In their never-ending war on actual science, the 1600 Crew has decreed that Hubble Must Die. It doesn't matter that the Hubble, after getting off to a rocky start with a bad mirror, has been one of the most successful and visible accomplishments, of NASA and our space program, the Hubble is no longer going to be supported.
In a midday meeting at the Goddard Space Flight Center on Friday, two days after President Bush ordered NASA to redirect its resources toward human exploration of the moon and Mars, NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe told the space telescope's managers that there would be no more shuttle visits to maintain it.
Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and also a member of the advisory committee, said, "I think this is a mistake," noting that the Hubble is still doing unique work at the forefront of science.
The Hubble's demise will leave astronomers with no foreseeable prospect of a telescope in space operating primarily at visible wavelengths.
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Floating above the Earth's murky atmosphere, the Hubble, which was launched in 1990, has had the ability to see into the depths of space and time with unprecedented clarity, glimpsing galaxies that were under construction when the universe was half its present age and helping cosmologists chart the way the mysterious "dark energy" has gradually taken over the expansion of the universe.
The unwritten sub-text here is that the Hubble Space Telescope helps to prove, by its very unbiased observations, that the Universe is more that 4000 years old, or what ever crack-pot literal interpretation that the bible slaps on it. Anti-scientists, coupled with their co-conspirators the dogmatic religious right have no desire to have real science being done anywhere. From potentially life-saving stem cell research to that creationist horseshit that they are trying to force into textbooks and classrooms, they want nothing more that a return to a rerun of the Dark Ages. Scary isn't it? I hope I'm not right.
Oh, and that whole manned space flight thing, the 1600 Crew ought to just write the check to the Aerospace contractors now, and quit acting like they want to accomplish something besides enriching campaign donors. For a billion dollars in that industry you get two computers, a server and a copy of some CAD program with a consultant to run it. A year from now, they fire the consultant, sell the computer equipment, take a tax write off and head to Barbados for the winter to count earnings. Jeebus.
posted by Jo Fish on 01.18.04 at 02:22 AM
Comments:
The cancelled the 4th scheduled mission to replace gyroscopes that are failing, so it is unlikely that Hubble will last its full life cycle. Some wanted a 5th mission to add another sensor.
There has been no announcement on whether the next telescope in the series will be launched.
They continue to waste money on Star Wars which multiple simulations have shown cannot work within the specified parameters because there simply isn't enough time between launch , detection, and impact. Nor can they explain why someone would go to the trouble of building a missile when they could simply send a weapon on a container ship.
This is step one in defunding NASA. Every time Dubya congratulates a program for doing something right, his administration turns around and destroys it.
posted by: Bryan on 01.18.04 at 04:13 PM [permalink]
But there is great progress! The Adminstration has officially admitted that the climate changes! I'm not quite sure if they've admitted, yet, that it's caused by human activities. And they certainly aren't actually doing anything about it. But they're ahead of Senator Inhofe (Chmn., Environment and Public Works), who still thinks it's all a hoax. so what more do you want?
posted by: Invigilator on 01.19.04 at 07:05 PM [permalink]
So much for using real science to study the universe.
