NASA should let a commercial mission save Hubble 

Jared Isaacman, the billionaire entrepreneur behind the recent Inspiration4 commercial space mission and the upcoming Polaris Dawn private space flight, would like to save the Hubble Space Telescope on his own dime. All he needs is for NASA to approve such a mission. 

However, according to NPR, some managers at the space agency, far from being excited, expressed concerns in emails obtained by the news organization.

The Hubble Space Telescope was one of the first and still is one of the most celebrated space observatories that NASA has ever deployed. It was launched in April of 1990 by the space shuttle Discovery. The telescope was designed to be periodically serviced by the space shuttle, which turned out to be very fortunate because NASA soon discovered, much to its chagrin, that the mirror was flawed, greatly inhibiting its usefulness.

The space shuttle Endeavour visited Hubble in December 1993 and installed, among other things, a corrective lens package that restored the space telescope to its full capacity. NASA conducted four more servicing missions to Hubble, the last being aboard the space shuttle Atlantis in May 2009.  

The scientific wonders that the Hubble Space Telescope has discovered are too numerous to mention. It has imaged everything from distant galaxies, nebulas and stars to objects within our solar system. But, if nothing is done, Hubble’s orbit will decay about the year 2034 or sooner and it will enter the Earth’s atmosphere. Its pieces will be scattered across land and sea, much as happened to Skylab in the late 1970s.

Since the space shuttle program was discontinued, the orbiters are no longer available to service the Hubble Space Telescope. That’s where Jared Isaacman’s proposal comes in.

Isaacman proposes that he and a crew of private astronauts take a SpaceX Crew Dragon to the Hubble Space Telescope. The Crew Dragon would be used to boost Hubble’s orbit to extend its life by several years. Also, the astronauts would perform a spacewalk to repair/enhance some of the components of the space telescope.

The sticking point seems to be NASA’s risk-averse safety culture. 

A Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission when the space shuttle was still flying was a meticulous and difficult undertaking. NASA astronauts practiced such missions for months before undertaking them. The shuttle would approach Hubble and take control of it using the Canadian-built robot arm. The arm would berth the telescope in the shuttle’s cargo bay, where the astronauts could get to it easily. After the servicing mission was complete, the robot arm would release Hubble and the shuttle would return to Earth.

The Crew Dragon does not have a robot arm or even an airlock. Astronauts on the SpaceX spacecraft would have to vent the atmosphere from the crew cabin entirely before opening the hatch. They would have to work tethered to Hubble before returning to the Crew Dragon.

Emails obtained by NPR suggest that some NASA managers can foresee scenarios in which spacewalking astronauts are killed, people servicing Hubble accidentally break the space telescope, or both. Needless to say, the private sector’s risk tolerance is a little more relaxed than NASA’s

Isaacman intends to take a crew on board a Crew Dragon on the Polaris Dawn mission to practice spacewalks using new EVA suits designed by SpaceX. The experience gained by that mission should indicate the possibility for success that a private Hubble servicing mission could have.

No reason exists to prevent NASA and Isaacman from sitting down, airing the space agency’s concerns and developing a plan for a Hubble servicing mission. With the end of the space shuttle era, it is not as if the space agency has a lot of options if it wants to extend Hubble’s useful lifespan.

On the other hand, it is probably past time that NASA start thinking of a replacement for Hubble. Hubble, as magnificently as it has performed, is based on decades-old technology. A more modern space telescope that can see in the visual light range would be a boon for astronomy.

A recent piece in the Next Big Future proposes making a SpaceX Starship into a space telescope. The Starship can accommodate a mirror 9 meters in diameter, versus Hubble’s 2.4-meter mirror. The article suggests that the cost of building and deploying such a space telescope would be $250 million to $500 million.

The secrets that such a telescope might extract from the universe are beyond evaluation.

Mark R. Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.