We're going to have another Hubble up in 2027 if all goes well: the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, or Roman for short. Originally known as WFIRST, it's a 1.6m-primary-mirror declassified Keyhole spy sat similar to Hubble, but with a shorter focal length and thus a much wider field of view (around 1/4 square degrees, roughly the area of a full moon). Still, its angular resolution will be comparable to Hubble thanks to a much higher-resolution, 300 megapixel imager. It's a visible/near IR instrument, so won't replace Hubble's near UV capabilities. Also, Roman won't have a traditional spectrograph on board. What it will have, however, is a novel coronagraphic instrument for imaging and spectrography of companions of nearby stars (brown dwarfs and gas giants in wide orbits -- still no imaging exo-Earths or even exo-Jupiters, alas).
“Digital camera sensors are inherently sensitive to infrared light, which would interfere with the normal photography by confusing the autofocus calculations or softening the image (because infrared light is focused differently from visible light), or oversaturating the red channel. Also, some clothing is transparent in the infrared, leading to unintended (at least to the manufacturer) uses of video cameras”
I expect NASA to do the calculations, but I would expect boosting the orbit of an existing working telescope would be much cheaper than building a new one ANDALSO putting it in orbit. There are relatively few telescopes outside Earth's atmosphere; keeping Hubble running seems like a good idea.
It's also doing things like swapping out reaction wheels and dying hardware of various kinds.
And as soon as you're doing that, you're probably using humans. And then because the cost is already so big, you might as well replace some instruments, too...
To be fair, making a robot to fix a specific kind of dishwasher whose internal layout is known and where fixes involve replacing parts already meant to be replaceable is probably a lot easier than one that can fix any dishwasher. Same with sorting trash.
The big point here is that this boosting and potentially servicing mission isn't being pitched by NASA. It's a SpaceX proposal connected to their entirely private program to develop EVA capability for Dragon and to eventually test Starship's ability to support crews in space. Thus for NASA it would likely be cheaper than if they were asking for it.
So the reason we likely won't see a robotic servicing of Hubble (from this) is that it doesn't have as much relevance to SpaceX's goals with Polaris Dawn as just docking, orbit raising and maybe crewed servicing does.
Agreed, technologically you can make a robot that can fix a dishwasher that would be specially designed to be repairable.
But if you can't get dishwasher manufacturers to produce repairable dishwashers, then it's all for naught - we have failed as am industry.
Amd if you can get manufacturers to produce repairable dishwashers, then probably those dishwashers can be repaired by random joe opening a repairshop.
And its not clear why we need a robot.
Thats why our industry is a joke, we were promised robots will deliver our food, but instead robots micromanage indentured servants.
My city removed all plastic recycling bins several years ago in favor of using trash sorting robots after collecting mixed waste.
The robots could pick sort 70% effectively while the population of humans after years of training was stuck at 50%. I imagine the efficiency of the robots may even have increased a bit since then.
You missed crucisl detail- humans were sorting for free, owner of robots is paid.
Another crucial detail: producers of platic packaging engage is deliberate fraud to conflate recycleable and non recycleable plastic. Plastics that say 'commonly recycled' may be unrecycleable anywhere except a leading technology lab.
Another detail: massive fraud in recycling industry:
>Where can you find another non-linear servo-mechanism weighing only 150 pounds and having great adaptability, that can be produced so cheaply by completely unskilled labor?
It's also proposed to be funded by Isaacman. Reading between the lines, he's probably planning to go to space personally and fix the Hubble. Which is kinda a vanity project at that point, but hey, I'll take it.
The original Hubble servicing mission where apparently more expensive than building and launching 3 replacements. Those missions where less about cost than actually testing repair capabilities and some publicity.
ALL shuttle missions were more expensive than launching 3 separate expendable missions. (on top of the launch costs themselves, the payload had to be 'upgraded' to human safety requirements. So things like deployment squibs had to be made triple redundant (instead of double) and had to be completely disconnected from a power source until released from the shuttle bay. (and of course, that power connection system had to be triple redundant... the complexity fed on itself) and that's before you get to the paperwork and the safety reviews... And you had to staff up three launch teams, instead of two... you needed a full team at Johnson in addition to the Cape and your own site. And the launch teams needed to be onsite for the full shuttle mission and rehearsals, and jerked around by the incessant shuttle schedule slips. The costs just kept piling up. )
It takes about fifteen years from concept studies to launch for a Hubble-class space telescope. I guess you could make it in ten if you just chose to replicate Hubble's instruments and if NRO had another spare Keyhole stashed somewhere...
The NRO donated two and parts for a third to NASA in 2012. One is apparently being used for the Roman Space Telescope, which would seem to leave another and a primary mirror of a third still unused.
Perhaps if we keep it in orbit long enough, robot technology will improve to a point where we don't need to send any humans to service the Hubble anymore.
Also, servicing the Hubble is exactly the kind of mission that commercial space ventures can use to showcase their tech. Relatively low risk, high media exposure. A pretty good practice ground, really.
By the time robotics advances to that point, it would most certainly be economical to manufacture a significantly more capable replacement telescope, wouldn't it? As far as I know, there isn't any particularly exotic materials in Hubble, it's just a big heavy precision manufactured (lol) object.
Even right now, it seems like the real cost of a falcon heavy launch is relatively low. We would get more science for the money by mass producing several higher performance telescopes with fewer reliability requirements.
A new hubble-scale space telescope is a multibillion dollar project - Hubble cost about $7 billion in 2022 dollars at the time of launch, JWST cost $10 billion.
By comparison, a manned servicing mission would likely cost in the mid hundreds of millions, or about 1-10% of the cost of a new telescope. It's unlikely that a one time injection of cash would buy much additional functionality for future satellites. By comparison, buying an extra few years before you need a proper replacement satellite would allow you to build a substantially better telescope at the same annual funding rate, or build the same telescope at a lower annual funding rate.
Things only cost that much per unit because they are one-offs. The trick to saving pots of money is to build duplicates, which will not incur research, design, tooling, test rig, etc., costs.
The other problem with these is the big super high quality optical mirrors. Going to a production line with those would be really interesting! I don't think you'd get a big enough economy of scale to mass produce them in a just-in-time pipeline though.
Once you've designed and built the grinding machine (I saw a picture of it, it fills a special room) you've done most of it. Same for the custom test rig.
SpaceX shows what happens to costs when you re-use designs and tooling.
True but there's also decreasing marginal utility for each duplicate. A second telescope in any given class would be awesome but it's always going to be less groundbreaking and useful than the first one.
Well if we had built a warehouse full of Hubbles, then launching a duplicate would make a lot of sense, but we didn't and now the cost of making a replacement after all the custom tooling and talent has been lost is just as expensive as the first time around.
The next gen space telescopes are already being planned. It just takes a long time to get them completed. In the mean time, we have a working telescope. We should just let it die and not be used while we wait for the next to come about?
Older telescopes can still contribute to science in parallel, too. Even terrestrial telescope time is booked years in advance. More scopes means more time for secondary pursuits, hands-on time for more junior astronomers, observations for more speculative theories, etc.
Of course, the cost tradeoff is quite different. All I'm saying is that a telescope, ground or space, does not suddenly become irrelevant because it's not the latest and greatest, so the expected value of the Hubble may remain positive after newer scopes are launched.
Each new space based platform also is built to see different parts of the spectrum. Hubble happens to be mainly visible. It is not irrelevant just because JWST is now active. To the contrary, they are combining images from each platform as a composite because they see different things for the same objects.
There would be no purpose of launching a new visible spectrum space platform unless it is going to seriously dwarf the size of Hubble. Hubble can already be upgraded with new sensors, and has. Which is part of the reason Hubble remains relevant. Hindsight being 20/20 and all, JWST learned from Hubble's need for contact lenses, which would be assumed to follow for whatever next is.
The proposed "better Hubble" that would launch in the 2040s is projected to cost $11 billion. That's a fair few servicing missions; it sounds like we can probably afford to do both, and if so, why not? Keeping Hubble around doing science longer is still useful even with a successor planned.
Since Hubble is at the upper range of LEO which made shuttle missions difficult, I've always wondered if they could make it slow down enough to lower its orbit more easily accessible for orbiters where part of the refurb is to refuel it so that it could get back to operating orbit.
Not to mention that NASA doesn't have the kind of blank check budget that the military has (by a longshot) — in a budget overview they may have to cut service for old projects to even get research on new projects funded.
when it comes to something like this you are forgetting the government redtape involved in building a new one is likely a bigger cost than the actual engineering building and launching.
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I wonder what we'd get instead if we dumped equivalent or slightly more resources into a new telescope, instead.