MSNBC - How a 'safe haven' could help save Hubble

"Explorer" wrote in
oups.com:

The reason why saving Hubble is such a big deal is that NASA rarely
ever carries out most new programs through flight status. So, if HST is
not saved, its possible that replacement would be cancelled, leaving
the science community with nothing.

Your comment is indicative of precisely why new projects are often
cancelled before flight - let's say that someone proposes the New Great
Telescope, and NASA funds the program. After a couple of years,
technology advances and the New Great Telescope is now just the Just OK
Telescope, albeit at the same price as before, if not higher. So, the
Better becomes the Enemy of the Good Enough, the new telescope is
cancelled in favor of the Next Really Great Telescope, and so on.

Better to hold onto existing hardware until the replacement is on
orbit. So, we really need that robot to save Hubble!


I don't know of a lot of science missions that are cancelled. Hubble
made it, Gravity Probe B made it, even though the basic reason it was
developed was obsolete thirty years ago. We have all sorts of satellites
and telescopes orbiting the earth, most of which never had to seriously
fight for funding. If NASA has plans to build a new telescope, they'll
get there . Which is disappointing. Why is NASA in the telescope
building buisness? Or the monitoring of greenhouse gases buisness for
that matter?
It seems that its becoming more and more that just because the platform
is based in space, it is NASA's juristiction. Why don't we leave it up
to the EPA to put satellites in space to monitor greenhouse gases?
Telescopes are a bit of a different monster. They're still about space
exploration, just from a distance. If you include that mission in NASA's
goals, then NASA should be maintaing ground based telescopes too.

My view is NASA should step away from its emphasis on science. NASA
should be developing technology to move out into our universe. It
bothers me when people make the statement that we could get more science
done on mars by sending probes then sending people. That's
debatable...however, I don't think the reason that we should send people
to mars is to get science out of them. I think a goal of seeing if
people can establish a permenant base on mars is a far greater goal than
seeing if life once existed on mars.

If you share my view that its not all about acquiring knowledge, then
you'd understand why it's no big deal if the Hubble happens to fall.
However, if your view is that we need to understand as much as possible
as quickly as possible about our universe then you'd want to say screw
the danger of not having a safe haven and get a shuttle up to the Hubble
ASAP, and I respect that.

Tom Kent

On 8 Dec 2004 08:56:44 -0800, in a place far, far away, "Explorer"
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such
a way as to indicate that:

"There's nothing about HST that makes it the only choice for this."

Yes there is, there is a *budget* for development of robotic servicing
for HST. If this budget is compromised by diverting money towards
Shuttle servicing of HST with this Safe Haven, there won't be enough
money for the robotic technologies - $2.2 billion is what the Aerospace
Corp says is needed.

And a Shuttle mission to accomplish the same thing would be less than
ten percent of that.

In article 4,
Tom Kent wrote:
I don't understand why the hubble is so high on some people's priority
lists. There are new telescopes in the pipeline that are going to be way
better...

Unfortunately, there is *nothing* in the pipeline that is a direct and
complete replacement for Hubble. In particular, JWST -- assuming it
actually flies -- completely lacks Hubble's visible and UV capabilities,
and despite what the IR astronomers say, those remain important and
heavily used.

There wouldn't be a tenth so much interest in saving Hubble if it were
about to be obsolete.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |

On 8 Dec 2004 11:20:06 -0800, in a place far, far away, "Explorer"
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such
a way as to indicate that:

Better to hold onto existing hardware until the replacement is on
orbit. So, we really need that robot to save Hubble!

No, we don't. It can be done with a Shuttle flight much more cost
effectively.

On Wed, 08 Dec 2004 03:15:04 GMT, "Jim Oberg"
wrote:

MSNBC - How a 'safe haven' could help save Hubble

Wouldn't it be easier to just have another Shuttle on standby in case
the Hubble mission can't re-enter? Granted, we can't time two Shuttle
missions so close all the time, but this is only a one-time deal.

Brian

On 8 Dec 2004 09:08:08 -0800, "Explorer"
wrote:

The HST robotic servicing mission can be tested on the ground before
launch to ensure mission success, just like ATV or any other new
system.

Better to test it at ISS, where astronauts are right there and can
take over if things go awry, and even offer the possibility of return
to Earth (via next Shuttle) if it doesn't work the first time. Ground
testing is useful, but no replacement for flight testing.

Brian

On Wed, 08 Dec 2004 18:44:18 GMT, Tom Kent
wrote:

Everyone is whining about how the robotic servicing mission costs so much.
The point of the robotic servicing mission wasn't to fix the hubble the
cheapest way possible, it was to build up the capability for on orbit
technologies....rendezvous+docking, human level dexterity, on orbit
repairs.

ISS already has the human-level dexterity... the Hubble robot would
use Canada's robot designed for ISS. Rendezvous and docking? Why spend
$2.2 billion for something the Russians and Europeans already can
provide? And Hubble is unlikely to be representative of future
unmanned rendezvous and docking targets (Hubble has no rendezvous
aids, future Moon/Mars spacecraft -- like ISS -- almost certainly
will.)

All that stuff is worth the $2.2 billion,

Not even close.

Brian

On Wed, 08 Dec 2004 19:49:31 GMT, Tom Kent
wrote:

Why is NASA in the telescope
building buisness?

Because they are satellites and NASA has been tasked with overseeing
the construction and launch of all US civil satellites. Other entities
do tend to run the satellites once they're operational... such as
weather satellites under the control of the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Hubble under the Space Telescope
Science Institute (part NASA, part NSF).

Or the monitoring of greenhouse gases buisness for
that matter?
It seems that its becoming more and more that just because the platform
is based in space, it is NASA's juristiction.

Why don't we leave it up
to the EPA to put satellites in space to monitor greenhouse gases?

The EPA is not the correct organization, you're probably thinking of
NOAA. And NOAA is involved with NASA in the Earth Science Enterprise.

Telescopes are a bit of a different monster. They're still about space
exploration, just from a distance. If you include that mission in NASA's
goals, then NASA should be maintaing ground based telescopes too.

No, operating ground-based telescopes is a vastly different
undertaking than operating unmanned orbital telescopes.

Brian

Brian Thorn wrote in
:

use Canada's robot designed for ISS. Rendezvous and docking? Why spend
$2.2 billion for something the Russians and Europeans already can
provide? And Hubble is unlikely to be representative of future
unmanned rendezvous and docking targets (Hubble has no rendezvous
aids, future Moon/Mars spacecraft -- like ISS -- almost certainly
will.)

The Russian and European docking systems require all sorts of crazy
hardware like radar dishes and optical sights. We need to get a system
that doesn't require all this stuff, then our ships to the moon or mars or
wherever won't have to carry around these huge docking systems, just an
aligned digital camera. This is about moving on to the next generation of
what we can do without the need for humans, which in turn will make it
possible to send humans all over the place :-) Robots should do as much as
is possible, but we eventually want to send humans out into the cosmos.

Tom

"Explorer" wrote in
oups.com:

This is a dumb idea. One of the chief purposes of the robotic servicing
mission for Hubble is to develop the technologies to allow automated
rendezvous and docking.

Oh, so that's it. Silly me, I thought the chief purpose of an HST servicing
mission was, well, to service HST. Thanks for clearing that up.

Trouble is, you've got a lot of other people to "educate" on this issue
besides me. O'Keefe didn't approve a robotic HST servicing mission chiefly
to develop AR&D technology. He approved it because of the public outcry
over the cancellation of HST SM-04. And that outcry was not because people
wanted HST used as a test target for AR&D technology, either - it was
because people wanted HST saved.

That doesn't automatically mean that robotic HST servicing is a bad idea,
but it *does* mean that O'Keefe has to think long and hard about which
servicing method offers the best cost-benefit - which one has the best
chance to save HST with the least cost, schedule, and technical risk.
Otherwise, there will be hell to pay if the robotic servicing mission fails
to launch before HST dies, or fails to rendezvous with HST, or even worse,
damages HST in the process of docking with it or servicing it. The public
will be quite unforgiving, especially since O'Keefe now has *two*
independent assessments in his hands telling him that the robotic option is
higher risk than the shuttle option, and that a shuttle mission to HST is
not much more risky to the crew than a shuttle mission to ISS.

If NASA cancels the robotic mission in favor of
this new idea, astronauts will be able to service the telescope, but we
will once again lose the opportunity to develop robotic technologies
critical for exploring the Moon and Mars.

The technologies needed for robotic HST servicing are inapplicable to, and
quite a bit more challenging than, the technologies needed for Moon/Mars.
HST is a challenging target because it was launched with no
rendezvous/docking navaids, as are needed by all existing AR&D
technologies, and because its components were not designed to be serviced
robotically. For Moon/Mars, we're starting with a blank sheet, so modules
can be designed with AR&D and robotic servicing in mind from the get-go.

Making HST the test target also puts unnecessary schedule pressure on the
task of developing AR&D/robotic servicing technology. HST will likely die
in 2007-08, while the Moon/Mars program doesn't envision any lunar flights
prior to 2015.

If the objective here is really technology development, NASA should follow
DARPA's example with the DART project, use an expendable target rather than
risking HST, and leave HST to the people best suited for servicing it -
astronauts.