But James, why spend the money to maintain the Hubble when it could eventually be used to send men to Mars? It's sooo expensive to do that, even the government knows it needs to start saving now! </sarcasm>

They are saying now that it's an electronics failure, and will likely result, worse case, in the loss of half the main channel's field of view, which could be compensated for by longer exposure times.

As a wild guess, due to the age of the electronics, I suspect a "tin whiskers" problem.

The Hubble has been superb, and I hope it will continue to function. Frankly, I'm deeply disturbed by the fact that NASA has chosen to abandon satellite servicing capability, which the proposed "replacement" for the shuttle system won't have.

I've been a fan of NASA all my life, but the planned CRV/Ares system (supposedly to replace the Shuttles) is in my view a horrendous boondoggle. It's "shuttle based" technology in that it uses (for the manned launcher) a single SRB with one extra segment as the first stage, then an Apollo style "capsule" for the manned vehicle. For the cargo launcher, it's basically Shuttle-C, the concept (regrettably never implemented) of replacing an orbiter with a cargo container and engine pod, which would give an enormous LEO cargo capacity.

The concept is insane in my view. It maintains the very labor-intensive aspects (and thus costs) of the current program, keeps the worst and most dangerous parts of the design, while throwing away many of the capabilities of the present system. I darkly suspect that the prime motive was political pork: they didn't want to terminate any of the current program.

IMHO, they should have gone for an improved shuttle, built with efficiency and ease of maintenance in mind. As things stand now, the Shuttles will be retired in 2010, while the CRV system is still in early development. There will be at least a five year gap between the last shuttle flight and the first manned CRV flight.

What really galls me is the supposed mission: This infrastructure is supposed to be used for new Lunar missions. However, it will require multiple launches for each mission, as well as massive changes to the earth-orbital CRV system. What galls me the most: The announced the "lunar mission goal" BEFORE they had come up with sound reasons for doing it! They also still don't have them. The moon can be explored and prospected very well by unmanned vehicles (similar to the current mars rovers) with the advantage that they can be directly remote-controlled in real time. They could operate for years, dozens of them, for the cost of one CRV-based manned mission to the moon.

For the idea of a lunar colony the CRV/Ares concept is near useless anyway: insufficient cargo capacity. For Mars? Utterly useless, cheaper and better to design a totally new vehicle with the possible exception of the cargo launcher (which i suspect will be cancelled long before it's built, the same way Shuttle-C was).

Finally, there is the promised "family" of shuttle-derived cargo launchers for heavier and heavier cargo. It looks great on paper: just add a beefed up ET and SRB, just move the liquid engines to under the tank, just stretch the tank, etc, etc. The problem is that in the real world, you can't just make changes like that. The engineering challenges are immense and time-consuming. For an example, look at the p;an to add one segment (to the current four) of the SRB in order to use it as the main stage of the CRV: It will take four years, at the earliest, to test launch an SRB with a DUMMY 5th segment, and only a ballast payload. Time to launch of a real 5-segment SRB? 2012, at the earliest. And this, engineering wise, is far easier then their other proposed changes. We are being sold a bill of goods.

Hi Big Guy

Oh No!! The Hubble

In a way it doesn

We know that every dollar spent on space research returns ten fold and yet congress and the