I got down to the part about charging people to take images with the Hubble, and started to laugh.

You know where those people get the money, don't you? While there are still a few private foundations floating about (Carnegie, for one), most US astronomers get their grants from the US government. In fact, currently astronomers who are awarded Hubble time can apply for grants to support the data analysis (and you don't even have to get time; there's a separate program for grants to analyze archival data). I don't see how adding another layer of bureaucracy will make it better, unless you think little kids donating their pennies will make a significant contribution.

The part about "draining NASA's budget" is delicious pickled red herring. The cost of one more already scheduled shuttle flight is nothing to what we're putting into the space station. No, what you have here is an abundance, possibly an excess, of caution on NASA's part, and one that I think bodes very ill for our proposed Mars program.

I think Powell's seriousness is shown by this sentence: But it is worth remembering that a permanent presence on the moon will provide a far better platform for a space telescope, and it is likely a telescope will be put there.

Indeed! And anti-gravity engines will be a lot better than these inefficient old rockets, so why don't we just stay on the ground until they're developed?

One of the things that's annoyed me over time has been that after all the squalling about the cost of getting things into orbit we still turn around and let the crap fall back into the atmosphere and burn up. Who do we have to smack to get their brain back on the rails? If nothing else, stuff in orbit represents raw material for future use that's already been boosted, already been paid for. It also is way more accessible than, say, the asteroid belt although I strongly suspicion that there's gold in them thar asteroid hills. Even if Hubble is shut down, it should be boosted into a higher orbit where it'll stick around for a while and that could be done robotically.

Before you guys put a lot of effort into these ideas, do a bit of research into whether or not the Hubble has been rendered obsolete by new revolutionary ground-based telescopy technology. I remember reading somewhere that new technology involving using fast computers to overcome the effects of the atmosphere had made ground-based telescopes more effective than the Hubble.

If this is true (and my memory could be faulty), it reminds me of the "Supercomputer Centers" that the federal government funded in the late 1980's, only to see them go largely unused because new computer technology made it easier for researchers to simply use their own workstations than deal with using a Supercomputer Center hundreds of miles away.

Marc Andreeson, one of the Netscape founders, used to work in one of those unused Supercomputer Centers. He apparently had enough free time on his hands to develop key early web browser software, so I guess the Supercomputer Centers weren't a complete waste of money...

...do a bit of research into whether or not the Hubble has been rendered obsolete by new revolutionary ground-based telescopy technology.

The answer: not yet. You have two factors here: the distortion of objects as the light passes through the atmosphere ("seeing"), and the absorption of certain wavelengths of light by the atmosphere.

Quite a lot of improvement has been done on the first problem with adaptive optics, which compares the image of a star with its ideal image on a moment-to-moment basis. However, it requires a (relatively) bright star within a certain small distance of the target object (which needn't be a star) to work. This is bad in places where there are few stars, such as the Hubble deep field.

The second problem is much more difficult, given that the absorption is due to water vapor (and other elements) in the atmosphere, which changes with time and temperature and other things. In principle, I suppose you could do a version of adaptive optics for this, measuring the water vapor column by observing the spectrum of a known source and comparing it in real time with its previously-measured above-atmosphere spectrum. This requires that 1) you have a lot of sources, for different regions of the sky, and 2) they not change over time. Might be a tall order. Right now, people make do with atmospheric models to adjust their data. Or they put telescopes on airplanes, as in the former Kuiper Airborne Observatory and the future SOFIA.

Note that this problem exists largely in the infrared; Hubble's instruments cover only a small part of the infrared, and there are new infrared telescopes going up. From what I've seen so far, they don't match Hubble's capability in that area (which is to say, the Spitzer telescope's wavelength range does not overlap with Hubble's, and the Webb telescope's instrumentation---which is still in the conceptual stage, I think---will not be as flexible as what Hubble has now).

You folks should listen to Angie Schultz. She knows what she's talking about. The whole idea of privatizing Hubble, which sounds good to libertarians, is, like most libertarian ideas, unworkable and preposterous.

I think we should pawn it off on the UN as a big fruitcake of reconciliation.

Meanwhile, we should up the timetable on the Next Generation Space Telescope.

Angie's undoubtably right about overcaution at NASA and lunar observatories. The first is a dead solid fact, and the second won't happen for a generation, and that's if we're very lucky.

All that said, if we take it as a given that Hubble is going to be abandoned anyway (no, that's not written in stone yet, but stick with me), why not see if either the private or NGO sectors want to take a shot at saving and/or running it? What's to lose? Is it preferrable to throw up our hands and watch it burn up?

Angie is correct, though I will add to her comments. Hubble beats ground-based instruments in two primary areas: 1) high spatial resolution over large fields of view and 2) wavelength coverage in regions absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere; namely, the ultraviolet.

What annoys me is not so much that Hubble is going to be abandoned but that Hubble plus a number of smaller missions are being lost all together. I work on a team that built an untraviolet spectrograph that was scheduled to go on Hubble in the next servicing mission. When the mission was cancelled, we were told by NASA HQ that we could propose to send COS (our instrument) up on another platform. Great, except that NASA has postponed funding for its smaller MIDEX and SMEX proposal cycles as well as pushing off implementation of already-funded space instrumentation projects to put all their eggs in the moon program basket.

Okay, so I'm tetchy because my group has gone from full funding through 2007 to out on the curb this July 1 and our instrument, the product of years' work, is now going to end up in that same warehouse where they put the Ark of the Covenant rather than in space, but really, I ask you: who's going to build the telescope on the moon in 2020 if you defund the instrument builders now and they all go into new fields?

I'm impressed that Steve's readership includes actual experts in current astronomical technology. Cool.

I guess my point is that just because letting the Hubble burn up SOUNDS stupid to a layman, that doesn't mean it automatically IS stupid. You need to actually know what's going on in astronomy to judge the value of the Hubble. Even if the Hubble remains useful, there might be even more effective alternatives.

Of course, sometimes what sounds obvious to a layman is actually correct.

The comment about at least leaving the Hubble up there as raw material for some future space development is interesting. I note that NASA has a habit of de-orbiting satellites when their "missions" are deemed "over" (instead of just leaving them up there.) Presumably there is a reason for this, like if we left them unattended, their orbit would eventually decay anyway, so it's better to bring them down in a controlled fashion. Or maybe they're concerned that it's shedding bits and pieces that could be a navigational hazard, so once it's done, drop it out of orbit.

Once again, what seems dumb may actually be smart, if you know the issues involved.