irs on a telescope the size of a school bus.
James Benson, CEO of SpaceDev, in Poway, Calif., agrees. His company is working with the U.S. Air Force to develop a space tug of the sort that will ultimately be used to de-orbit Hubble once it can no longer serve its purpose. Benson says robotic servicing is "so complicated and would require so much brand-new engineering it would border on science fiction."
As for another idea for extending Hubble's life--bringing it to the ISS for repairs--Benson says this would require an enormous amount of energy because the two are in completely different orbits. "You'd need a massive rocket motor that's beyond reality," he says.
Still, all hope for a longer-lived Hubble is not lost. The influential U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat from Maryland, not coincidentally the home of the Space Telescope Science Institute, has intervened on behalf of the telescope. In a response to her letter, O'Keefe stated on 28 January that he had asked Admiral Harold W. Gehman, the chairman of the shuttle accident board, to review the Hubble servicing mission. If Gehman feels that the Hubble can be serviced without compromising astronaut safety, it may yet continue to be the darling of astronomers well into the next decade.