Bush Administration Kills Hubble Space Telescope

Apparently, the Servicing Mission was killed, and now all the White
House wants to do is to mount an expensive robot mission that will
simply de-orbit HST.

Explorer wrote:

Apparently, the Servicing Mission was killed, and now all the White
House wants to do is to mount an expensive robot mission that will
simply de-orbit HST.

Prediction: even that will be cut.

Paul

"Paul F. Dietz" wrote:

:Explorer wrote:
:
: Apparently, the Servicing Mission was killed, and now all the White
: House wants to do is to mount an expensive robot mission that will
: simply de-orbit HST.
:
:Prediction: even that will be cut.

Perhaps, but isn't something like this going to be required in order
to get the thing down in a controlled way? Aren't there significantly
sized pieces of Hubble that will survive reentry? If so, there has to
be some concern about where they hit.

--
"Rule Number One for Slayers - Don't die."
-- Buffy, the Vampire Slayer

Fred J. McCall wrote:

Perhaps, but isn't something like this going to be required in order
to get the thing down in a controlled way? Aren't there significantly
sized pieces of Hubble that will survive reentry? If so, there has to
be some concern about where they hit.

The expected cost of uncontrolled reentry is many orders of magnitude less
than the cost of preventing it.

Paul

"Paul F. Dietz" wrote:

:Fred J. McCall wrote:
:
: Perhaps, but isn't something like this going to be required in order
: to get the thing down in a controlled way? Aren't there significantly
: sized pieces of Hubble that will survive reentry? If so, there has to
: be some concern about where they hit.
:
:The expected cost of uncontrolled reentry is many orders of magnitude less
:than the cost of preventing it.

This is presumably true if you play the odds. True, Earth is mostly
empty, but that's not a homogenous condition. I'd think the legal
liability alone would swamp the cost of such a mission if some major
pieces happened to spray across a major city.

Do we really think they'll want to bet the odds on this?

--
"Rule Number One for Slayers - Don't die."
-- Buffy, the Vampire Slayer

Fred J. McCall wrote:

:The expected cost of uncontrolled reentry is many orders of magnitude less
:than the cost of preventing it.

This is presumably true if you play the odds. True, Earth is mostly
empty, but that's not a homogenous condition. I'd think the legal
liability alone would swamp the cost of such a mission if some major
pieces happened to spray across a major city.

I don't think so. The chance of killing anyone is small (maybe
1 in 1000), and the chance of killing large numbers of people is
astronomically small and contributes little to the expectation.

Do we really think they'll want to bet the odds on this?

Do I think the administration could and would do things that would
put innocent parties at risk? This administration, and all others,
have done this and continue to do this, all over the world. One
cannot avoid risk, one can only mitigate it, and the extent to which
it should be mitigated is dependent on the cost/benefit ratio.

The cost/benefit ratio for controlled deorbiting of HST is ridiculously
bad. There are far better ways to reduce unnecessary deaths and injuries
among HST's potential victims, ways that would save orders of
magnitude more lives.

Paul

Explorer wrote:
Apparently, the Servicing Mission was killed, and now all the White
House wants to do is to mount an expensive robot mission that will
simply de-orbit HST.

The current Bush White House has been persistently against the HST.

Here's my guess; creationists don't like Hubble and the evidence it
lent to opposing worldviews.

"Paul F. Dietz" wrote in
:

The cost/benefit ratio for controlled deorbiting of HST is
ridiculously bad. There are far better ways to reduce unnecessary
deaths and injuries among HST's potential victims, ways that would
save orders of magnitude more lives.

That is undoubtedly true, from an actuarial point of view. NASA calculates
the odds of a casualty from an uncontrolled HST re-entry as 1:700. Spending
hundreds of millions for a 1:700 chance of saving one life makes little
sense.

However, is it still true from a political point-of-view? We have seen with
the Kosmos 954 and Skylab re-entries that the hysteria caused by re-
entering spacecraft is disproportional to the actual level of risk. HST's
*systems* are predicted to die in 2007-08, but its *orbit* will not decay
until after the turn of the decade. Thus, this is a decision Bush will
make, but his successor will have to deal with the consequences. The GOP
undoubtedly is confident Bush will be succeeded by another Republican, so I
could see GOP officials quietly lobbying Bush to "clear the decks" and not
leave any loose ends behind that could create a crisis for his successor.

(My uninformed opinion is that the whole thing is a negotiating ploy -
delete the HST mission and more-or-less force Congress to add more funds to
NASA's budget if they want it back.)

--
JRF

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On 23 Jan 2005 08:53:29 -0800, in a place far, far away,
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:

Apparently, the Servicing Mission was killed, and now all the White
House wants to do is to mount an expensive robot mission that will
simply de-orbit HST.

The current Bush White House has been persistently against the HST.

Here's my guess; creationists don't like Hubble and the evidence it
lent to opposing worldviews.

Here's my guess. Anti-Christian, paranoid loons think that the White
House is sufficiently in thrall to creationists that they would let
them dictate space policy, despite zero evidence that the
administration has ever done anything whatsoever to support
creationism.

Here's another good guess. The administration doesn't want to
continue to spend money on Hubble at all, because it sees it as a
distraction from the president's new space initiative.

On 23 Jan 2005 17:27:13 GMT, in a place far, far away, "Jorge R.
Frank" made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

We have seen with
the Kosmos 954 and Skylab re-entries that the hysteria caused by re-
entering spacecraft is disproportional to the actual level of risk. HST's
*systems* are predicted to die in 2007-08, but its *orbit* will not decay
until after the turn of the decade. Thus, this is a decision Bush will
make, but his successor will have to deal with the consequences. The GOP
undoubtedly is confident Bush will be succeeded by another Republican, so I
could see GOP officials quietly lobbying Bush to "clear the decks" and not
leave any loose ends behind that could create a crisis for his successor.

Or they could be betting that it won't ultimately be an issue (e.g.,
they might be able to just purchase a reboost or deorbit from Orbital
Recovery at bargain prices, before it becomes a serious threat).

That's what I would do.