Chemical Engineer <cheme...@gmail.com> wrote: Condemning the shuttle program is like condemning jet fighter aircraft & > bombers now that we have drones to do the dirty work.
No, it is like condemning the F22 Raptor because that airplane was too ambitious, it tried to do too many different missions, and it costs way too much. The history of military aviation is filled with cost overruns and badly designed aircraft. Without the shuttle & crew Hubble would be a piece of space junk. > As noted, it would have been cheaper to abandon it as space junk, and launch another. Sending the Shuttle to fix it was a publicity stunt. *That mission alone* cost more than a replacement, never mind the whole Shuttle project. It is not surprising that a new Hubble would have been cheap. The Hubble is similar to the spy satellites the U.S. has been launching for decades. This is a mature technology with lots of experienced people. Unfortunately, when they were designing the Hubble, they ignored many of the lessons of the spy satellite business. The spooks contacted them and offered to help, but the designers blew them away. That is one of the reasons the Hubble had a bad lens and other problems. It was a fiasco in many ways. It was also overrun by academic politics, which degraded performance. Much of the design and operation was focused on preventing junior-level astronomers, staff or -- God forbid -- members of the public from making important discoveries, by locking up, restricting or degrading the data. Before the Hubble, a junior astronomer made a major finding by looking through the raw data. She got to it before the big-gun, well established experts got a chance. So they vowed to prevent this by structuring the whole project in the Mushroom Management Mode: keep your employees in the dark and feed them manure. Again, see the book "Hubble Wars." - Jed
