Celestia Forums

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe told engineers and scientists today that he has decided to cancel a planned shuttle mission in 2006 to service and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope, one of the most scientifically productive spacecraft ever launched.

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0401/16hubblesm4/

How sad.

If only development on the OSP or the new "Crew exploration vehicle" had started a few years ago... This kind of thing really shows up the shortcomings of the shuttle- imagine if the designers had been told in the 70s that "this craft will eventually be too dangerous to launch on its own, so we'll need a space-based backup system..."

I am too furious for words...

I read on space.com that they may send a spacecraft to Hubble that will get attached to it and then deorbit it. Why can't they make it go the other way into a bigger orbit or maybe even a solar orbit so that one day we could get it back and put it into a museum. They said that they didn't want to send it to a higher orbit because they didn't want to create a problem for future generations. But they already did with all of that space junk.
I still hope that they can squeeze some more out of Hubble and then make sure that it doesn't make an uncontrolled deorbit that could have the mirror and the ring around it hit someone.
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/hubble_demise_030804.html

They figured that if Hubble does go on an uncontrolled deorbit, the chance of human casualty is 1/700 with NASA requiring 1/10000 or less.
It would be sad if someone who enjoyed the Hubble images was the unlucky one.

Brendan