Posted on 03/11/2005 8:17:20 AM PST by wingblade
Senator Calls on NASA to Service Hubble
By Brian Berger Space News Staff Writer posted: 10 March 2005 12:10 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON – In a sternly worded letter to acting NASA Administrator Frederick D. Gregory, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said she expects the U.S. space agency to heed the will of the Congress and keep preparations for a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission on track.
Congress, in passing an omnibus spending bill late last year, directed NASA to set aside $291 million of its 2005 budget to spend planning and preparing for a servicing mission to Hubble by 2008. When NASA informed Congress just weeks later that it intended to spend only $175 million of that amount on the Hubble repair effort, some saw the move as an indication that the agency was preparing to abandon plans to service Hubble robotically and rely instead on a space shuttle crew to fix the telescope.
Many Hubble backers, including Mikulski, were shocked and angered when NASA announced in early February that it would not make any effort to service the telescope beyond attaching a propulsion module that can be used to drop Hubble into the ocean once it goes dark.
Mikulski, an influential member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, told Gregory in her March 2 letter that Congress will consider this year including money in NASA’s 2006 budget for a Hubble servicing mission. In the meantime, she said, she expects NASA to spend every penny of the $291 million included in the 2005 budget for Hubble servicing.
“I expect NASA to carry out Congress’ intent and spend the entire amount appropriated this year so there will be no interruption in the planning, preparation and engineering work that will be necessary for a servicing mission to Hubble,” she wrote. “The funding that I included in the Omnibus Appropriations Act is to ensure that the workforce at Goddard, the Space Telescope Science Institute and their associated contractors remain fully engaged in all aspects of a servicing mission. Any attempt to cancel, terminate or suspend servicing activity would be a violation of the law unless it has the approval of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees.”
Government agencies are required to seek permission from congressional appropriators before using money for purposes other than which it was originally approved. Although the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2005 gives NASA “unrestrained transfer authority” to move money between accounts, it also says that the authority should be used primarily to help the agency complete its transition to full-cost accounting.
NASA has not canceled contracts it awarded to Lockheed Martin and Canada’s MDA Robotics last year to help engineers at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., design a robotic servicing mission. NASA officials have said the agency intends to let that work continue at least until a preliminary design review planned this month.
The Hubble is a sentimental favorite for everybody, and it is hard to accept that its mission might just simply be over, a couple years before the next generation space scope is deployed. This thing has served a big time fodder for Bush-bashing conspiracy theories. Robot fix-it missions have been deeemed impractical, the Shutttles aren't flying either, engineers think they can extend functionality by goign down to two gyros, the next generation scope is coming... why is this such an endless discussion?
Can't we just give up on obsolete ideas for once?
I think we need to revive Project Mercury just as much as we need to revive the Space Shuttle, Hubble, etc.
Anyone else see any parallels to Social Security???
Even if they get a next-generation telescope up there, the Hubble would still be useful. There's plenty to look at, and two scopes would be better than one.
The International Space Station is the real boondoggle. It's totally useless, a huge waste of money. Its only purpose was to make better relations with the USSR, and that no longer applies. In fact last year Russia was complaining it was too expensive, and I doubt they would mind ending the program.
OFFER THEM HALF OWNERSHIP IN IT
They just might accept. Prestige (in helping poooor America), appeal to their slavic sense of machismo, and finally jump start their astronomy program, which they tend to neglect.
Alternative is to watch the last gyro fail, start tumbling, and years later, re-enter.
We must preserve the Hubble!
Because the Hubble was designed to be updated with new hardware. The next gen telescope cannot do what Hubble does, and it will be a BIG loss to science and astronomy.
NASA now translates it as "meekly stay" I gather.
I think we need to revive Project Mercury
Complete strawman.
Because they don't have a vehicle that can service it. I would be all for that, however, it is not feasible.
The next gen scope is IR, not visible light. Different animal.
Seems to be at times. Sigh.
Also Hubble has no hydrazine attitude jets that could contaminate the lens.
That's the Webb Telescope, right? Wasn't there a Gen. II optical scope also in the works? I forget the name of it...
That would be a huge cost. Wouldn't it be easier just to fix Hubble?
Should Congress micromanage the space program? Congress could take a real lead and create private property rights in outer space and suggest the President should invoke the withdrawal clause in the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty.
There is a new contract up for bid related to the Webb scope. It's good to see some new flyable hardware amongst the management services and maintenance contracts.
Yup. :-)
Wasn't there a Gen. II optical scope also in the works?
Not now at least. Webb won't do UV or visible. Sigh.
And as nice as I think it is that Sen. Mikulski is taking NASA to task for their spending priorities, the bottom line is she's a politician; and so I have doubts that her motivation extends much farther than protecting the jobs of her constituents at Goddard.
Looks like our future in space is in the hands of politicians right up and down the line. And I don't see any real passion for space exploration in any of them right now.
What's it going to take to make a bold space effort a reality again??? I think space exploration is vitally important, not only for the expansion of human knowledge of the universe, but also for more mundane reasons -- preeminently national security.
This is true. We (JPL) went to the Smithsonian and retrieved the spare Voyager dish they had to be used as the main dish for the Magellan spacecraft.
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