[Lerkfish]

this Cnn story relates:

NASA canceled all space shuttle servicing missions to the Hubble, which has revolutionized the study of astronomy with its striking images of the universe.

John Grunsfeld, NASA's chief scientist, said NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe made the decision to cancel the fifth space shuttle service mission to the Hubble when it became clear there was not enough time to conduct it before the shuttle is retired. The servicing mission was considered essential to enable the orbiting telescope to continue to operate.

[osiris]

One more giant leap into the dark ages we go.

[vmarks]

From Dave Farber's Interesting People list:

Before everyone thinks this is just a reaction to the new NASA announcement of a couple of days ago, the Hubble mission was already in some serious jeopardy due to the review of Shuttle operations by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB).

A number of the techniques of inspecting and repairing the Shuttle on orbit involve the International Space Station as a destination. All planned shuttle missions *except* the single Hubble repair mission planned for sometime in 2006/2007 were to ISS (at least after Columbia, the only Shuttle that couldn't reach ISS becuase of its weight was destroyed). Its fairly likely that mission was going to get canned in any event because of the difficulty of performing an adequate inspection on orbit at any location other than ISS.

Hubble's orbital inclination and ISS's are incompatable. A Shuttle cannot fly from one to the other in a single mission due to orbital mechanics.

The fundamental replacable elements that will determine Hubble's lifespan are it's gyroscopes (which are very heavy, balky and seem to fail with annoying frequency, the telescope needs 3 operating ones to perform fine mode tracking necessary for long exposures). These things are pretty big, they won't fit in a Soyuz, for instance, only Shuttle has enough cargo space to carry new ones.

The final word on this story may not be written yet, depending on the fate of the James Webb Space Telescope (Hubble's replacement which will *not* be at a Shuttle servicable location), I think there's a strong possibility of an all volunteer Shuttle mission to the telescope (while a 2nd Shuttle stands by on the ground), possibly at the end of Shuttle operations nearer 2010. However I doubt that will happen until the ISS committments have been met.

[ghost_flash]

Originally posted by Lerkfish:
this Cnn story relates:

Lerk:

Your first and most common error is quoting CNN for anything. What about when we go to the moon 'again'? Can't we set up a permanent telescope there? I mean, wouldn't it be more stable, and have a better viewing distance from the dark side? I don't know about communicating with it, but I figure the NASA types could figure out some relay system to get the information around to the bright half and then transmit images back to earth.

What about Mars? Isn't that more important?
What exactly do you want? Everything?

Out with the old and in with the newer and better.

vmarks:

Thanks for the heads up and clarification of the information.

[osiris]

Originally posted by ghost_flash:
Lerk:

Your first and most common error is quoting CNN for anything. What about when we go to the moon 'again'? Can't we set up a permanent telescope there? I mean, wouldn't it be more stable, and have a better viewing distance from the dark side? I don't know about communicating with it, but I figure the NASA types could figure out some relay system to get the information around to the bright half and then transmit images back to earth.

What about Mars? Isn't that more important?
What exactly do you want? Everything?

my little rant, but yes - everything. Some of us on this earth have heard the same 'Go to Mars" thing decades ago. A Moon base should been in operation years ago. Now that we're in the 21st century, we no longer have civilian supersonic transportation, no more shuttle launches, and an incomplete space station with an air leak. The very idea of allowing Hubble to burn up in the atmosphere is unacceptable. I'm surprised that Arthur C. Clarke hasn't cut his wrists by now.

Hubble is up there now - why should it be allowed to die whilst we wait another 10 years for a replacement?

[spacefreak]

Originally posted by osiris:
Hubble is up there now - why should it be allowed to die whilst we wait another 10 years for a replacement?

Hubble is not a living creature, so it can't die. It's being decommissioned - a choice afforded to all owners of machinery.

[osiris]

Originally posted by spacefreak:
Hubble is not a living creature, so it can't die. It's being decommissioned - a choice afforded to all owners of machinery.

whatever

[el chupacabra]

The Hubble has been used to discover and research things that the mars mission and moon base will never match.

This thing isn't outdated yet, and is more important than the boring rocks on mars, allowing it to burn up in the atmosphere would be one giant leap backwards for mankind.

placing a telescope on the moon wouldnt work very well since the moon is the earths shield for cosmic debry.

[vmarks]

Why Hubble? Why not a telescope which can actually be serviced by something other than the Space Shuttle?

The same institute in Boston that manages Hubble signed a contract for $162.2 million which places them in charge of the Webb telescope, set to come online in 2011.

[el chupacabra]

Then lets put the hubble out when a new one is up there and ready. Since the service mission was in 2007 it probably will be out of commision before 2011. Also wouldnt it be good to have 2 telescopes. In your post you said that the webb couldn't be serviced by the shuttle. Don't we want a telescope that can be serviced by the shuttle since thats mainly what the US uses.

[OreoCookie]

Don't forget its successor that's out of funding, too

[BlackGriffen]

I fail to see why Hubble or any other space based telescope would require the astronauts to get there in a certain way.

Seriously, as long as the astronauts get there with tools and parts, what on Earth does the shuttle have to do with it?

BlackGriffen

[OreoCookie]

Originally posted by BlackGriffen:
I fail to see why Hubble or any other space based telescope would require the astronauts to get there in a certain way.

Seriously, as long as the astronauts get there with tools and parts, what on Earth does the shuttle have to do with it?

BlackGriffen

Some replacement parts have to be delivered by space shuttle and installed by astronauts. Not being able to maintenance Hubble (and its successor) kills the project.

[BlackGriffen]

Originally posted by OreoCookie:
Some replacement parts have to be delivered by space shuttle and installed by astronauts. Not being able to maintenance Hubble (and its successor) kills the project.

Right, I got the gist of what was being said just fine. What I wanted to know was why it has to be the space shuttle that delivers the parts? As long as they get there, it shouldn't matter how the parts got there, right?

BlackGriffen

[nonhuman]

Originally posted by BlackGriffen:
Right, I got the gist of what was being said just fine. What I wanted to know was why it has to be the space shuttle that delivers the parts? As long as they get there, it shouldn't matter how the parts got there, right?

BlackGriffen

Because the space shuttle is the only orbital vehicle there is with enough cargo capacity. Until there is a replacement for it, the US will be using Russian Soyuz capsules which are not nearly as big, being more comperable to the Apollo capsule (though larger and, by now probably, more advanced).

[Lateralus]

Bush's little plan had better lead to us finding little green men.

[OreoCookie]

Originally posted by BlackGriffen:
Right, I got the gist of what was being said just fine. What I wanted to know was why it has to be the space shuttle that delivers the parts? As long as they get there, it shouldn't matter how the parts got there, right?

BlackGriffen

Well, the size of the parts plus the fact that I haven't heard of something that can transport things of that size plus astronauts.

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by nonhuman:
Because the space shuttle is the only orbital vehicle there is with enough cargo capacity. Until there is a replacement for it, the US will be using Russian Soyuz capsules which are not nearly as big, being more comperable to the Apollo capsule (though larger and, by now probably, more advanced).

I've seen the full size mock up at the Air and Space of the Apollo-Soyuz mission. The Soyuz is considerably smaller than the Apollo was, though I understand that the two part orbital module/command module gives approximately the same interior volume for the crew as the Apollo's command module. Soyuz is also considerably lighter than Apollo, which I suppose reflects the fact that Soyuz was designed only for low orbit, whereas Apollo had that big engine and fuel tanks to blast its way in and out of lunar orbit. There was a design of super Soyuz designed for the Soviet moon misson that was bigger. That design never flew.

I remember when the Shuttle first flew the Soviets were upset because they pointed out that the Shuttle's cargo bay could accomodate an entire Soyuz (minus its solar panels). They were scared one of their ships could be kidnapped from orbit a la Thunderball.

Obviously, the computers in the current Soyuz are more advanced than the 1960s Apollo. I don't know if anything else could be considered more advanced. The basic design is the same as it has always been. That's why it is considered such a successful spacecraft.

[Ayelbourne]

Originally posted by SimeyTheLimey:
They were scared one of their ships could be kidnapped from orbit a la Thunderball.

I believe you are thinking of You Only Live Twice.

[vmarks]

From an email I received, personal info removed.


Steve Beckwith's summary of the O'Keefe meeting

***

Colleagues,

I wanted to give you a synopsis of the meeting we had yesterday with
O'Keefe. Since that time, I have been answering a lot of questions
from the staff, interested astronomers, the media, and the public,
and I hope you will forgive me if I omit some of the details. In the
coming weeks, we should be able to fill in information as needed, and
I will try to keep you informed about any developments.

Several of you have sent personal e-mails of condolence. I am
grateful for your show of support, and I hope you will accept this
e-mail as a response at least for the next few days. My e-mail
traffic has increased markedly, and it will be difficult to give you
individual responses that are more than perfunctory.

Friday:

O'Keefe called a meeting of the "Hubble Team" on Friday, January 16.
We all got the word only 24 hours in advance. The meeting started at
11:30 am at Goddard Space Flight Center in the Hubble conference room
above the main bay (Building 7, Room 200 B/C) and ended at 1:00 pm.
There were approximately 100 people in attendance, mostly from
Goddard. Notable representatives included:

Sean O'Keefe, John Grunsfeld, Ed Weiler, Anne Kinney, Eric Smith,
Jennifer Wiseman (HQ)
Steve Beckwith, Mike Hauser, Rodger Doxsey, Antonella Nota, Ian Griffin (STScI)
Preston Burch, Dave Scheve, Dave Leckrone, Frank Ceppolina, Mal Niedner (GSFC)
+ a mix of around 100 people from Goddard and the contractors (I presume)

O'Keefe delivered the news that he had decided to drop any shuttle
servicing missions to Hubble in the return to flight, including SM4,
and he wanted to tell us all in person about the decision. He said
the decision was his alone. It was not the recommendation of Code S
(Ed Weiler) or the astronaut office, and he said it was not a
decision based on one factor or a single, compelling argument. His
decision was a very close call (he said "razor thin" or something
similar) and based on the weight of the arguments for and against
Hubble servicing.

He spoke for about 45 minutes without any obvious notes, and he
touched a large number of detailed decision factors, not all of which
I will reproduce here. It was my impression from his presentation
that he had, indeed, thought deeply about the reasons, giving him the
ability to speak impromptu for so long and retain so many details.
(It is not easy for most people to speak this way after being briefed
by other people, although he is a former professor and seemed to
follow the habit we all have of being incapable of talking for more
or less than 50 minutes, a class period.) He said several times that
it was not about money, and not about safety alone. You will see at
the end of my description, money in a broad sense (including using
NASA's talent base on the mission) must have been a large factor.

My distillation of the reasoning boils down to the following logic:

1. O'Keefe has personally accepted the CAIB recommendations for
shuttle return to flight. NASA will not fly shuttles without
implementing every one of the CAIB recommendations as a minimum.

2. Flights to the International Space Station (ISS) required NASA to
implement a series of changes to the shuttle. NASA is committed to
closing out the ISS work by 2010, thus it is committed to do that
work.

3. Hubble is the only target not in an ISS orbit which NASA considers
important enough to study for a non-ISS flight.

4. Non-ISS flights require additional developments for shuttles to fly:
a. Ability to inspect the entire shuttle on orbit.
b. Ability to repair the shuttle on orbit for a certain set of failures
c. Some kind of safe-haven or rescue capability in case of
catastrophic failures that cannot be repaired on orbit. My
recollection about this requirement is hazy, and I rely on Mike
Hauser's memory on this point; it was not clear to me that this last
capability is required or simply desirable. I will have to reread
CAIB.

5. Implementation of the additional items in (4) would have to be
made on a one-use basis for SM4 alone. They would never be used
again, and NASA would learn nothing from their development, vis-a-vis
heritage for future space missions.

6. Optical astronomers have access to more facilities than just
Hubble: he mentioned ground-based telescopes with adaptive optics and
other assets in orbit such as Chandra and Spitzer. Thus, a gap
between HST and JWST would not kill optical astronomy.

7. SM4 would only extend the life of HST by a few years. I think he
used "3 years" in speech, and in that he is mistaken, but a short
period (e.g. 3 years) obviously played a role in his thinking.

8. Therefore, he thought the extra effort required to mount a single
mission, SM4, was not worth the scientific return. That drove the
decision.

My comment about money is that when any of us use the term "worth,"
we are ultimately talking about money and resources. He did not state
that NASA could not develop the capabilities in a timely fashion, and
I am given to believe by other sources that they could, assuming they
wanted to expend the resources. I also note that most of the things
NASA builds for orbit use developments that will be used only once;
they just don't like to do that for transportation systems (I
detected a difference in culture between the transportation and
science side of the agency.) I suspect these points are why the
decision was characterized as not turning on a single issue.

He made a number of other useful statements, some in response to
questions. I note a few here:

1. He recognizes the "Hubble Team" as uniquely talented and needed
for NASA's future missions to the moon and beyond. He pledged to
ensure that the team had adequate resources to keep it alive and not
lose all the best people. There was no specific mention of STScI as
part of this team, and it was my impression that the commitment was
to Goddard, although I detected no obvious hostility toward us; we
are likely to be below O'Keefe's radar screen.

2. He committed to accelerate JWST as much as physically possible. He
said money would not be a limit to JWST construction. The only
bottleneck would be manufacturing capability. In a follow up
question, he would not commit to a specific amount by which JWST
would be accelerated.

3. He challenged us to figure out a way to maximize Hubble's
scientific lifetime (we could reinterpret to scientific return, since
the two may not be equivalent) without a shuttle servicing mission.

4. He committed NASA to a robotic servicing mission to de-orbit
Hubble safely. No time scale or dollar figure was attached to this
statement. (nb: I have begun to wonder about the incremental cost of
developing robotic capability to replace batteries, say, compared to
the cost of a shuttle flight, and I have pondered if that would be
useful for the moon initiative anyway.)

That gives you a synopsis of the meeting sans anecdotes (Sean is more
loquacious than I am, if you can imagine that.) The mood in the room
was decidedly somber.

Both Kinney and Weiler took pains to assure us that they had found
money to cover SM4 with slips and it was not their recommendation to
cancel SM4.

Following the meeting at Goddard, I held an All Hands meeting at the
Institute at 3:00 pm to explain the circumstances and answer
questions. While no one on the staff was happy with the decision, I
believe they are momentarily resolute to start thinking about
positive solutions to our dilemma, and I believe the All Hands
meeting went well.

STIC will make a special effort to assess the mood of the staff at
its meeting in a few weeks. People are obviously nervous about their
jobs. However, one of our best young engineers commented that none of
the ESS staff were especially concerned about employment - all are
very talented and expect to move from project to project. But they
like working at STScI and they like working on Hubble.

I will try to give you updates on developing events that seem
relevant. I was told that O'Keefe informed Senator Mikulski by
telephone on Thursday afternoon, and she was not delighted with the
decision. The reporters that have been interviewing me seem quite
sympathetic to Hubble (note the stories in the NYT and Baltimore Sun
today).

On Monday, I am going to assemble a team at STScI to look at a
wide-suite of options to extend Hubble's life. I think we should
think positively about ways to use or even service Hubble without the
shuttle and see if we cannot find something that would be attractive
to NASA and preserve our observatory.

Best wishes,
Steve

[theolein]

FWIW: I don't see what the big problem is with the HST. There will be a replacement in the future and NASA is being careful about making yet another Shuttle disaster. More interesting will be to see if NASA is anywhere near capable of implementing the Bush space initiative in the timespan and with the budget planned. I personally severly doubt it as there has never yet been a NASA programme that didn't go totally overbudget.

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by theolein:
there has never yet been a NASA programme that didn't go totally overbudget.

Can't the same be said for pretty much any large engineering project?

My worry is that the return to disposable boosters makes the whole project more easily killable. That's how Apollo died -- Congress simply cut off the funds for new boosters. Without near constant political support at the highest levels funding is vulnerable to short term political winds. That is much less likely with reusable spacecraft because the construction expense is up front, not mission by mission.

The trade off, as we have seen with the Space Shuttle, is that you get locked in to antiquated technology. It's easier to upgrade when you throw the craft away after each flight.

[nonhuman]

Originally posted by SimeyTheLimey:
I've seen the full size mock up at the Air and Space of the Apollo-Soyuz mission. The Soyuz is considerably smaller than the Apollo was, though I understand that the two part orbital module/command module gives approximately the same interior volume for the crew as the Apollo's command module. Soyuz is also considerably lighter than Apollo, which I suppose reflects the fact that Soyuz was designed only for low orbit, whereas Apollo had that big engine and fuel tanks to blast its way in and out of lunar orbit. There was a design of super Soyuz designed for the Soviet moon misson that was bigger. That design never flew.

I thought the Soyuz carried a larger crew? So I assumed it would have to be at least slightly larger in interior dimensions. And the computers are what I meant by more advanced. Anyway, it's definitely too small for servicing Hubble.

[itai195]

It seems as if the Bush plan just made the other shoe drop. I've read that NASA has wanted to scrap Hubble for a while... Also, the Bush plan isn't just some proclamation from on high that NASA is scrambling to implement now. The president consulted with NASA administrators throughout formation of the plan.

OTOH, if you were a big Orbital Space Plane fan, you may have something to complain about

[Meneldil]

As someone who loves astronomy, the Hubble decision sucks. On the bright side, the possibility of manufacturing capabilities on the moon would be incredible. Telescopes built on the moon would be much easier to maintain, and you still have the benefit of no atmosphere. In addition, an array of radio telescopes, (which are relatively simple to construct) located on the far side would be absolutely wonderful, especially if we patched them into an inferometry array with Earth based telescopes. It means a delay in telescopes making it up, but think what we could manage with a mature moon base in 30 or 40 years if that part turns out.

[Zimphire]

Because Hubble was going to be used forever.



Come on Lerk..

While this was news worthy, your way of posting it zealous in nature.

Get a grip.

[Zimphire]

Originally posted by itai195:
I've read that NASA has wanted to scrap Hubble for a while...

They have. But lets not let that stop the anti-Bushies from twisting it into a "casuality" from the Bush administration.

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by nonhuman:
I thought the Soyuz carried a larger crew? So I assumed it would have to be at least slightly larger in interior dimensions. And the computers are what I meant by more advanced. Anyway, it's definitely too small for servicing Hubble.

Soyuz has the same crew as the Apollo had -- three people max. Actually, Soyuz often flies with a crew of two. It's very cramped in there. The descent capsule isn't much bigger than the old Gemini capsule, which only carried two people.

The Soyuz design is quite space efficient, however. It has the orbital module in front of the descent module. The orbital module is your in-orbit living space that is jetessoned just before reentry. It also carries all of the equipment not needed for reentry, including the heavy docking equipment, and orbital navigation instruments. That means there is less to put behind the heat shield, which reduces weight. Boeing apparently had a similar design for the Apollo, but thier design lost out to the bigger Rockwell Apollo capsule, which used two modules, not three.

Interestingly, the Chinese spacecraft is based on the Soyuz but is apparently about 30% bigger. It also has a larger orbital module with its own solar panels. I've read that the intent is that it will be left in orbit after each flight instead of burning up in the atmosphere as the Russians' do. That way each Chinese flight will leave a satellite in orbit, or if it were docked to a space station, each flight would made the station a bit bigger. Clever!

In any case, neither the Apollo nor the Soyuz would be any good for repairing Hubble. They are strictly ferries. They don't have the cargo bay and arm of the Space Shuttle.

[Lerkfish]

Originally posted by Zimphire:
Because Hubble was going to be used forever.



Come on Lerk..

While this was news worthy, your way of posting it zealous in nature.

Get a grip.

my only post in this thread has only the following line in my own words...

[/quote]this Cnn story relates:[/quote]

for this you are saying *I* need to get a grip?


"the way I was posting it"?

how else should I post it? the title of the thread is taken from the headline of the article.