The Official Bell Tolls: With New NASA Budget, The Hubble Is Dead

The question is where is all the money coming from to fund this robot considering so much is being spent in Iraq?

So maybe we have to scrap pretty much every land-based telescope because their optics are older than ten years... some of them are ~100 years old!

I was not talking about land-based telescopes that need better optics, I was talking about future "space" telescopes that could see further than what Hubble has now.

Originally posted by tobyswansea
The question is where is all the money coming from to fund this robot considering so much is being spent in Iraq?

The American Tax payers.

A "fix it" mission would cost around 600 million to 1 billion, while it costs around 50 million to direct it into the ocean, the picked the right choice. It would be foolish to spend 1 billion dollars on the Hubble, there are better telescopes in the world then this, it is no longer "The Best", so in 2007-ish, it will meet its watery grave.

You people seem to be only pointing out all the dissappointing things out of this proposed budget, its raised by over 2% increase over the previous years.

I'm trying to find some of the good things about how much is going to what, but its not easy, considering that the pdf i got at Nasa.gov is 389 pages long. whew---heads gonna hurt after this one.

[edit on 8-2-2005 by Murcielago]

Does anyone know why NASA is paying an astronomicaly high amount of funds to launch a robot to de-orbit Hubble in the Pacific? Not to be callous, but in the extremely remote event of it landing on somebody's head, wouldn't it be cheaper to settle with the survivors?

Originally posted by Realist05
Does anyone know why NASA is paying an astronomicaly high amount of funds to launch a robot to de-orbit Hubble in the Pacific? Not to be callous, but in the extremely remote event of it landing on somebody's head, wouldn't it be cheaper to settle with the survivors?

The chance of it killing someone is very rare, but they dont want to take the chance of this school bus sized telescope going supersonic and having it smash into a building, Nasa doesn't need anymore blood on its hands.

Also, its that high because of the work involved, the hardware (robot) to do it, and then the software it will need and the area to impact, not to mention the most expensive part...The Rocket.

Also...A side note to all the people who love its pictures and think its the only thing we will have until the James Webb Telescope.
Read up on VERY LARGE TELESCOPE and LARGE BINOCULAR TELESCOPE, the first one is ESA funded, while the second one is Nasa. ESA's will be better then Nasa's, and Nasa's will be 10 times clearer then Hubble. So get over it, we dont need the Hubble. Both of these telescopes will be online before the Hubble takes the plunge.

[edit on 8-2-2005 by Murcielago]

I'm not sure where you got info that Prometheus info. Because on page 157 it clearly states its budget...and its not cancelled.

FY05 - 431.7 million
FY06 - 319.6 million
FY07 - 423.5 million
FY08 - 500.6 million
FY09 - 614.0 million
FY10 - 779.0 million
So according to Bush and Nasa its not cancelled.

Originally posted by Murcielago

Originally posted by Realist05
Does anyone know why NASA is paying an astronomicaly high amount of funds to launch a robot to de-orbit Hubble in the Pacific? Not to be callous, but in the extremely remote event of it landing on somebody's head, wouldn't it be cheaper to settle with the survivors?

The chance of it killing someone is very rare, but they dont want to take the chance of this school bus sized telescope going supersonic and having it smash into a building, Nasa doesn't need anymore blood on its hands.

Also, its that high because of the work involved, the hardware (robot) to do it, and then the software it will need and the area to impact, not to mention the most expensive part...The Rocket.

Also...A side note to all the people who love its pictures and think its the only thing we will have until the James Webb Telescope.
Read up on VERY LARGE TELESCOPE and LARGE BINOCULAR TELESCOPE, the first one is ESA funded, while the second one is Nasa. ESA's will be better then Nasa's, and Nasa's will be 10 times clearer then Hubble. So get over it, we dont need the Hubble. Both of these telescopes will be online before the Hubble takes the plunge.

[edit on 8-2-2005 by Murcielago]

That's the thing I think people don't realize. We now have the technology to all but eliminate the resolution loss in ground based telescopes that was once caused by the atmosphere by using adaptive optics. The two you mention have them (as an added point, the VLT is fully operational, I believe). The Keck observatory has been upgraded with them and many existing facilities have as well. These have been producing images of equal resolution to the Hubble. Considering that you could probably build 5 observatories on the scale of Keck for that $1B it would cost to save Hubble for another three or four years, it would seem more cost effective to do that instead.