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To: TalonDJ
Build the next big scope on the moon? So no visible light spectrum space telescope for 20 years or more? Why is that a good idea?

I agree that NASA can't/won't service the Hubble. I agree that NASA servicing the Hubble with a Soyuz mission or two is almost totally out of the question.

But maybe NASA should put the Hubble on eBay and let the new owners decide what to do with it. Russia is always ready to sell space on Soyuz rides.

NASA didn't save Skylab primarily because the shuttle wasn't ready in time. What did the shuttle have to do with it? Nothing except it was supposed to be NASA's darling project.

The Bush plan shelves the shuttle and ISS, but doesn't make any replacements likely to arrive on time. Manned spaceflight by NASA is going to hit another low spot like the late 70s around 2010 or so and it will last for years.

I hope someone has the dollars and the know-how by then to pick up the slack.
24 posted on 02/10/2004 1:03:25 PM PST by murdocj (Murdoc Online - Everyone is entitled to my opinion (http://www.murdoconline.net))
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To: murdocj
I hope someone has the dollars and the know-how by then to pick up the slack.

The problem with asking NASA to come up with another launcher is that they don't know how to do it economically. NASA is a bureaucracy, and as such it is incapable of imagining a system that pays for itself. In fact, by their reckoning a system that costs more to operate and takes more people is better because it grows the bureaucracy.

Similarly, the big aerospace companies won't gamble on a bigger market at reduced costs. They are afraid reducing the cost of getting to orbit will just mean less revenue for themselves.

If you look at the development of other technologies, you see a huge ramp up from the first prototypes. Aircraft, computers, etc. But nearly fifty years after we started going into space, we still aren't doing things remarkably different. Launcher development is a dead technology, has been since the seventies. Oh they keep slapping "new" and "improved" on the sides of their missiles, but they are still just missiles.

All the people who figured out how to launch things bought into a dead end paradigm with dead end economics. New people are just starting to look at the problem in the context of improvable technology and profitable economics.

If NASA gets back into launcher development, they will just sabotage those efforts.

26 posted on 02/10/2004 1:19:47 PM PST by hopespringseternal
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