunately evaporate over time as we’ve seen with America’s particle accelerator programs.

I think the images returned by Hubble have helped the public understand the beauty and complexity of the universe. They’ve certainly helped explain why astronomers, pro and amateur, stare at the sky.

But I don’t think Hubble has helped the general public come to terms with the size and scale of space. I’ve talked to folks who think the ISS is as far away as the Moon because they remember it took Apollo a few days to get there, and because the networks usually say something like “the Shuttle has begun its three-day journey to the space station” rather than saying they’re waiting for their repective orbital paths to be amenable to rendevous. I.e., people think the Shuttle is spending 2 or 3 days moving out from Earth.

Sometime this week I heard a TV personality characterize the U.S. and Soviet space prorams of the 1960′s as “moving to the edges of the universe.”

People need to understand that, moving at the speed of their SUV, ISS is only a few hours overhead, but Mars, for example, is, umm, a really long way away.

I have responded to your problem in the thread at “The magnetic tendrils of NGC 1275”.

20 or 30 years from now, maybe the next Einstein, Hawking, or Newton will credit HST for inspiring them to become a scientist.

We live in a red state and maybe, just maybe, what she’s seen will help inoculate her against the stupid which she will inevitably confront. Maybe she won’t be the only one inoculated. The Hubble Telescope might have been a poor investment in science in the short term but it’s impact on the popular conscious will be felt for years.

My bad! I take it all back, then: Hubble sucks.

um…kidding.