Maybe this is a blessing in disguise
Sending a NASA mission to HST now might have a backlash from
the general public, who continues to see space exploration as both frivilous and a huge money drain.
A roughly $1 billion space mission to fix an old telescope which many
people think only takes pretty pictures for a bunch of science geeks -
that's all they are going to see now that the nation is in survival mode.
Hopefully if the mission is held off until next year, things will have
calmed down enough - or, heaven forbid, been SOLVED - that such a
space mission will not be looked down upon any more than usual.