Fix Hubble, or else.

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Professur

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Senator Calls on NASA to Service Hubble
By Brian Berger
Space News Staff Writer
posted: 10 March 2005
12:10 p.m. ET


WASHINGTON – In a sternly worded letter to acting NASA Administrator Frederick D. Gregory, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said she expects the U.S. space agency to heed the will of the Congress and keep preparations for a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission on track.

Congress, in passing an omnibus spending bill late last year, directed NASA to set aside $291 million of its 2005 budget to spend planning and preparing for a servicing mission to Hubble by 2008. When NASA informed Congress just weeks later that it intended to spend only $175 million of that amount on the Hubble repair effort, some saw the move as an indication that the agency was preparing to abandon plans to service Hubble robotically and rely instead on a space shuttle crew to fix the telescope.

Many Hubble backers, including Mikulski, were shocked and angered when NASA announced in early February that it would not make any effort to service the telescope beyond attaching a propulsion module that can be used to drop Hubble into the ocean once it goes dark.

Mikulski, an influential member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, told Gregory in her March 2 letter that Congress will consider this year including money in NASA’s 2006 budget for a Hubble servicing mission. In the meantime, she said, she expects NASA to spend every penny of the $291 million included in the 2005 budget for Hubble servicing.

“I expect NASA to carry out Congress’ intent and spend the entire amount appropriated this year so there will be no interruption in the planning, preparation and engineering work that will be necessary for a servicing mission to Hubble,” she wrote. “The funding that I included in the Omnibus Appropriations Act is to ensure that the workforce at Goddard, the Space Telescope Science Institute and their associated contractors remain fully engaged in all aspects of a servicing mission. Any attempt to cancel, terminate or suspend servicing activity would be a violation of the law unless it has the approval of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees.”

Government agencies are required to seek permission from congressional appropriators before using money for purposes other than which it was originally approved. Although the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2005 gives NASA “unrestrained transfer authority” to move money between accounts, it also says that the authority should be used primarily to help the agency complete its transition to full-cost accounting.

NASA has not canceled contracts it awarded to Lockheed Martin and Canada’s MDA Robotics last year to help engineers at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., design a robotic servicing mission. NASA officials have said the agency intends to let that work continue at least until a preliminary design review planned this month.
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Wow. That doesn't leave a lot of grey area, does it?
 
If not for the good of science, at least for the good of the people who will put the money in their pockets to fix it, eh? :ashamed:
 
Remember this lesson kids, your members of Congress are better informed than the scientists they ocassionally fund.
 
Hey this is America!
We don't have to keep patching up some broken down telescope, we need a new one!
Any money spent fixin' this 90's era technology is money wasted.
Let's burn that mutha up in the atmosphere!
 
Wow Ive really never seen anything like this. This story just wont die. Yeah I wish to god we could save hubble but itd cost a huge amount of money to send a robot mission up to do it and it might not work anyway. Whereas the human mission to fix it is hampered by the whole shuttle blowing up thing. And time is running out. The last gyros are expected to die in about 2007 i think. And then the heater core will die by 2010 and then hubble is toast because itll warp the lenses as it freezes. So... as cool and awsome as hubble was maybe a next generation telescope would be a better focus. Lets swallow hard and look at the long term prospects here. I think americans are swinging with a little too much emotion from 3rd graders on this issue. Personally, Im looking forward to that monster telescope they will plant on the dark side of the moon. will make the hubble images look like a bad web cam let me tell you. Theres planets out there we know about now. We need to be able to SEE them. The hubble cant do that. We already have telescopic technology ON THE EARTH that is pretty much as good as hubble imaging despite the atmosphere issue. So lets swallow hard and move on I think. Unless someone can come up with a way to get the thing fixed without spending a billion or more dollars or shooting up a shuttle in the time required before its completely moot.
 
Thats swell & stuff but what about the politicians. They know better & carry the checkbook. :idea:

Let's privatize space research ;)
 
Gonz said:
Thats swell & stuff but what about the politicians. They know better & carry the checkbook. :idea:

Let's privatize space research ;)
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Send in Burt Rutan and Richard Branson! :cool:
 
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