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Space/Science » in reply to If we had unlimited resources then by all means we should maintain the Hubble

re: If we had unlimited resources then by all means we should maintain the Hubble
Sawyer — (archived)

As an engineer, I'm trained to thing of tradeoffs and return on investment. Meanwhile the public at large seems to respond to emotional appeals, hype, and hysteria. Politicians and many with diverse agendas make use of the public airwaves to lobby for their pet projects irrationally. I'm tired of supporting programs whose major benefit is that large aerospace companies employ a lot of people and make money off of them. Hubble has become a political football with a lot of sentimental baggage associated. When looking rationally at the dollars vs. return on investment, it makes no sense to launch some sort of expensive repair mission. You could probably launch a whole new (and much better--more complimentary to other probes and ground based instruments, updated with modern technology) for the cost of repair. Let's quit fooling ourselves on this. We already have new space based instruments under development and ground based systems are making great strides. It is time to close the curtain on the historic probe despite our obvous sentimental attachment to it.

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