From ABC News of 31 Oct 2006:
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NASA Waits for Go-Ahead to Save Hubble Telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope looks like the comeback kid of the decade.
Just two years ago it was doomed to die when the shuttle mission to service it was canceled, one of the first casualties of NASA budget tightening to finance President Bush's ambitious Moon-Mars mission vision.
The mission was also deemed too risky to fly by former administrator Sean O'Keefe.
But political pressure and the emergence of a new NASA administrator who once worked on the Hubble revived hope that the celebrated telescope could be saved with one more shuttle mission, scheduled now for spring 2008.
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Paint George Jr with disparaging remarks that he has earned - and eventually great innovative Americans get liberated. There was no doubt that George Jr administration destroys science for the glory of their political agenda. But they are not so powerful when words such as 'mental midget' get attached to his legacy. Remember the fuss when two bolts were lost on the last shuttle mission?
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The Hubblle astronauts will have to remove 110 very tiny fasteners to fix the imaging spectrograph. Engineers have designed a plastic capture plate to grab those tiny screws and keep them from becoming space debris.
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Details that demonstrate why space war would be a disaster for mankind equivalent to airborne nuclear weapons use.
Eventually, mankind will have to promote an international treaty to keep orbital space clean. But that would be akin to other things that neocons so hate such as clean water legislation, global warming, and air pollution standards.
Coming is another telescope to join the current constellation - James Webb Telescope. It's long in the future. Scientists would like Hubble to overlap Webb so that the accomplishments of both can be coordinated.
Ground based telescopes have much higher resolutions. Adaptive lenses mean many earth borne telescopes can be coordinated to achieve even better perspectives. But Hubble is outside the atmosphere meaning that it lower resolution still achieves more.
One final point. Science with telescopes - like most advanced science today - is best done without humans on site. Astronomers rarely go to the telescope anymore. Best work is accomplished remotely - with the telescope acting as a robot. Just another reason why Hubble - like the Martian Rovers - have been so successful.