Atlantis crews begins second Hubble spacewalk
Two NASA astronauts ventured out of space shuttle Atlantis today for the mission's second of five spacewalks to repair and upgrade the Hubble Telescope. "Trained my whole life for this," said Michael Massimino as he squeezed his six foot frame inside the cramped quarters of the aged space observatory. Massimino and fellow crew …
With the Telescope running so longer after its estimated end of service time, and the Mars rover running much longer than expected as well, either NASA is damn good at making things or they are terrible at estimating life-cycles... Wouldn't be surprised if the ISS will be still up there 50 years from now.
It's had a lot of replacement parts, pretty much only the bodywork and the (faulty) mirror are original. It also sat in a box for 5years after Challenger blew up so it's even longer life than they are claiming.
They have also been lucky that it's been an unusually quiet solar cycle and so there hasn't been as much atmospheric drag as expected.
The life of ISS is a bit more political, it can stay up there as long as you are prepared to repair/replace bits and boost it's orbit.
Rugged design, overprovisioning (in the case of the batteries, I'm guessing) and thorough fault checking prior to launch, combined with some excellent craftsmanship from the people who built these things go a long long way towards ensuring a length lifetime for just about any kind of device.
As for the ISS. So long as they keep supplying it with fuel, perhaps. But once they stop doing that, it's only got a few months, maybe a year or two before it comes plummeting out of the sky.
Don't forget though that there was still plenty that needed to be fixed on Hubble from time to time.
I suspect it went something like this,
"yes Mr Senetor this thing only lasts 13 months which gives us plenty of time to ..."
(17 months later)
"Mr Senetor we are getting some amazing results up there we need to play this a bit longer on the funding side"
(2 years later)
"Mr Senetor it would be silly to stop the project now, we never expected this to last this long , honestly, but since it is why dont you fund us till its dies?
i doubt very much "Mr Senetor" would agree to funding a project for 4 years from the word go, but hay if it just kept going then, well, renewing the project life would be much easier.
I'm stunned by NASA's statements that (something like) "the spacewalk will begin at 12:17".
Yet, they don't say "the Spirit Rover will fail at 13:07/january/07"
Why can't they just say "the spacewalk will start this afternoon, when the astronauts have had their cup of piss^H^H^H^H tea"?
Apart from the solar panels, which were thrown down into the atmosphere, I think all the other bits that have been swapped off Hubble have been brought back to earth. Souvenier hunters aside, there must be mountains of kit that has clocked up serious orbit time, now lying in NASAs scrap yards.
Still, I remember the HST being launched when I was a kid, and even though it's been refitted again and again, I'm still pleased that after nearly 20 years it's still a cool bit of hardware.
Any reason why the rest of us have to put up with shite that either dies after 18 months or bursts into flames after two weeks?
