In many senses I agree with Weatherc's statements. But consider this: the party of fiscal responsibility wants to junk a functioning telescope, and a pair of instruments that were supposed to go into it in the next mission (and which are partially if not wholly built), all so we can try to build some unproven technologies to get people to the Moon. Shouldn't we be trying to save money elsewhere to pay for what will prove to be a HUGE money pit? Say, how about NOT spending it on a quagmire in Iraq? Oh, silly me... this is just like Viet Nam all over again... we had a war AND a trip to the Moon. Is this the limit of Bush's Vision Thang?
Let's examine this a bit more.
The HST was planned to be brought back (or deorbited) sometime after the next servicing mission. That would, theoretically, be when JWST is about ready to be put in orbit. Great. But, we have a small problem with shuttles, so now we can't service HST. The govmint wants to attach small rockets to it to boost it DOWN to earth, preferably into a convenient ocean. That's a bit ahead of schedule, and if we can't have shuttles, then that's the way it is. But why not boost it UP a bit further until we DO have a capability of getting folks up to refurbish it? I don't know the costs involved, but if we're going to put people back in space, we're going to have to have an Earth-to-LEO capability sooner rather than later.
Okay, but for the sake of argument, we' trash HST for political reasons (using the very real reason of safety as a guiding motive), and start working on getting folks to the Moon. Lots of pork barrel project contracts get let, which incidentally go mostly to Texas, Florida, and other Blue States. Three or four years go by, billions of dollars are spent on R&D, and we find out that we don't have enough folks rising through the ranks from the American public school system (mostly because "No Child Left Behind" initiatives have replaced math and science with religious indoctrination in the schools). We're in a world of hurt, the space program is getting broken faster than we can fix it, and why, well lookie here... remember back in the good ol' Dubya days? why yes, he let in all these immigrants. Some of them might be employable as engineers and what not. But, here's the bigger blow -- let's ship all them high-tech jobs over seas and let the lower-paid engineers in other countries do all the tech work for us. It works well -- they get good jobs, the companies get to rack up record profits (which they funnel into political contributions to keep the gravy train going), but a funny thing happens on the way to the Moon. Lots of money being spent on Earth, but we don't have a Moon base and Mars missions are still robotic.
Set against that scenario, I guess you're all right -- losing HST is a drop in the bucket. It's also a grim reminder that politics has no business defining science, but apparently business and politics trump science concerns.
I find this all so disheartening, even as I hope against hope that we really WILL get back to the Moon and Mars. As a long-ago member of the original Mars Underground, I used to think we'd be on the Moon by now and planning trips to Mars. Sadly, I think that by the time our children grow up, they won't have those two goals, or a chance to participate in such exciting ventures as HST or JWST.
On another topic, there IS certainly a challenge coming to the idea of space astronomy from the ground-based adaptive optics people, but even the highest, driest observatories with the most cutting-edge systems still have bad days far more often than an orbiting platform does. The systems are getting better all the time, and I fully expected that by the time HST was ready for its normal de-orbiting (rather than this politically-based manipulation of science for political gain), AO would have surpassed what it could do. It probably still will -- and the deorbit of HST will likely spur those efforts on. So, science won't totally lose -- but it's still a major disappointment to see a working observatory and the people who worked so hard on it be thrown around for one man's ambition to keep his throne.
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