Moon in, Mars in; Hubble out

[unixronin]

The Hubble Space Telescope has become collateral damage in the wake of President Bush's plan to send manned missions to the Moon and Mars.  Bush's plan calls for the Shuttle to be retired in 2010, with virtually all remaining Shuttle flights until then scheduled to be used to complete the International Space Station.  (One assumes, and hopes, that the plan also includes having a Shuttle replacement flying by 2010.)  As a side-effect of this plan and of safety requirements established after the loss of Columbia, all remaining Hubble servicing missions have been canceled.

The Hubble Telescope is expected to continue operating until 2007 or 2008, and is planned to be safely de-orbited in 2011 or 2012.  NASA plans to launch a more capable James Webb Space Telescope in 2011 to replace Hubble; no word yet as to what NASA plans to launch it on.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The design cycle for the Shuttle was, what, about 15 years? As far as I know, NASA does not currently have a Shuttle replacement project on the drawing board, because they haven't been given any money to develop one with. I really doubt they can come up with one from clean-sheet to flying status in six years, and certainly not on the kind of shoestring budget they're going to likely get out of Bush (unless he's planning to completely bankrupt the US during his term of office). This is, after all, what the DC-X project was about. (Yeah, that would be the DC-X project that got cancelled several years back.) I'm not even sure they could get a new disposable heavy-lift booster designed and flying in that timeframe. And to the best of my knowledge, a Titan-Centaur doesn't have near that kind of throw weight.

About the only ways I can see right now of the US having a Shuttle replacement flying by 2010 is if Jack Northrop and Burt Rutan go for broke and say, "OK, the government may not want to give Northrop Grumman any contracts, but if we build an SSTO hauler they'll HAVE to come to us for launch capability after the Shuttle is EOL'd," or if Lockheed Martin tells NASA and the Pentagon to bugger off and says, "The hell with you guys, we're going to build an SSTO to our specs, and it's going to WORK."

A privately-designed, privately-funded spacelift capability like these is feasible, though it's a hell of a short timeframe. Boeing has a working linear aerospike engine, for instance, that might be used as the basis for a conventional-takeoff orbiter.

Of course, it also would not totally shock me if the Jack Webb Space Telescope got cancelled. "There's no profit in basic science, which is all it would be good for, and anyway, we don't have anything big enough to launch it on."

[dirtynumbangel.livejournal.com]

Bush should be shot.

BIll Gates would be well-advised to throw a billion or so at someone who is building an SSTO hauler. World domination is obviously his goal, right? Once the shuttle is gone, he'd have a stranglehold on space travel.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but would YOU want to fly yourself or a valuable payload on a launch system made by Microsoft....? ;)

[dirtynumbangel.livejournal.com]

As long as they don't write the OS. The hardware for Xbox (which i presume is outsourced, correct me if I'm wrong) seems to be fairly reliable.

Yes, I know there's a huge difference betwixt a gaming console and a spaceship :P

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, aside from the CD/DVD drive in it that was scratching disks, and Microsoft denied there was a problem until the Japanese MADE them fix it.

Of course, I'm also told the damned thing weighs about twice as much as one each of every other game console on the market put together.