"OhBrother" wrote in message
...

I recall reading that Hubble is approaching the end of it's service life,

No. Not by a long shot.
It has yet to even reach its fullest potential. It has not yet reached
the prime of its life. All the components to accomplish that
have already been built and are waiting in a clean room for delivery.
They cost millions to produce, are the best of their kind ever made,
and are not usable on any other telescope.
Millions ****ed away.
The Hubble Space Telescope is the most productive telescope in
history and it was about to get 10 times more productive.

O'Keefe has shown the blindest "vision" in history.

and that there are other projects in the wings.

1. The year 2014 is not what I would call "in the wings". That is
when Hubble's "successor" (the NGST) is supposed to launch.
What sane person would throw away a car a decade before
he or she plans on buying a new one to replace it?

Besides, the NGST doesn't even replace Hubble.
It will only do 1/4 of what Hubble can do. It is limited to the
infrared. Hubble spans from the infrared to the ultraviolet.
The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (which is one of the
multi-million dollar new components already finished and
bagged up ready to go) is predominantly an ultraviolet
spectrograph and will not be duplicated in any planned
spacecraft and cannot be used on the ground due to
atmospheric absorbtion. Millions wasted. Who knows
what great science would have come out of it....
The WFPC 3 was to be the next workhorse camera
with a throughput 10 times greater than the WFPC 2.

The best was, by far, yet to come.

If that's the case, sounds
like the decision is part of a standard risks/rewards analysis.

It isn't. My understanding was that it was not a consensus
decision. It was a unilateral decision on the part of NASA's
Director based on his bean-counter interpretation of
Bush's "vision". Kill first. Promises of pie-in-the-sky sometime
far enough in the future so that they won't be in power anymore
when the promises aren't kept.
It a chicken **** LACK of vision and balls on the
part of O'Keefe.
He would have no problem whatsoever with finding astronauts
willing to take the risk. Or civilian volunteers, for that matter.

Considering NASA's concerns for shuttle reliability it would make sense
that
they would pick and choose what they signed up for. I don't think it was
a
simple decision.

No. Instead it was a stupid, ugly, short-sighted decision.