A Shuttle for Hubble

A National Academy of Sciences panel has recommended that, instead of preparing a costly $2b+ robotic mission to the Hubble Space Telescope that (if it flies at all) may arrive too late to save the facility, NASA should just go ahead with its original plan to dispatch a shuttle mission: NYT Story.

This is but one of the dozens of ways in which open-minded and politically forgiving scientists - including yours truly, natch - find themselves on the wrong side of this Administration. The article mentions in passing some NASA science missions that may be postponed if their budgets are affected: "other projects like the study of black holes and dark energy." What they are referring to here are the LISA, Constellation-X, and JDEM/SNAP missions.

LISA will detect the gravitational-wave signatures of colliding black holes in the distant universe. It represents the only near-term way to test Einstein's General Relativity in its strongest form, near black holes. If we care about learning anything about black holes, this is the way to do it.

Constellation-X will be the successor to Chandra and XMM-Newton; it will allow detailed investigation of accreting black holes in the distant universe, and will also be crucial for learning about the properties of neutron stars in our Galaxy (just ask Bob). If we care about the properties of the black holes that lurk in the centers of nearly every galaxy - and which are our universe's most powerful energy sources - then this is the way to study them.

JDEM/SNAP has been designed to reveal the next level of information about the Dark Energy that pervades our universe and is currently driving an acceleration of the cosmic expansion. There is no more important question for those seeking to understand the origin and destiny of our universe on the largest scales.

The shuttles are currently being prepared for launch next spring, when they will begin their final series of flights to "complete" construction of the International Space Station (ISS). Shuttle flights to Hubble have been judged marginally more risky than flights to the ISS. We're not talking about a dramatic difference, however - chances are, if we lose another shuttle, it will be to a launch failure (which is generically fatal) or to a new failure mode during descent and landing, not to the lost tile(s) problem which doomed Columbia (and which are potentially fixable at the ISS).

If the Administration nonetheless chooses, against the advice of the NAS panel, to forbid shuttle flights to Hubble, restrict shuttle flights to the ISS alone, and push forward with the robotic repair mission at the expense of LISA, Constellation-X, JDEM/SNAP, and like missions, then they will not just be choosing the ISS over Hubble. Rather, they will effectively be admitting that they judge the welfare of NASA's aerospace contractors to be more important than every major question in astrophysics.