Surprise NASA Press Event About Hubble And Commerce
Hubble Servicing
NASA
Keith’s note: According to a last minute advisory “NASA will hold a media teleconference today at 4:30 p.m. EDT, Thursday, Sept. 29, to discuss a new study exploring potential commercial space opportunities for NASA science missions.” But look who is participating. Let’s all speculate. A third private SpaceX flight with EVAs? Update: NASA, SpaceX to Study Hubble Telescope Reboost Possibility
Watch live at http://nasa.gov/live
Participants include:
- Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate
- Kathy Lueders, associate administrator, NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate
- Jessica Jensen, vice president, customer operations and integration, SpaceX
- Jared Isaacman, commercial astronaut and commander of Polaris Dawn
- Patrick Crouse, Hubble Space Telescope project manager, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
To ask questions during the teleconference, media must RSVP no later than two hours before the event to Alise Fisher at: [email protected]. NASA’s media accreditation policy is available online.
5 responses to “Surprise NASA Press Event About Hubble And Commerce”
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So what is preventing commercial space from say replacing parts over a multiple trips making Hubble more powerful/modernized, I guess?
Lack of knowledge about how or if this might be done is the limiting factor right now (thus this agreement). Hubble was designed to be grappled by the Canadarm from Shuttle. How could SpaceX replicate that? Could Dragon rendezvous with Hubble without causing contamination damage with its reaction control system? It seems likely that any upgrade/replacement parts would have to fit in Dragon, likely in the trunk. The reaction wheels and gyros are comparatively small, by comparison with the instruments, and seem to be important targets of opportunity for replacement.
The trick would be to carry instruments in the trunk and then find some way to grapple the HST. Maybe a telescopic grapple fixture also in the trunk? Lots of work to do to flesh out something like that but it isn’t conceptually impossible,
First step for any mission would be to restore the gyroscopes and maybe add a new RCS system. My idea is to permanently berth a cargo Dragon onto the HST’s base (shuttle-style berthing platform in the trunk) and use that as the work platform from which to do everything else.
Easy? No. As people are rightly saying, HST was never intended to be serviced by anything other than the shuttle; a lot of work would need to be done to prove this concept but it is a possibility worth exploring.
A Soft Capture Mechanism (SCM) – i.e. a docking port, was installed onto the back end of Hubble during Servicing Mission 4 (STS-125) in May of 2009. The purpose of the SCM was to allow something to latch onto Hubble and guide it to a controlled, but sad, deorbit. This same facility could be used by a Dragon to dock with Hubble. Perhaps the SCM might also be used to attach a combined propulsion / ACS system that could raise the orbit and maintain it.
Now, on the other hand, the if the JWST is supposed to be a replacement for Hubble, does continued Hubble servicing make sense? Maybe that sad use of the SCM as a deorbit facility will have to be employed after all.