Hubble Space Telescope has been part of my life since 1988, when I first went to work at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, and found out that some of my tasks would involve the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph on HST. I didn’t know much about the scope at that time, since the mission had been delayed due to the 1986 Challenger disaster. Ultimately it got launched though, and despite tough times in the beginning, Hubble has been a hugely successful observatory. We’ve all known that it would serve us well for until at least 2008, but we never expected to see its mission cut short prematurely.

So, it’s with a sense of frustration and disappointment that I found out about the plan to cancel HST’s last servicing mission, due to safety reasons. I don’t dispute those reasons, but I also smell an awful stink coming from the politically-driven announcement of missions to the Moon and Mars. I’m not against those missions, and if they were well-thought out, they’d be great. But they’re not, and to trash a working observatory while at the same time announcing scientifically questionable lunar and Mars missions, is tantamount to junking a car because it needs a tuneup and announcing the purchase of a car that hasn’t been designed yet. It’s a lousy way to treat the international astronomy community, which has benefitted far more from access to Hubble’s wide-field, high-resolution views than a few cowboy astronauts will do on a trip to the moon that won’t happen for at least a decade (or more).

Fortunately, HST continues to work, and may last for a year or three more. I’ve just finished writing a planetarium show about HST, and there are so many good images from the telescope that it was tough to choose the slides to accompany the script. I hope that we’ll get many more good ones before the scope whispers a last good bye before its fiery death in Earth’s atmosphere.