What’s more amazing is that the NRO has multiple more capable telescopes in orbit as we speak and we’re celebrating that NASA doesn’t have to spend money to keep that old piece of hardware useful for a few more years. Which isn’t bad, don’t get me wrong, but it just feels odd that priorities are shifted so much towards black projects.

> What’s more amazing is that the NRO has multiple more capable telescopes in orbit as we speak and we’re celebrating that NASA doesn’t have to spend money

I have zero problem with the NRO's budget or its existence and mission statement, undoubtedly its data products are proving extremely helpful right now in a behind-the-scenes way stopping the Ukrainians from being overrun by the Russian army. In addition to the well publicized equipment (HIMARs, etc) provided by the US and NATO states there is certainly a large amount of data on russian armor movements, ammo dump locations, logistics depot locations etc being funnelled from the US into the Ukrainian military command.

Just because a project or budget is black doesn't necessarily mean it's useless or nefarious.

In addition to the above of course NASA should have a much higher budget. I would like it if they could spend it on things that aren't flying pork barrels like the SLS. If they want to launch huge heavy things to orbit, designing something in two pieces that can attach together and using two fully expendable Falcon Heavy launches right now would be a tiny fraction of the cost. Not even counting the theoretical capability of Starship.

> Just because a project or budget is black doesn't necessarily mean it's useless or nefarious.

Of course not, it does mean that we don't have the ability to know if it is useless or nefarious or not.

Theoretically the idea is you're supposed to elect trustworthy people with good judgment to the positions that sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee and other persons in the US government who approve the budgets of TS/SCI and similar programs....

In reality maybe this doesn't work so well.

Something like the Church committee would be nice every decade or so.

Snowden showed they desperately need some light to shine on them once in a while.

Otherwise intelligence agencies have a historically consistent tendency to get a little too laissez faire with people's right.

NRO is probably the most secretive of all of them, but I'm assuming looking at pictures of Russian tanks and Chinese missile silos all day isn't the most civil-rights threatening thing vs storing billions of peoples emails, text messages, and phone calls like the NSA.

False, though common, misunderstanding of responsibilities. The NRO is the operator/owner of the space asset. The NSA is (one of) the customer getting data from the NRO space asset. (along with many other sources)

Though I would bet good money that a vastly greater percentage of what the NSA does for traffic interception, storage and analysis is related to terrestrial based networks (or terrestrial-to-local wireless like LTE) rather than space based, these days.

There are also two "Stubby Hubble" chassis sitting in storage because they're so obsolete that the NRO just donated them. However there is no budget to actually be able to use them.

If the famously secretive[1] NRO can just donate that, imagine how far ahead their newer stuff is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...

[1]: founded in 1960, but only officially acknowledged in 1973 and then by accident.

I think one of those is currently being turned into the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, though I haven't heard about progress in awhile.

It's been renamed to the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope scheduled to launch May 2027.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...

Well colour me updated! That's nice to hear.

... imagine how far ahead their newer stuff is.

Trump gave the whole world a good idea how far ahead the newer stuff is when he tweeted an image from an NRO satellite. Estimated at ~10cm/pixel resolution.

Scott Manley published a great break down: https://youtu.be/JRLVFn9z0Gc

Go read _The Hubble Wars_.

It will make you angry. Aside from the mirror fault, there were a number of operational issues that Hubble ran into that the TLAs knew about (e.g., solar panel flapping, radiation around the Southern Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly resetting Hubble's computers, etc.) . . . and didn't tell anyone because of secrecy concerns.

> we’re celebrating that NASA doesn’t have to spend money to keep that old piece of hardware useful for a few more years.

I'm pretty sure that SpaceX is being paid for this. They are not a charity but a for-profit company.

Jared Isaacman offered to pay for the mission, depending on if it's feasible.

I'd love to see an xprize kind of award for design of a disposable, flat pack 1m space telescope. Get the unit costs down to <$1m (ground-based 1m scopes are $500k) and put 100 of them up into orbit and make time available for very low cost.

As this is operationalized you could incrementally increase the capability and specialty with each release.

I am pretty uninformed in this space, but would a swarm of smaller mirrors configured into a synthetic aperture work to make a larger scope? This could leverage mass manufacturing techniques to lower cost, be fault tolerant, etc?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis

For multiple individual telescopes to provide more telescope time, yes, but for multiple mirrors to act as one in the visible spectrum, it would be extremely difficult as they need to be aligned to a fraction of a wavelength. Maybe if they are mechanically attached to each other once in orbit it could work. See: ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomical interferometers.

For all practical purposes, the parent comment is describing at a gross level the design of the Webb : ) (not much cost savings in that direction...)

There's already several companies doing that kinda thing for telescopes that point back down at earth. For telescopes that point away from earth I don't think anyone wants to do it because there's not much $$ in it.

I've seen at least a few startups try similar kinda things ("let's launch a constellation of cheap satellites and rent time on them out!") and they flopped hard. My favorite tried marketing as a "cryptocurrency in space" thing (LMFAO)

I wanted to do a certificate authority in space that you could connect to as it passed overhead and get certs and signatures from it.

This wouldn't be a profitable enterprise.

What would you be looking for exactly tho? What are the advantages - what could be studied in this way? One million dollars is really low for space ready equipment no?

Access.

I spent about 100 hours on a shitty 11" Celestron last year learning all sorts of things about space and optics and image processing. I'm hooked even though the results are terrible. I can rent time on some big scopes in high places, but the results are still subject to all of the artifacts and attenuation of the atmosphere.

Putting up a large number of reasonably capable space telescopes could be a tremendous boon to space education and even science. Look at atmospheric transmittance charts, there are entire areas of the spectrum that we can't even see from the ground. Having all of that research piled up behind billion dollar hardware pipelines doesn't foster a lot of attention or momentum.

Access for learning and education isn't going to ever pay for engineering and launch costs. Plus, if you're really interested in actual science, there's 30 years of Hubble images available to work through. Crowd-sourced science would be a lot more useful filtering through that back catalogue than coming up with anything new to look for that's visible by something with much less power than Hubble.

Stable Diffusion for amateur space-telescope astronomy.

Generally, not for cubesats though, but irrelevant to disposable mirrors

a bunch of them together might be "crowdsourced" weather satellites.

Hasn't our recent history argued against "disposable" hard enough?

Disposable on Earth means sitting in a landfill. Disposable in space means burning up in the atmosphere. Ironically by not using disposable equipment you can end up cluttering the space even more because we still need to make advances.

With current space infrastructure, disposable is the only way to go while maintaining progress. As long as the hardware is optimized to fully burn up on re-entry it's acceptable at current scales.

For example, Starlink can keep unit costs low and focus on getting at least some functionality going while simultaneously working on next generation satellites. Since the satellites are somewhat disposable (expected to have an operating life of ~5 years), this approach doesn't lock them into a specific generation of satellites.

Eventually, we'll have enough hardware up there that it'll start being important to try to refurb/recycle, but that is not practical at scale right now, given that we're only starting to seriously explore things like mission extension vehicles, active debris removal, orbital refueling and satellite servicing.

Depends on the application. Starlink satellites are disposable (demisable). Not to say they shouldn't have stationkeeping to prolong the mission lifespan, just that there's no contingency servicing/maintenance plan if something goes wrong. They just return to dust.

When it's millions or billions of items? Sure.

Yup. Though--- I do wonder about the desire to keep it functioning at all costs. Servicing is expensive: humans and their consumables aren't cheap.

I wonder what we'd get instead if we dumped equivalent or slightly more resources into a new telescope, instead.

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).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...

https://roman.gsfc.nasa.gov/why_Roman_Space_Telescope.html

Why do they call it an infrared telescope when it doesn't see in the infrared spectrum?

It sees the near infrared. I expect they got that for free from the camera sensor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_photography#Digital_c...:

“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”

It does in near IR, but yeah, it’s as much a visible light telescope as an IR one.

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 AND ALSO putting it in orbit. There are relatively few telescopes outside Earth's atmosphere; keeping Hubble running seems like a good idea.

It's not just orbital boosting.

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...

A boost module can semipermanently attach itself and take over all the maneuvering functions with its own hardware suite.

Ha, found the practical engineer! I didn't think of that. Brilliant!

On the last Hubble service mission, they added a soft capture mechanism. They could attach a boost module to that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#/media/...

Or Kerbal Space Program player lmao.

I definitely did that once or twice, just send a small craft with some RCS thrusters and reaction wheels then attach it to spacecraft via The Claw

Yes, humans are needed until they’re not.

Once they’re no longer needed the cost of repair drops by 100x.

Musk’s android seems like a bit of a gimmick but hopefully he stirs up enough imagination in people that we get a few breakthroughs in robotics.

Then we can explore the entire solar system…build bases on Mars and the moons of Jupiter, etc without sending humans

we can't even get a robot to fix a dishwasher or to sort trash. Let alone am orbital telescope

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.

Interesting! Which city, and is there a writeup with more details?

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:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/18/uk-recyc...

Most european countries stil do separate recycling, and have much higher recycling rates than UK or US, which have mixed recycling.

I can't even get my dishwasher to clean my dishes. This is not the future I was promised.

The trick is let your dog lick them clean.

biological automation is always superior

>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?

—Scott Crossfield, US test pilot <https://quoteinvestigator.com/tag/albert-scott-crossfield/>

Yeah, many people think it’s impossible until someone else does it.

The game of Go wasn’t close to being won by a computer until DeepMind came along.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/9/11185030/google-deepmind-a...

Do they plan to do more manned missions to Hubble?

Hubble re-enters in 2037, and is useless because of orbital mechanics a few years before that.

I think it's unlikely the current reaction wheel system lasts to that ~2032 timeframe, let alone significantly beyond.

Of 6 wheels, 2 are working well, 1 is dodgy, and 3 have failed. 3 are required to keep orientation.

I thought they could now control it with only 2 reaction wheels [1]

[1] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/10543974.pdf

This proposal (by being part of Polaris) is implied to be manned as far as I can tell.

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.

Both he and SpaceX seem committed to expanding the capabilities of private spaceflight and private astronauts. If they are into it, why not?

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.

Which may or may not still be relevant.

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. )

As other's have commented, NASA has "free" telescopes donated to them by the NRO.

The next space telescope will be the Nancy Grace Roman telescope which is a wide angle telescope so not an exact replacement.

https://roman.gsfc.nasa.gov/

The longer term goal is the Luvoir telescope but its not yet been approved and will probably require significant R&D like JWST.

https://www.luvoirtelescope.org/

Sure. I'm not talking about the timelines of existing plans for new telescopes. I'm comparing ROI vs:

- mission to reboost and service Hubble in various ways

- launching a new space telescope mission

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.

True for now, but Starship, if full and rapid reusability is achieved, will radically change the economics of space missions.

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.

The universe is so big, and so many things to look at, I find it hard to believe we couldn't productively use 100 Hubbles.

100 Hubble's would be great but 100 Hubble's and nothing else would not be

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.

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.

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.

Terrestrial telescopes don't have nearly the degree of maintenance costs that a manned servicing mission in orbit entails.

If fixing your old terrestrial 0.5m telescope were going to cost more than a shiny new PlaneWave 0.5m, you can bet that you're going to replace.

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.

Because servicing it (beyond reboost) may be the same cost as launching something new that offers better performance.

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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/science/astronomy-decadal...

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.

Maybe not Hubble, but maybe the next gen?

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.

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.

> It's amazing to see a 32 year old chunk of hardware remain active and useful to this day. And projected to remain functioning for another 15 years.

With only a few billion dollars spent on maintenance, including five space shuttle servicing missions.

My stereo plays all day every day for over 40 years now :-)

Your stereo's electronics are also pretty well protected against radiation. That radiation has a habit of frying electronics (even rad hard ones) after a while.

So what? Scientific exploration costs money and I'm happy for my tax dollars to pay for this

Voyager is still going after about 46 years and about 14.7 billion miles from earth (and counting).

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

SOLID engineering.

Honestly Webb is way overhyped for what it is. Almost 8 times the mirror area of Hubble, three decades more advanced cameras, placed so far beyond any possible interference and it makes images that are at best twice as good and roughly at the same magnification. That photo of Jupiter was pretty disappointing in comparison.

With only limited yaw control and no articulation of any kind I was frankly surprised that it was able to see DART at all.

My understanding: what’s great about Webb is that it can take pictures in the infrared.

It has to be really cold to do this, hence the big complicated heat shield.

Infrared let’s us see things that are further away, because when something’s really far away it gets red-shifted down out of the visible spectrum into the infrared (due to expansion of the universe).

So it’s not really any better at imaging things that are close / in the visible spectrum like Jupiter.

You have to consider that JWST is working at much longer wave lengths than Hubble. So the resolution isn't much better than Hubble, if at all. Resolution of an optical instrument is limited by diameter over wave length. So despite its much larger mirror, it doesn't pull more resolution than hubble.

Where it excels at is, first looking at wave lengths so far invisible by any larger telescope. Hubble can't observe at those wave lengths and they are virtually invisible from earth, as the atmosphere basically absorbs any light at those wave lengths.

Also, it has almost 10x as much surface area than Hubble. So it will collect vastly more light than Hubble, as can be seen by the deep sky pictures available so far, taken in a fraction of time compared similar Hubble pictures.

The limited targetting control doesn't matter from a scientific perspective. There is a many years long waiting list for observations. During a year, the telescope is able to hit every spot on the sky, so the observations are just done in the order given by the telescope.

Ah fair enough, I hadn't considered the wavelength impact on resolution. That makes at least some sense.

> Hubble can't observe at those wave lengths and they are virtually invisible from earth

coughs in Spitzer

> The limited targetting control doesn't matter from a scientific perspective.

I would argue that it does matter in the case of specific events like the DART impact. Having it in its field of view was either extensive planning or dumb luck. I really don't see how it was too complicated to add one pitch servo, hell having a full robotic arm is even planned for LUVIOR.

They didn't create Webb to put better pictures as your desktop background. Saying it's "overhyped" because you don't understand what it's for is just peak internet, isn't it.

The media hyping people up for pictures of a scientific data collector that doesn't mean anything to most people is probably the definition of overhyped.

The point of the Webb telescope isn’t to take pictures! It’s to collect data. It can “see” way further into the early universe by examining infrared light, which Hubble cannot do.

I just assumed the general public isn't the main user of Webb. I figured infrared is more interesting to scientists than me. Why else would they have chosen that?

Maybe they'll figure out a way to translate the colours better for consumption.

You have to consider that Webb's time is highly competitive. Having another great telescope that can collect good days is Gold for science at large.

*good data