Happy birthday, Hubble!

Twenty years ago today, the space shuttle and crew of STS-31 were launched to deploy the Hubble Space Telescope into a low Earth orbit.  From the Hubble website:

NASA's best-recognized, longest-lived, and most prolific space observatory zooms past a threshold of 20 years of operation this month. On April 24, 1990, the space shuttle and crew of STS-31 were launched to deploy the Hubble Space Telescope into a low Earth orbit. What followed was one of the most remarkable sagas of the space age. Hubble's unprecedented capabilities made it one of the most powerful science instruments ever conceived by humans, and certainly the one most embraced by the public. Hubble discoveries revolutionized nearly all areas of current astronomical research, from planetary science to cosmology. And, its pictures were unmistakably out of this world.

At times Hubble's starry odyssey played out like a space soap opera, with broken equipment, a bleary-eyed primary mirror, and even a space shuttle rescue/repair mission cancellation. But the ingenuity and dedication of Hubble scientists, engineers, and NASA astronauts have allowed the observatory to rebound time and time again. Its crisp vision continues to challenge scientists with exciting new surprises and to enthrall the public with ever more evocative color images.

NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) are celebrating Hubble's journey of exploration with a stunning new picture, online educational activities, an opportunity for people to explore galaxies as armchair scientists, and an opportunity for astronomy enthusiasts to send in their own personal greetings to Hubble for posterity.

The stunning new picture is a photo of a small portion of one of the largest seen star-birth regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula.  You can view it in your choice of resolution here.

First moonwalker Neil Armstrong blasts Obama's space plan

Two days ahead of President Obama's space policy summit at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong released an open letter condemning the administration's plan to scrap the back-to-the-moon Constellation program:

When President Obama recently released his budget for Nasa, he proposed a slight increase in total funding, substantial research and technology development, an extension of the International Space Station operation until 2020, long range planning for a new but undefined heavy lift rocket and significant funding for the development of commercial access to low earth orbit

Although some of these proposals have merit, the accompanying decision to cancel the Constellation program, its Ares 1 and Ares V rockets, and the Orion spacecraft, is devastating.

America’s only path to low Earth orbit and the International Space Station will now be subject to an agreement with Russia to purchase space on their Soyuz – at a price of over 50 million dollars per seat with significant increases expected in the near future – until we have the capacity to provide transportation for ourselves.

The availability of a commercial transport to orbit as envisioned in the President’s proposal cannot be predicted with any certainty, but is likely to take substantially longer and be more expensive than we would hope.

It appears that we will have wasted our current $10-plus billion investment in Constellation and, equally importantly, we will have lost the many years required to recreate the equivalent of what we will have discarded.

For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature.

Under the President's space plan, resources will be shifted to private-sector rockets and a scaled-down version of Constellation's Orion crew capsule for emergency use to reduce NASA's reliance on the Russians for transport to and from the International Space Station (ISS).  Accordng to CBS News, the President's long range plans will focus on the development of a heavy-lift rocket for eventual manned space flight to a variety of deep space targets, including, ultimately, Mars.

NASA icon Chris Kraft, who directed mission control from Mercury through Apollo is not impressed:

"They're concentrating on the wrong thing," Kraft said Tuesday evening. "The problem is not safety on space station and escape; the problem is getting to and from the space station."

And Kraft said he sees no reason to speed up work on a new larger rocket, saying, "We need a heavy-lift vehicle like we need a hole in the head."

With the retirement of the space shuttle at the end of this year, the U.S. will be entirely dependent on Russia for transportation to and from the International Space Station (which has cost the U.S. $96 billion).  The Russians aren't stupid.  They recently doubled the price for Soyuz spacecraft passage to and from the ISS to $55.8 million per astronaut.  I'm sure more price increases will follow.