This is nuts. I could come up with a cheap way to boost the Hubble into a safe orbit on the back of a napkin. Give the private sector five years and they could have a repair crew on site.

A legal question: at what point does a space system become "abandoned" if its owner has declared it's going to dump it into the ocean? Maybe we should just fly a boost stage up with the Jolly Roger painted on the side and "commandeer" the Hubble.

NASA is rapidly beginning to look like a little kid who gets tired of a toy and demands new ones all the time, while the old ones get left in the yard to rot. Given that the agency is comprised of researchers and engineers whose job it is to come up with brand new ideas, the more fabulous and expensive the better, as opposed to simply building old ones, this is not surprising.