Washington Post: NASA's triumphant mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope this week has cracked open a policy rift within the space agency, with a top NASA scientist saying that the US is on the way to losing the capability of doing what it has just done so dramatically.
David Leckrone, the senior project scientist for the Hubble, said NASA's new strategy for the post–space shuttle era does not include servicing scientific instruments in space, and he fears that vast amounts of accumulated knowledge and technical expertise will quickly vanish.
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In my opinion, this issue is far more complex than suggested. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was originally designed to be repaired by humans while in orbit. This became abundantly clear during the analyses by the Congressionally-requested Committee on “Assessment of Options for Extending the Life of the Hubble Space Telescope” (which I chaired), that concluded that a robotic repair would not be feasible as a replacement for the space shuttle’s recent service mission.
However, there is nothing to preclude designing other space-based observatories that could potentially be repairable in space by robots. The design decisions are very different between the two possibilities: service missions by humans, or by robots. Leckrone, as reported by the Washington Post, does not acknowledge the possibility of designing for robotic servicing.
It has been known for some time that the HST orbit is not ideal for many astronomy missions. Future missions, both scheduled and planned, will not be placed in similar low-Earth orbits. Further, most space science missions, including missions to the Moon and other planets, do not fly in low Earth orbit where human servicing would be feasible.
As more astronomical observatories are planned to reside at the several Lagrangian points, it would be difficult for humans to venture so far out into space to repair them. Designing a spacecraft and its instruments for a robotic service mission, which would make more sense, has not been done to date, but it could be. In my opinion, we should consider such a design—if such a decision makes both scientific and fiscal sense.