Hubble would be a great loss. It has aided some of the best recent research pointing to the recently discovered acceleration of the universe.
Pictured: Crab Nebula remnant supernova which was seem by Chinese and Japanese observers in 1054ad.
Posted on 03/21/2008 1:52:50 PM PDT by RightWhale
Hubble servicing mission's launch date threatened BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: March 21, 2008
With the shuttle Endeavour's mission entering the home stretch, shuttle Discovery remains on track for blastoff May 25 to ferry a huge Japanese laboratory module to the international space station. But subsequent near-term flights, including a high-profile mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope, could be delayed, sources say, because of ongoing external tank production issues.
The tank used by Endeavour for its current mission was the last in the inventory of tanks built before the 2003 Columbia disaster and subsequently modified to reduce potentially dangerous losses of foam insulation. The tank slated for use with Discovery in late May, ET-128, is the first so-called "in-line" external tank built from the ground up with post-Columbia upgrades, including a new ice-frost ramp design and titanium oxygen line support brackets. Both improvements address areas of possible foam shedding.
ET-128 for Discovery's upcoming mission leaves the Test and Check-out Building near New Orleans this week for the journey to Kennedy Space Center. Credit: Lockheed Martin
ET-128 departed Lockheed Martin's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans Thursday for the 900-mile barge trip to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
But a backlog of work at Michoud is hampering downstream tank deliveries. The tank that would be needed for a rescue mission should some mishap strand Discovery's crew in orbit is not expected to reach the Kennedy Space Center until late summer. NASA managers say the space station has enough supplies on board to support a combined crew for more than three months if necessary and as of this writing, Discovery's launch remains on track.
But the picture is cloudier for NASA's next shuttle flight, a mission by the shuttle Atlantis to service the Hubble Space Telescope. Launch currently is targeted for Aug. 28. ET-127, the tank designated as the emergency backup for Discovery's May mission, is the prime tank for the Hubble flight.
Safe haven aboard the space station is not an option for Atlantis' crew if major heat shield damage occurs. The observatory and the station are in different orbits and the shuttle does not have the ability to move from one to the other. As a result, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin early on approved plans to have a second shuttle, Endeavour, ready for launch on a rescue mission just in case.
That means NASA needs two ready-to-fly external tanks for the Hubble mission, ET-127 and ET-129 respectively. Manpower and production issues, triggered in part by unplanned work to upgrade low-level hydrogen fuel sensors and other post-Columbia design upgrades, have slowed external tank manufacturing and sources say the Hubble mission faces a possible delay to October.
Senior program managers visited Michoud for a first-hand look earlier this week and a more realistic assessment of the tank production schedule is expected in the next week or so. For now, the Hubble mission remains officially targeted for launch Aug. 28.
Shuttle Program Manager John Shannon told CBS News Thursday that NASA has "added many new features to further ensure the safety of this tank and since these were the first in-line tanks, we took extra time to make sure we got it right."
"We have margin in the schedule to absorb small delays and we have learned a lot in the process of putting these tanks together so that the '09 and '10 tanks will flow much faster," he said.
Shannon did not address specific launch dates.
NASA plans to complete the space station and retire the shuttle by the end of fiscal 2010. The current manifest calls for four more flights this year - in May, August, October and December - four in 2009 and up to three in 2010.
do I read this right that the environmental concerns raised years ago have finally bit the program bigtime.. damn!
a nation that chases its tail because of an ecowacko agenda is really asking for it, we see that all around us as is at the pump..
Yes, that is what I see. Of course they would point out the impact to the Hubble because that is what anybody actually cares about.
Its an open secret that the Hubble launch has been moved to October. Just as well, some of the subsystems arent ready and meeting the August deadline would be problematic.
Hoagland didn’t mention this this week when he was talking about A C Clarke. Seems like he would have since the problem would be known internally even though the news release was only today.
Pictured: Crab Nebula remnant supernova which was seem by Chinese and Japanese observers in 1054ad.
My prediction - the shuttle will never fly again, except missions to the ISS.
Of course, I am often wrong.
Then they wasted a sh*tload of money on the Hubble Repair Mission, which would be a shame, given its probably the greatest PR success theyve had since Appolo.
And?
The government wasted money.
Well, color me suprised!
It would probably be cheaper to launch a new telescope using an unmanned rocket than launching one of these servicing missions to fix the original.
So, if this were ever to happen, what would it be like? A second shuttle would fly to the first shuttle to offload the crew? What would they do with the first shuttle after that?
Would they jettison the shuttle to burn up in the atmosphere? Would they attempt to put it in a stationary orbit until a future flight could repair it and land it? Would they try to move it to a new orbit that a future flight could then reach and still reach the ISS?
-PJ
Too bad, Hubble is probably the best thing to happen to NASA and the science community in the past decade or so. Of course they are building some earth based scopes, and have some on-line currently with many times the resolution of Hubble.
Depends what is wrong with it. It is possible they could bring it back on autopilot.
Have there been any of those famous Hubble images lately? Seems like a couple of years, maybe more since they had some fresh ones.
Just so we don’t think the ISS is poitless:
spacedaily.com
In an unprecedented experiment, a Japanese astronaut has thrown a boomerang in space and confirmed it flies back much like on Earth.
Astronaut Takao Doi “threw a boomerang and saw it come back” during his free time on March 18 at the International Space Station, a spokeswoman at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said on Friday.
Doi threw the boomerang after a request from compatriot Yasuhiro Togai, a world boomerang champion.
“I was very surprised and moved to see that it flew the same way it does on Earth,” the Mainichi Shimbun daily quoted the 53-year-old astronaut as telling his wife in a chat from space.
The space agency said a videotape of the experiment would likely be released later.
Doi travelled on US shuttle Endeavour on the March 11 blast-off and successfully delivered the first piece of a Japanese laboratory to the International Space Station.
Work continues on the moon landing program even though there is no sign whatsoever in the MSM news.
spacedaily.com
NASA’s Constellation Program has selected five space-related companies to receive contract awards for a 210-day study to independently evaluate NASA’s in-house design concept for a lunar lander that will deliver four astronauts to the surface of the moon by 2020.
lol...That’s intriguing.
Wow..How cool would that be? I would imagine after 500 days of being able to snoop around and explore, would reveal some interesting new stuff, and would no doubt be a step towards a permanent lunar outpost.
That would be well worth the expense and effort IMO.
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