NASA gives green light to Hubble rescue

Alan Boyle Science editor • Profile • E-mail

GREENBELT, Md. - After years of debate, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin gave the go-ahead on Tuesday for what could be one of the space shuttle program's most dramatic missions: a final repair visit to the Hubble Space Telescope.

"We are going to add a shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope to the shuttle's manifest, to be flown before it retires," Griffin told agency employees here at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The news was greeted with a standing ovation.

The service call is tentatively scheduled for launch no earlier than October 2008, with Atlantis as the designated shuttle. The aim is to keep the orbiting observatory, which has provided thousands of dazzling pictures of the cosmos during its 16 years in orbit, in operation for at least seven years more.

During the 11-day flight, astronauts would install fresh batteries and fix the gyroscopes and guidance system on the $1.5 billion, 12-ton telescope. Those are Hubble's most vulnerable components, and without their replacement, Hubble is thought to have only two or three years left before it quits working.

The repair crew will be headed by shuttle commander Scott Altman, with rookie astronaut Gregory Johnson serving as pilot. Other crew members include veteran spacewalkers John Grunsfeld and Michael Massimino as well as first-time space fliers Andrew Feustel, Michael Good and Megan McArthur.

Spacewalkers would install the Wide Field Camera 3 and the Cosmic Origin Spectrograph, which would improve Hubble's observing capabilities by at least a factor of 10. They also would try to repair the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, which stopped working two years ago.

After the morning announcement, Griffin told reporters that the "cradle to grave" cost of the servicing mission was estimated at $900 million: half a billion dollars to keep the Hubble team in operation, $200 million for new instruments, $100 million for components such as an extra shuttle fuel tank and solid-rocket boosters, and another $100 million for shuttle processing.

Hubble mission's ups and downs
Originally, this fifth Hubble servicing mission had been planned for 2004 — but that plan had to be changed in 2003, when the shuttle Columbia and its crew were lost due to damage done by flying foam insulation shortly after launch.

In the tragedy's aftermath, then-administrator Sean O'Keefe decided against sending a shuttle to the space telescope because of safety concerns — and particularly because crew members could not seek refuge in the international space station if Columbia-style damage ruled out the shuttle's return to Earth.

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Mission planners looked into sending an autonomous space robot to do the repairs, but that idea was nixed last year after the National Academy of Sciences said sending a shuttle was the better option.

When Griffin took NASA's top post last year, he signaled that a shuttle mission might be considered for Hubble's repairs — but only if the shuttle fleet was proven safe, and only if there was a way to rescue the crew in the event of another Columbia scenario.

He met with other NASA managers on Friday for a final debate on the Hubble servicing mission's pros and cons. Griffin was swayed by the fact that the past two shuttle missions were trouble-free, and also took account of the progress being made on methods for inspecting the shuttle for damage and possibly repairing damage while in orbit. For instance, a procedure to put spacewalkers on the end of a shuttle inspection boom was successfully tested during Discovery's flight in July.

"We had [the capability for] inspection, we had repair, we had the ability to get the astronaut to the repair site … so we felt that we were in pretty good shape," Griffin explained.

The mission plan also calls for another shuttle to be placed on standby for launch, to rescue the Hubble crew members in the event that their shuttle couldn't return to Earth. To provide safe-haven capability, the shuttle would be loaded up with enough supplies to stay in orbit for 25 days, Altman said.

Griffin told MSNBC.com that many of the details of the rescue mission still had to be worked out, but the leading scenario calls for astronauts to make their way from the stricken shuttle to the rescue craft during a series of spacewalks.

Griffin said the requirement for a potential rescue mission might delay some of the early launch-pad tests for the shuttle's successor, an effort known as Project Constellation. But he added that "we're certainly not in danger of slipping any major Constellation milestones."

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