purplecthulhu

BBC news is reporting that the new Bush space plan will lead to the abandonment of future servicing missions to Hubble. This means no WFPC3 and no COS (that's Wide Field & Planetary Camera 3, and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph). These were both due to be launched on the next shuttle servicing flight. The BBC reports that the new plan will lead to HST becoming useless in 5 years which is probably coded for 'we'll shut it down in 5 years to save money'.

Quite where this will leave US astronomy, which gets a load of funding via HST, or where it leaves other NASA missions is unclear.

What is clear is that this new Bush plan is already affecting science. When congress fails to give it extra funding, as they failed to give Daddy's Mars plan funding, where will NASA be left then?

I have a feeling this is going to be the beginning of the end of NASA.

Where that leaves joint NASA/ESA projects, such as the Planck and Herschel satellites that I'm working on, is unclear, but it is rather worrying. People involved in earth observation missions should probably be even more worried, and should probably think about moving to Europe.

The BBC news article is available here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3405249.stm

BBC news is reporting that the new Bush space plan will lead to the abandonment of future servicing missions to Hubble. This means no WFPC3 and no COS (that's Wide Field & Planetary Camera 3, and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph). These were both due to be launched on the next shuttle servicing flight. The BBC reports that the new plan will lead to HST becoming useless in 5 years which is probably coded for 'we'll shut it down in 5 years to save money'.

Quite where this will leave US astronomy, which gets a load of funding via HST, or where it leaves other NASA missions is unclear.

What is clear is that this new Bush plan is already affecting science. When congress fails to give it extra funding, as they failed to give Daddy's Mars plan funding, where will NASA be left then?

I have a feeling this is going to be the beginning of the end of NASA.

Where that leaves joint NASA/ESA projects, such as the Planck and Herschel satellites that I'm working on, is unclear, but it is rather worrying. People involved in earth observation missions should probably be even more worried, and should probably think about moving to Europe.

The BBC news article is available here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3405249.stm