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HOUSTON - The premature termination of the Hubble telescope's mission
is dismaying, even heart-breaking. But even more appalling has been the
aftermath of the decision. While NASA made ghastly blunders in announcing
and explaining the decision to cancel a needed repair mission, the public
furor that has ensued is based on fundamental misunderstandings and misconception
mixed with posturing and politics.
Lost in all this senseless noise is a sober discussion of what needs to
be done now to maximize the future scientific value of the still-very-much-alive
space eye. And as NASA faces the challenge of responding to the new White
House "space vision" to fly safely beyond low Earth orbit, it
needs to preserve and widen its commitment to improving its own philosophical
approach to risk management -- a positive trend that lies hidden behind
the controversy over Hubble.
Heed lessons of Columbia
NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe recently released a lengthy defense
of the rationale behind canceling the repair mission cancellation rationale,
and even though it came out far too late, it deserves attention because
it makes very good points that are too widely overlooked.
In preparing the next shuttle mission, O’Keefe writes, “NASA
has uncovered a number of problems that had previously gone undetected,”
which has “deferred Space Shuttle launch milestones.” I wish
he’d just used English -– “has delayed the next launch”
–- but the point is valid.
As a result, after resuming assembly and servicing and resupplying the
International Space Station –- NASA’s priority project, involving
major foreign partnerships -– O’Keefe writes that “the
earliest NASA could launch a servicing mission to the HST ... would be
Spring 2007.”
That’s three years from now. Even if the mission was scheduled,
in the intervening years Hubble still faces a significant likelihood of
battery and/or gyroscope failure. In the same period, stand-alone tile
inspection and repair procedures must also be developed that would be
unique to a servicing mission.
“If any of the many elements do not develop as planned,” O’Keefe
writes, “the telescope may cease operations before a successful
mission could be mounted.” Hence the need –- already recognized
at NASA –- for exploring all automated servicing options.
Meantime, loading a new time-critical responsibility on the shuttle engineers
and managers would be a great leap backwards from the culture of higher
safety awareness that the Columbia investigation board urged NASA to implement.
The Columbia report, issued only last August, blamed the loss of the space
shuttle and the deaths of its seven-member crew on NASA's habit of relaxing
safety standards to meet financial and time constraints and warned of
future tragedy if the space agency's "broken safety culture"
continued.
As it is, return-to-flight planners already are under the deadline gun
of the faltering space station, with its creaky oxygen system and hiccuping
gyroscopes. It makes no sense to add another layer of pressure to "get
the bird in the air," no matter the shortcuts.
Real risks of Hubble mission
A lot of former astronauts, including some who worked on the Hubble, say
they would do it again, despite the risk. Ships are safe in harbor, goes
the macho mantra of astronauthood, but that’s not what ships are
for. One of them recited the famous two-century-old quotation from John
Paul Jones: “Give me a fast ship for I intend to sail in harm's
way.”
Such posturing (and posturing it is, since there is actually zero chance
that any of these volunteers would actually be tapped for the mission)
ignores certain factors. I don’t mind people stepping forward, and
I say, let 'em go, as long as they bring their own spaceship, too. But
when you talk about MY ship (as a part-owner taxpayer), I want my hired
experts to make the judgment call on letting it fly or not.
After all, we only have three space shuttles left. We need to protect
them a lot more than we'll need to protect the planned Constellation-class
expendable vehicles with an open production line. When Jones went into
harm’s way, he had a fleet (and active naval yards) and could afford
to loose a few ships. We can’t.
Some “leaked” memos from anonymous “NASA insiders”
allege the Hubble mission is actually safer than a space station mission.
(This despite the fact that the shuttle crew can actually take refuge
in the space station should they need to, and from there inspect and repair
their vehicle.) I’ve seen these reports and as a veteran of 22 years
at Mission Control in Houston, I don’t see any indications that
the authors have the slightest working familiarity with shuttle operations.
Hubble is in a near-equatorial orbit that requires launching shuttles
east over the open Atlantic, far from the emergency landing sites on the
U.S. East Coast that could save a limping shuttle bound for the station’s
orbit. And Hubble is almost twice as high as the station, presenting a
challenging propulsion task to return to Earth –- some hardware
or fuel supply problems that would merely annoy a shuttle at the space
station could doom it on a telescope mission.
Publicity and politics
NASA isn't blameless, of course. The space agency has painted itself into
a public relations corner with its hype of Hubble (false-color artwork
of the images included), and the impression that for all its undeniable
advantages, it is the only way to conduct astronomy.
Without Hubble, an inattentive reader might suspect from the propaganda,
humanity’s eyes on the universe will close. But observatories here
on Earth are advancing in capabilities on half a dozen technological fronts
-- even as their accomplishments often go unsung both by NASA and the
news media at large.
For example, the planetoid Sedna was not discovered from any of NASA's
space-based Great Observatories, but from Mount Palomar in California.
Yet NASA hosted the press release on its Web site devoted to the Spitzer
Infra-Red Space Telescope, whose main contribution to the discovery was
an upper limit on the planetoid’s size based on the fact that the
space telescope could NOT detect Sedna.
Nor is it unprecedented to shut down a working science satellite, despite
accusations such as the one from journalist Peter Dizikes in the Boston
Globe a few days ago: “Astronomers and historians of science alike
say they cannot remember any other time in modern scientific history when
the world's most powerful telescope was simply abandoned, without a better
one ready to replace it,” he wrote. He then quoted Harvard emeritus
professor Owen Gingerich as saying, "Usually other instruments are
there and taking over. ... You don't have this interim gap where you throw
away an instrument that is producing heavily in anticipation of something
else."
“Usually” is the operative word here, because (unlike Dizikes’s
interpretation) it doesn’t mean “always”. And in fact
NASA several years ago did “abandon” an earlier component
of its fleet of Great Observatories on safety grounds even though there
was no replacement payload. Failures in the Compton Gamma Ray
Observatory's stabilization system threatened an out-of-control fall to
Earth of particularly-dense structural materials, and based on a defined
standard of risk level, NASA made the unpopular decision to deorbit the
payload deliberately.
Dizikes expresses disbelief in O’Keefe’s explanation: “The
agency says its rationale is safety, but skeptics believe the Hubble is
being sacrificed to pay for President Bush's goal of sending astronauts
to Mars”, he wrote, without actually quoting anyone saying that.
Then in his summing up, he accepted this suggestion as proven: “Ultimately,
any choice between Hubble and a manned Mars mission is a choice between
two distinct modes of astronomical exploration,” he concluded. “Mars
presents a specific, long-term undertaking -- and an all-or-nothing gamble.
Hubble would provide a wider-ranging, more immediate, and steadier flow
of discoveries.”
Perhaps this is a foretaste of the politicization of the Hubble debate.
Dizikes has impeccable credentials as a technology journalist, but he
also recently wrote an article for ‘Salon’ about “What
Kerry Has To Do To Defeat Bush”. Making the Hubble decision a minor
key for political attack could well be one such tactic.
That’s a sure way to introduce further irrationality into an already
overheated debate characterized by lots of smoke and very little light,
which is an insult to the true mission of Hubble: To see things more clearly.
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