By-Tor wrote:
NASA says that cancellation of the last servicing mission had
absolutely nothing to do with the new initiative.

Right. And monkeys might fly out of my butt.




Given that the Hubble review was ordered immediately after
the Columbia accident and the CAIB established safety priorities
that precluded another Hubble mission, it's actually a legitimate
stance to take. Hubble being shut down was on the table a year ago.


They aren't going to be doing much in terms of making Shuttle
fundamentally safer. So, they are doing some basic cosmetic stuff
and doing items within their budget to reach their primary objective.
This one falls directly into that area where they can increase
safety by not flying. Cheaper all the way around.

Even without the "new" directive, I suspect that this was the
exact same decision they were going to make. For the first time,
the ISS team is in a position of having hardware complete and ready
to fly on schedule. There should be a bit of a backlog even. So,
they can pretty much just schedule out the rest of the construction
of ISS without having to worry too much about the payload.

If you look at the pre-accident shuttle schedule, you'll note
that Columbia was the only shuttle slated for non-ISS missions. They
were keeping it in rotation pretty much for the sole purpose of
doing Hubble missions.

Now, they have a backlog of ISS components to fly. No free
shuttles for other missions outside ISS. Safety regs that call
for specific requirements. Hubble is at least 4-5 years from
the earliest opportunity for a service mission and it's down
a couple gyros and has one showing signs of dying... It is entirely
possible that Hubble will lose it's control capability by the
time they clear the ISS backlog. In which case, they would certainly
scrub any repair mission anyway. It's a low percentage, high risk,
manned mission. All in all, the cards are stacked against Hubble.