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All that money to save the Hubble will go
down the drain. A robotic mission will likely
take longer than planned, cost more than planned
and probably fail.

Naturally, you provide zero evidence for your claims. The robotic
mission to repair Hubble will be ground breaking and the new technology
developed may one day make it the preferred method to service
satellites. It's worth the investment. It might cost a little more
than the average wasteful shuttle flight. But if nasa really cared
about saving money they wouldn't have built (1) the shuttle or (2) the
space station. If NASA wanted to save money then they could hire the
russians to service hubble, for example.

At least Hubble is producing loads of new science data, which is more
than can be said for most of the money spent on the shuttle or the ISS.


Even if completely successful, it only gives a couple
of years. For a couple of billion?

First off, a couple billion isn't that big a deal. Whether serviced by
human crew or not, there was going to be cost associated with repairing
it. But it's worth it. Hubble is still the only orbital, optical
telescope of its kind. If we dump hubble now and the next generation
space telescope is delayed then astronomers will have to do without for
many years. Hubble is a sunk cost and it's cheaper to maintain it, at
this point, than to build a whole new one.



A couple of billion to keep a handful of scientists
on the gravy train for a ...couple of years.

You can't be serious. Hubble has produced incredible results so far and
the world astronomical community relies upon it. Unlike much of the
manned space program, it does real science.

We could hire half of Baghdad for that.

What do you want them to do, all squint really hard at one part of the
sky?


What we are looking for is life, Hubble cannot see it.

That's not the only priority, nor is it a foregone conclusion that
Hubble would be unable to detect some large scale sign of life.


--
Quibbler (quibbler247atyahoo.com)
"It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the
threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, 'mad cow'
disease, and many others, but I think a case can be
made that faith is one of the world's great evils,
comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to
eradicate." -- Richard Dawkins