Closing Eye
The Hubble Space Telescope is going to die.
I've made my opinion known here. It's too bad that the Hubble will be eliminated, but America has other priorities right now that are more important. Getting the Space Shuttle fleet back into orbit, developing new technologies for space travel and orbital/extraorbital transit are more important than looking thousands of light years away.
The loss of the Hubble will be a profound loss for science, but it's the right decision for the country right now.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) -- With the moon on its horizon, NASA sees an increase in the 2006 budget proposed by the White House on Monday, but the 2.5 percent hike is not enough to save the Hubble Space Telescope.
Only $75 million in the space agency's $16.45 billion budget would go toward Hubble's future involving a visiting robot, and all of that would be used to develop a mission for steering the orbiting observatory into the ocean at the end of its lifetime.
I've made my opinion known here. It's too bad that the Hubble will be eliminated, but America has other priorities right now that are more important. Getting the Space Shuttle fleet back into orbit, developing new technologies for space travel and orbital/extraorbital transit are more important than looking thousands of light years away.
The loss of the Hubble will be a profound loss for science, but it's the right decision for the country right now.
1 Comments:
If you'll go back to read the whole post, I said that letting Hubble die is the right choice. If science and private investors want to pay to keep the Hubble alive, good on them! That's why SpaceshipOne and all of the other spinoffs are such a great thing, and even the Russians are starting to open up space tourism.
Hubble was nice while it lasted and gave some very pretty pictures (which have been sold and a lot of people have made a lot of money, though nowhere near what it cost to put the thing up there in the first place) but American tax dollars are better spent on manned spaceflight, space probes, et cetera that can give us some tangible benefits for real life.
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