The Hubble: All may not be lost.

From the Washington Post today.

NASA engineers have taken a successful first step in showing they could service the Hubble Space Telescope using only robots, implicitly challenging NASA headquarters' insistence that Hubble will have to be abandoned because the controversial $470 million mission is too expensive and too difficult.

In an unpublished March 28 letter marking the end of a "preliminary design review" of the robotic proposal, review chairman Dennis B. Dillman, a NASA engineer, complimented Goddard Space Flight Center's Hubble team for an "extremely successful" presentation. "Congratulations are due for reaching this milestone in such [a] short time," the letter said, urging "robust support" in "resources and staffing" for the Hubble team.

The letter was completely at odds with the Bush administration's determination to abandon the mission, and the Hubble controversy seemed certain to come up during Senate confirmation hearings today on President Bush's nomination of Johns Hopkins University physicist and engineer Michael D. Griffin to become NASA administrator.

Of course Bush doesn't want things floating around up in space. From there you can see that the Earth isn't flat.

I'm still not sure where I stand on this question. Obviously I would like the Hubble to continue on taking pictures indefinitely, but if the technology just isn't there to manage the repairs, it's a waste of precious funding. Also, we're getting closer to the launch of the next generation space telescope which will allegedly put the Hubble to shame. It might be time to start focusing resources of all kinds on that launch and let the Hubble drift away gracefully after a brilliant science career.

The third generation will allegedly include plans for a permanent, fixed telescope on the far side of the moon. Far larger than the Hubble and more stable, it might finally get close up shots of earthlike planets orbiting distant stars.

The Hubble has been a miracle for science, but nothing lasts forever. If they can put a mission up with a high probability of success, then I'm all for it. But if it's a desperate stab in the dark, then maybe we are better off driving Hubble into the ocean and just moving on to the next big thing.