more on hubble

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2004 00:53:34 -0800 (PST)
From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall <jhall () SIMS Berkeley EDU>
Subject: HST SM4 (fwd)
To: "Joseph C. Pistritto" <jcp () jcphome com>
Cc: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>

More info. on the Hubble servicing mission cancellation for the
interested... I have removed some personal information.

It seems that this was a very carefully made decision...

Joe

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2004 21:15:57 -0800 (PST)
From: Alex Filippenko <...@astron.berkeley.edu>
To: ...@astron.Berkeley.EDU
Subject: HST SM4


Steve Beckwith's summary of the O'Keefe meeting

***

Colleagues,

I wanted to give you a synopsis of the meeting we had yesterday with
O'Keefe.  Since that time, I have been answering a lot of questions
from the staff, interested astronomers, the media, and the public,
and I hope you will forgive me if I omit some of the details.  In the
coming weeks, we should be able to fill in information as needed, and
I will try to keep you informed about any developments.

Several of you have sent personal e-mails of condolence. I am
grateful for your show of support, and I hope you will accept this
e-mail as a response at least for the next few days.  My e-mail
traffic has increased markedly, and it will be difficult to give you
individual responses that are more than perfunctory.

Friday:

O'Keefe called a meeting of the "Hubble Team" on Friday, January 16.
We all got the word only 24 hours in advance.  The meeting started at
11:30 am at Goddard Space Flight Center in the Hubble conference room
above the main bay (Building 7, Room 200 B/C) and ended at 1:00 pm.
There were approximately 100 people in attendance, mostly from
Goddard.  Notable representatives included:

Sean O'Keefe, John Grunsfeld, Ed Weiler, Anne Kinney, Eric Smith,
Jennifer Wiseman (HQ)
Steve Beckwith, Mike Hauser, Rodger Doxsey, Antonella Nota, Ian Griffin (STScI)
Preston Burch, Dave Scheve, Dave Leckrone, Frank Ceppolina, Mal Niedner (GSFC)
+ a mix of around 100 people from Goddard and the contractors (I presume)

O'Keefe delivered the news that he had decided to drop any shuttle
servicing missions to Hubble in the return to flight, including SM4,
and he wanted to tell us all in person about the decision. He said
the decision was his alone. It was not the recommendation of Code S
(Ed Weiler) or the astronaut office, and he said it was not a
decision based on one factor or a single, compelling argument.  His
decision was a very close call (he said "razor thin" or something
similar) and based on the weight of the arguments for and against
Hubble servicing.

He spoke for about 45 minutes without any obvious notes, and he
touched a large number of detailed decision factors, not all of which
I will reproduce here.  It was my impression from his presentation
that he had, indeed, thought deeply about the reasons, giving him the
ability to speak impromptu for so long and retain so many details.
(It is not easy for most people to speak this way after being briefed
by other people, although he is a former professor and seemed to
follow the habit we all have of being incapable of talking for more
or less than 50 minutes, a class period.) He said several times that
it was not about money, and not about safety alone. You will see at
the end of my description, money in a broad sense (including using
NASA's talent base on the mission) must have been a large factor.

My distillation of the reasoning boils down to the following logic:

1. O'Keefe has personally accepted the CAIB recommendations for
shuttle return to flight.  NASA will not fly shuttles without
implementing every one of the CAIB recommendations as a minimum.

2. Flights to the International Space Station (ISS) required NASA to
implement a series of changes to the shuttle. NASA is committed to
closing out the ISS work by 2010, thus it is committed to do that
work.

3. Hubble is the only target not in an ISS orbit which NASA considers
important enough to study for a non-ISS flight.

4. Non-ISS flights require additional developments for shuttles to fly:
     a. Ability to inspect the entire shuttle on orbit.
     b. Ability to repair the shuttle on orbit for a certain set of failures
     c. Some kind of safe-haven or rescue capability in case of
catastrophic failures that cannot be repaired on orbit.  My
recollection about this requirement is hazy, and I rely on Mike
Hauser's memory on this point; it was not clear to me that this last
capability is required or simply desirable. I will have to reread
CAIB.

5. Implementation of the additional items in (4) would have to be
made on a one-use basis for SM4 alone. They would never be used
again, and NASA would learn nothing from their development, vis-a-vis
heritage for future space missions.

6. Optical astronomers have access to more facilities than just
Hubble: he mentioned ground-based telescopes with adaptive optics and
other assets in orbit such as Chandra and Spitzer. Thus, a gap
between HST and JWST would not kill optical astronomy.

7. SM4 would only extend the life of HST by a few years. I think he
used "3 years" in speech, and in that he is mistaken, but a short
period (e.g. 3 years) obviously played a role in his thinking.

8. Therefore, he thought the extra effort required to mount a single
mission, SM4, was not worth the scientific return. That drove the
decision.

My comment about money is that when any of us use the term "worth,"
we are ultimately talking about money and resources. He did not state
that NASA could not develop the capabilities in a timely fashion, and
I am given to believe by other sources that they could, assuming they
wanted to expend the resources. I also note that most of the things
NASA builds for orbit use developments that will be used only once;
they just don't like to do that for transportation systems (I
detected a difference in culture between the transportation and
science side of the agency.) I suspect these points are why the
decision was characterized as not turning on a single issue.

He made a number of other useful statements, some in response to
questions.  I note a few here:

1. He recognizes the "Hubble Team" as uniquely talented and needed
for NASA's future missions to the moon and beyond. He pledged to
ensure that the team had adequate resources to keep it alive and not
lose all the best people. There was no specific mention of STScI as
part of this team, and it was my impression that the commitment was
to Goddard, although I detected no obvious hostility toward us; we
are likely to be below O'Keefe's radar screen.

2. He committed to accelerate JWST as much as physically possible. He
said money would not be a limit to JWST construction. The only
bottleneck would be manufacturing capability.  In a follow up
question, he would not commit to a specific amount by which JWST
would be accelerated.

3. He challenged us to figure out a way to maximize Hubble's
scientific lifetime (we could reinterpret to scientific return, since
the two may not be equivalent) without a shuttle servicing mission.

4. He committed NASA to a robotic servicing mission to de-orbit
Hubble safely. No time scale or dollar figure was attached to this
statement.  (nb: I have begun to wonder about the incremental cost of
developing robotic capability to replace batteries, say, compared to
the cost of a shuttle flight, and I have pondered if that would be
useful for the moon initiative anyway.)

That gives you a synopsis of the meeting sans anecdotes (Sean is more
loquacious than I am, if you can imagine that.) The mood in the room
was decidedly somber.

Both Kinney and Weiler took pains to assure us that they had found
money to cover SM4 with slips and it was not their recommendation to
cancel SM4.

Following the meeting at Goddard, I held an All Hands meeting at the
Institute at 3:00 pm to explain the circumstances and answer
questions. While no one on the staff was happy with the decision, I
believe they are momentarily resolute to start thinking about
positive solutions to our dilemma, and I believe the All Hands
meeting went well.

STIC will make a special effort to assess the mood of the staff at
its meeting in a few weeks. People are obviously nervous about their
jobs. However, one of our best young engineers commented that none of
the ESS staff were especially concerned about employment - all are
very talented and expect to move from project to project.  But they
like working at STScI and they like working on Hubble.

I will try to give you updates on developing events that seem
relevant.  I was told that O'Keefe informed Senator Mikulski by
telephone on Thursday afternoon, and she was not delighted with the
decision. The reporters that have been interviewing me seem quite
sympathetic to Hubble (note the stories in the NYT and Baltimore Sun
today).

On Monday, I am going to assemble a team at STScI to look at a
wide-suite of options to extend Hubble's life.  I think we should
think positively about ways to use or even service Hubble without the
shuttle and see if we cannot find something that would be attractive
to NASA and preserve our observatory.

   Best wishes,
   Steve

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