Re: The Hubble Space Telescope...

Leaf Fan opined

>Unfortunately many things changed after February 1.  Even the official
>position of the astronaut office at JSC is that astronaut lives will not
>be risked for an HST retrieval mission, i.e. the benefit of returning
>HST to Earth is not worth the risko of astronaut lives.  The risk is
>acceptable for servicing missions where the benefit is scientific knowledge.

>The HST Program did a study to determine what would have to be done to
>bring HST back to in the payload bay and while the study assumed
>Columbia, i.e. no external airlock, a return mission could be performed
>with an orbiter that has the external airlock, although additional work
>would have to be done (servicing hardware mods for HST to fit farther
>back in the bay).

>The current thinking is that some sort of propulsion module will be
>attached to HST to provide a controlled re-entry at the end of HST's life.

If NASA is going to delibrately change Hubbles orbit, why not do 2 burns and
boost into a 6,000km orbit and give some future generation the option of
retrieving it for the Smithsonian?

                         -ash
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