What does it say about our National Priorities that something NASA has been trying to fund for decades (A Hubble Replacement) and has had to hat in hand to rest of the world to pull off, are fucking surplus items from the NRO?!?!? And TWO! NASA doesn't have the budget for ONE, and the NRO accidentally over orders TWO?!?!?
On a related note, this is why I don't mind NASA getting out of the freight hauling business. It is a developed industry, with a growing market and client base, so private industry with a little help can step in and bring the efficiencies and innovation that they do to such areas. However, there is no to extremely limited money in the research and exploration business, which is why it should be the governments main focus.
That we value intelligence gathering, and that redundancy is important in that area? Look, maybe they'll haul these to NASA on some type of train. Happy?
I guess it's too bad NASA doesn't even have the vehicles to pick up and set up the gifts. So in essence, they'll be going from NRO storage to NASA storage. They won't do any intel gathering or science. Good job all around. :tech man: Maybe we can give them to the Chinese. That's the best bet for them actually getting into orbit and doing anything.
Something about the "stuff gets shot down or damaged and is vital to national defense" springs to mind here. Also, something about the "you're reality impaired" also flashes from your general direction (constantly).
Obviously, vis-a-vis the military having two. What I was referring to was the amount of around here about the U.S. space program being dead. This shows it's not. It's just been siloed.
Since we have no way to get it to orbit, or to service it of it does get there, it might as well as be a museum piece. Hubble was only useful because we could go up there and fix it or update it. That's gone.
This looks like a job for [insert heroic theme music]...Private Enterprise! Because, after all, there's no other nation on Earth with spaceflight capability...
It is. The problem is that we needed an orderly transition from the shuttle to private industry. We didn't get that. As for other countries, I hardly see the US handing over top secret spy apparatus to them to launch.
For that last part, during the Cold War, obviously not, but if the spy apparatus is used primarily to monitor things like terrorist cells and Iranian nuke plants, some sort of coalition of nations with the same interests might be workable.
According to a NASA employee I know, this is a mixed blessing. NASA has zero dollars to do anything with it. They don't have the money to put the instruments it needs into it, or launch it, or do anything with the data it would produce. If Congress doesn't allocate new money for it, the only way the scopes can ever be used is if NASA takes the money from some other program. I'm betting something gets cut. Probably from the manned program, or one of the interesting planetary missions.
Give em back to NRO with the instructions to put the necessary instrumentation on them, and let NRO handle the astronomy. Such science is both intelligence gathering and cartographical necessity.
That might be nice, except Russia and China are supporters of the terrorist and terrorist backing regimes, providing them with tech, support and info. That leave only Europe, and I'm not sure they even have the capacity to launch it. They certainly have no capacity for orbital repair and/or upgrades.
The Multiple Mirror Telescope was made out of Air Force leftovers originally IIRC. Nice trivia question: How many mirrors does the Multiple Mirror Telescope currently have?
So if this sucker can see a dime in hi-res sitting on the top of the Washington Monument from orbit, could it, say, break out a terrestrial-sized planet in the habitable zone around a nearby G-type? Of course, a big Interferometry array would be even better, so we could break out stuff like chlorophyll lines, which might imply green leafy things...
I suspect if it was sensitive enough the dim light of a planet around a star, the light from the star itself would damage the scope. Apparently that's true of Hubble, that they have to be really careful where they point it. For all the examples of its abilities, if they actually did point it down at Earth the daylight ground would be so bright it would burn out the CCD. If we are talking random ideas for what to do with the hardware though... Rather than cutting an interplanetary mission, make a big old school planetary probe using one of these as the chassis. Imagine for example being able to map the surface of all the Jovian moons in amazing close up detail.
The Falcon could deploy them. If the Falcon 9 can't do it, the forthcoming Falcon Heavy would. In fact the manned dragon could be usee for further servicing missions on the existing Hubble.
Dragon lacks the EVA capability necessary for such repair work. Future SpaceX designs being contemplated may include such capability if regular demand for such is seen as necessary.
For EVA work you need either an airlock (shuttle, ISS) or the ability to depressurise the cabin, open the door, close the door, and repressurise. This was done with apollo, gemini, mercury etc... The disadvantage is everyone must be spacesuited, and you can't have any items onboard that can't withstand vacuum. I don't know whether Dragon as it stands could use the total-depressurisation method, however, it should not be terribly difficult for Spacex or NASA to produce an airlock module to attach to the capsule. The existing Falcon 9 rocket, capable of putting around 10 tons in LEO, can loft the Dragon and possibly might be able to loft a version modified with an airlock for EVA work... if not, the Falcon heavy (50 tons to LEO) could certainly do it, with payload to spare. Depending on how long they want to keep hubble around, Spacex rockets could also be used to reboost it if need be.
