Wednesday’s House Science Committee hearing about the options for Hubble was rather interesting: there was no consensus among the members regarding whether and how Hubble should be serviced. Moreover, there was a fair amount of sparring among the witnesses regarding the viability of some options; it was all polite, but they made it clear when they disagreed with one another’s assessments. (That was particularly the case of Paul Cooper of MD Robotics, who strongly defended the case for robotic servicing in light of the conclusions of both the Aerospace Corporation study and the National Academies report, which found robotic options particularly risky compared to shuttle repairs or a new spacecraft.) Few members of Congress expressed a strong opinion one way or another: Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) said he supported a robotic mission, while in a statement, Bart Gordon (D-TN) appeared to back restoring the shuttle servicing mission canceled over a year ago.
One complicating factor discussed at the hearing is just how much a shuttle mission to Hubble would cost, and who within NASA would pick up the tab. UPI and Florida Today noted that witnesses said NASA used to charge its science programs on the order of $100 million for a shuttle Hubble mission, but would charge the “full price” of about $1 billion for a new shuttle mission. “There is some accounting here that does not compute,” Louis Lanzerotti, who led the National Academies report, said. That, no doubt, will attract the attention of Congress.
If they look into the accounting, I think they’re going to find that the old number ($100 M) didn’t make a lot of sense. On the other hand, if the new number includes reasoning of the form ‘as soon as STS shuts down, we can fire all these people, so keeping it around for another launch costs this much in extra salary’ then that might concern some legislators whose constituents stand to lose their jobs.
Okeefe was suppose to fix the accounting but there is nothing new here. Whatever “NASA” wants to do cost almost nothing (at least at the start) what they do not want to do cost a hugh amount of dollars.
Its been that way forever and it continues to be that way. NASA has a new cash cow with RTM and it doesnt want anything to get in its way….Oink Oink.
Robert G. Oler
China’s Shenzhou has improved upon the Soyuz design they bought from the broke Ruskies. The destructive tests performed on Shenzhou make it 400 times safer than the space shuttle.
Why don’t we simply outsourse sending Americans to and from LEO to China, like all other manufacturing in this nation? China builds factories, and we build Mcburgers and storemarts. Who even talks about controlling production cost in America any more?
It is embarrasing that China has a human transport 400 times safer than the space shuttle. But to keep Doo Doo bird going, we could launch Americans in Shenzhou to the space station and then send up the space shuttle unmanned. Then the Americans could transfer into the shuttle up in orbit and go repair Hubble using the jalopy. Then they could take jalopy back to the space station, and transfer back to Shenzhou to land back on Earth. Why can’t we walk away from the jalopy?
We do not need “return to flight”. What we need is return to “success”. NASA needs to re-read the Apollo 13 reports to understand success and failure. The space station is a bad design, but its main problem along with hubble is we have a jack of all trades master of nothing jalopy to service them. There are options, but this nation needs a new human transport to and from LEO that is no more than the ski lift chair or gondola, not a mountain crawler, and we have to assume the chair or gondola will break occasionally so we need to crash dummy test the survival systems as the shuttle did not but as Soyuz and now Shenzhou have done.
This nation is at least a decade behind China regarding humans in space.
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