Hubble, R.I.P.
A federal program that served successively as a metaphor for government incomepetence and as one of the great scientific research projects in history is about to end. Although NASA will receive an increase in this year’s federal budget (if the White House has its way, at least), Washington Post reports that the Bush administration has decided to slash the requested $1 billion save-the-Hubble Space Telescope mission. Instead, the space agency will work out how to de-orbit the telescope in 2007 or later. The funds are needed for what the Bush administration has deemed higher priorities, including the trip to Mars and relaunching the space shuttle fleet. (Remember? Mars? The Moon? Hundreds of billions of dollars over the next two decades?)
All may not be lost for the HST. Post mentions that support for the mission remains high in Congress, and it’s possible the White House is using tactics similar to those suspected in its proposed defense budget cuts–namely, submitting a deficit hawk-budget that gets its spending cuts from popular programs Congress is likely to continue funding.
Wikipedia has useful background on the Hubble and its scheduled successor, the infrared-only James Webb Space Telescope (named for a former NASA administrator). Wikipedians argue that ground-based observatories can observe nearly as well as the HST can, but also that a new-generation space telescope, incorporating the nearly thirty years of research since the HST’s design, could bring about major new discoveries.
Balta is upset.
10 Responses to “Hubble, R.I.P.”
Economically, saving the Hubble made no sense at all: For the price of repairs to the old telescope, we could almost as easily launch an exact replica–or even a better one. It’s public sentiment, not science, that brought politicians to try to save the Hubble.
I’d love to see a true Hubble replacement using modern technology. Actually the best possible replacement would be an array of 7 smaller replacements arrayed in a hexagon with one in the center. The current computer controls available would make that system blow the Hubble away when using them in tangent and they could also be individually targeted to allow for research by even more scientists.. The problem with the replacement is its completely IR nature, IMO.
Jason, yes we could deploy another one for the same costs, but it would take years for it to happen. The HST right now is by far the best option available anywhere in terms of a telescope for astronomy. Scrapping it in a year or two means that there will be 5 or 10 years of time that passes without an opportunity to collect any new visual data using a space-based telescope.
And no matter what people say, it simply seems physically impossible to me that you’ll be able to achieve Hubble-clarity through an atmosphere. It just doesn’t make sense – the atmosphere will almost always distort whatever you want to look at.
The Hubble should stay in operation until its replacement is ready to fly. That way there’s no multi-year block where people just can’t work on things they’d like to. Given that the extra-solar planet work is really heating up in particular, that telescope could give us some real interesting views in the next few years.
Okay, then at this point we’re talking cost-effectiveness. An extra billion for the Hubble for five years’ research is $200m/year, not counting the risks to the shuttle and its crew. Or we could wait for a next-generation telescope that would do more.
This is beginning to sound like NASA made the right decision.
First, to put a little perspective on things, the federal government expends $200 million dollars every 55 minutes — that’s not including Social Security (if you include Social Security, it expends $200 million every 43 minutes).
Second, in terms of what the government is spending that money on, it spends over five million dollars an hour (every single hour of every single day) on Iraq alone.
Two days’ worth of our expenditures in Iraq, expenditures that for two years now have produced not a single lasting tangible positive outcome, would fund Hubble for a year.
Third, Hubble is the only valid reason for the space shuttle’s existence at all. If it isn’t going to fly to service Hubble, then it makes no sense for it to fly.
greg
One more thing,
Hubble originally cost over five billion dollars (in today’s dollars) and took a decade (1980-1990) between when the first assemblies were produced and when it was placed into orbit. It was another two years after launch before it became fully operational.
Try as I might, I’m not quite seeing my way to how waiting another fifteen to twenty years while spending another five to ten billion for a replacement is more cost effective than spending even up to a billion today for something that can be used tomorrow.
greg
I just knew someone was going to make that argument, which boils down to “The federal government spends X dollars on Y ‘bad thing,’ which is worse than Hubble, so why not spend the money on the Hubble too?”
It is not, to be frank, an overpowering argument.
It is a bad argument. It’s also not the one that I made.
My point was not that we should follow bad money with more bad money but that $200 million/yr (for five years, your argument) a) isn’t going to break the bank, by a long shot and b) represents a better investment than the two alternatives (do nothing or build a replacement).
But that’s not to say that an argument for proportionality shouldn’t or can’t be made in its own right. We all learned the concept of diminishing returns and low-lying fruit in grade school. If you’re going to throw out numbers like “$200 million” for rhetorical value then you shouldn’t be surprised if someone asks you “compared to what?”
greg
p.s. Hubble was far more a metaphor for private-sector incompetence than governmental. It was, after all, the private sector (Perkin-Elmer, specifically) which mis-ground the primary mirror and it was again the same private sector which took three separate measurements of said mirror, all of which indicated spherical aberration, prior to the private-sector’s white-tagging of the mirror assembly certifying it ready for flight.
The government didn’t build Hubble. It just paid for it.
I didn’t say it was government incompetence, I said it was a metaphor for public sector ineptness. You remember as well as I do the debates over the mirror and its use as a symbol of the inability of the Bush I-era government to do anything right. (Anyway, saying that the private sector ‘really’ screwed up is a bit disingenuous, given that many big ‘government’ projects are contracted out–what, I should blame Lockheed and TRW for missile defense and not the BMDO/MDA/Pentagon?)
‘Compared to what?’ is a question that can be asked, but it’s not just $1bn: It’s $200m plus a 4% chance of losing Discovery, Atlantis or Endeavour. If Nixon, Ford and Carter hadn’t locked us into the STS program, we’d probably have a more robust space program, but we don’t and that’s going to stay the same no matter what.
In any event, as I wrote in the post (which I suspect half the people on this thread didn’t actually read), I consider it likely that Congress will fund both the misguided Bush Mars mission and the Hubble servicing project.
What are some pros and cons about the Hubble Telescope debate?