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hopespringseternal wrote: "Sometimes you just have to stop throwing good money after bad."

Amen. Hubble was a good telescope, but there is no satellite that is worth enough to send repeated shuttle missions to fix it. Especially when the shuttle is now counting up the final number of its future missions. Especially when the next fix-it mission was only to extend it BEYOND its original lifetime. Now they are just cutting it back to regular. How many would that be, the third or fourth fix-it-up mission to Hubble?

Its really a shame that Americans would settle for pretty pictures over real adventure, exploration, progress, and colonization.

Hubble represents the NASA liberals want. They don't want NASA to be something America can be proud of and use to show everybody else how great America is; they want to use NASA to show the world how "its a small world after all" and how we are exploiting the environment. Now, there's nothing wrong with these beliefs: they have their place and are perfectly legitimate, but people come to post on free republic because they believe in the opposite ideas: that the world and the cosmos are ours for the taking, and that a powerful America is the reality, and perhaps even a good reality.

[RightWhale]

they want to use NASA to show the world how "its a small world after all"

There may be someting to that. The Goresat still sits in its storeroom until Algore is kissed by fate and turns into a real little boy.