Steve Quayle News Alerts

February 17, 2004
By Kathy Sawyer, The Washington Post

While the Mars rovers are getting most of the headlines these days, the U.S. space agency is embroiled in an increasingly scrappy controversy over the demise of the Hubble Space Telescope - which, with luck, will not occur until at least 2006.

At issue is whether NASA should send astronauts aboard the space shuttle on a mission to service the telescope. Last week, three NASA headquarters officials offered reporters forceful arguments against doing so. They were responding, in part, to pro arguments that have been advanced by an unidentified engineer whose studies astronomers have been distributing and which was described in the New York Times.

And those arguments were made in response to NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe.

Last month, O'Keefe said he had reluctantly decided against a fourth space shuttle mission to service and maintain the celebrated observatory, because the shuttle program cannot meet rapidly enough safety requirements imposed after last year's loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven.

But a legion of Hubble advocates has mounted an increasingly aggressive campaign to reverse the decision. They include far-flung astronomers who have used the telescope to revolutionize their field, as well as many at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., where the telescope's control room is, and at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which manages the research.

The "save the Hubble" movement has been collecting signatures and technical suggestions on the Web and is attracting growing interest in congressional offices, where members are about to begin hearings on the administration's new space budget. The budget embodies President George W. Bush's proposed new long-term goalsto return robots and humans to the moon asa stepping-stone for eventual settlement on Mars.

In the past, "the administration has cited the servicing of the Hubble as a major justification for sending humans into space," said a congressional source familiar with space issues. "Now we're basically saying there's no way to do it safely? It calls into question our ability to embark on this multi-hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars initiative." A spokesman for Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-Utica), chairman of the House science committee, said the Hubble decision "is certainly one of the top issues that the chairman wants to hear more details about."

The thrust of the Hubble advocates' argument in favor of sending astronauts back for the fourth shuttle servicing visit is that NASA's safety rationale does not hold up.

The servicing mission "will be at least as safe as shuttle flights to the International Space Station," said the engineer's analysis, which is posted on the Internet. A flight to the telescope "requires few, if any, unique capabilities to ensure safe flight beyond those developed for flights to the ISS." The shuttle fleet has been grounded indefinitely, pending compliance with the new safety requirements. All shuttle flights on the manifest until 2010 - when the administration has called for the fleet to be retired - have the space station as their destination.

O'Keefe has indicated repeatedly that his decision on the Hubble is final. But in response to requests from Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and others, he recently asked retired Navy Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., who headed the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, to review the matter.

The astronaut refurbishment could prolong the Hubble's life for several years, telescope managers say. Without it, the failure of its aging gyroscopes and batteries could affect its usefulness as early as 2006, although officials sayHubble engineers are working on techniques that would enable it to do research with diminished capabilities for as much as 18 months longer.

In a teleconference last week, William Readdy, NASA's chief of spaceflight, said that O'Keefe hadfully considered all the arguments offered in the engineer's analysis. "The white paper, while well-intentioned, oversimplifies these complex, interrelated issues," he said. "... I think we'd beremiss if we accepted [the] additional risks andfailed to honor the spirit" of the recommendations made by the Columbia board last summer.

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