Bush cancels Hubble telescope rescue mission

In article ,
OrionCA wrote:

On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 09:27:57 -0600, richard schumacher
wrote:

http://www.space.com/news/hubble_budget_050121.html

"The White House has eliminated funding for a mission to service the
Hubble Space Telescope from its 2006 budget request and directed NASA to
focus solely on de-orbiting the popular spacecraft at the end of its
life, according to government and industry sources."


No surprise here. Bush gets all his science from the christian bible.

Time to write our congresspeople to direct NASA to save Hubble.

All future Shuttle missions must include the capability to reach the
ISS in case of a major emergency that precludes re-entry. Hubble is
in an orbit that the three remaining Shuttles can't attain and still
reach the ISS. Ergo, no Hubble resupply missions are planned.

That is an arbitrary choice. A Shuttle mission to Hubble is not
significantly more dangerous than to ISS; true, there's no "safe haven"
at Hubble (and as we see repeatedly ISS is not all that reliable
itself), but the Shuttle's engines have to fire longer to reach ISS. A
"safe haven" is useless if a failure leaves the Shuttle unable to reach
it. Regardless of destination the safest approach is to keep a rescue
Shuttle or Soyuz ready to fly within a week. The real reason to limit
Shuttle flights is to maximize the chances of completing US
contributions to the astronaut hotel called ISS.



Hubble was never intended as a permanent floating observatory. The
follow-on telescope is to be launched in 2010 and will greatly expand
on Hubble's capability. There's even a possibility that Hubble will
remain functional through 2010 w/o replacing the 3 remaining
operational gyro packages.

The James Webb space telescope is for IR only, not UV or visible light.
There is wide scientific agreement that Hubble should stay in use at
least until JWST is operating:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...on_050121.html