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Originally posted by Ustwo
There is a hell of a lot more here going on then what 'Evil' Bush wants to do, so before you decide to just blame him yet again for something, remember that you might not have all of the story.
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I second Lebell's thanks for another very informative article. For the record, I wasn't blaming "'Evil' Bush" for the Hubble mission *having* *an* *end*. The article I linked to above says :
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NASA officials said yesterday that the decision to cancel the final service mission was influenced by Bush's new space initiative, which calls for NASA to complete the International Space Station by 2010.
To meet that deadline, all future shuttle missions must be dedicated to the task, said John Grunsfeld, NASA's chief scientist.
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This is what I'm "blaming" Bush for - given the current state of the shuttle program, and given that a single shuttle mission would be sufficient to keep the Hubble operational and doing useful work for (theoretically) another nine years or so, he still put his signature on an initiative that explicitly requires
all shuttle traffic from now until 2010 to be used for completing the ISS.
Now, I am the first to admit that I don't have access to all the information our President has. And perhaps the future will bring some compromise that is not on my limited radar at present, that allows the space initiative to continue apace while also preserving the Hubble. Or maybe in the last quarter of 2009 the Jovians will launch their Hive-Ships against us, and we'll all praise GWB for having the foresight to push ahead on the ISS, our last bastion of defense from the alien invaders.
But given the information to which I have access, and given the track record of this administration thus far, I stand by my criticism of the decision to leave the fate of the Hubble up in the air, so to speak. It is taking a big risk with a still-functional NASA asset into which a non-trivial amount of capital has already been sunk, and it displays a puzzling lack of understanding of the importance of the Hubble project to the worldwide space science community.
Maybe you can explain how it is that Bush is making the right call here, without presuming that my criticism of his space initiative springs from lack of understanding, or knee-jerk liberal hatred of ${OTHER_TEAM}.