I cannot express just how much I want this to happen.
No attempt = hubble will fail and reenter
Attempt(failure) = same
Attempt(success) = hubble continues groundbreaking science and, after some time, can be brought back to earth via Starship to become a museum piece that inspires generations!!
I love Hubble, but the only reason it made sense was because of the Shuttle. Starship ain’t no Shuttle.
I’d love for it to come back home, but dollar for dollar there are better things to be spending the money on, Hubbles just going to have more and more problems and we literally don’t have the right tools for the job.
Jared Isaacman really wants to fund a Dragon trip to it to attach a reboost/attitude control module. I’m pretty down to let him go for it.
I know this is the spacex community, but it’s worth avoiding the delusion that spacex often sells. Spacex just does not have the tools that Shuttle provided.
The concept I saw involved putting the reboost module in Dragon’s trunk, docking with that, and EVAing over to plug in a handful of connections. That seems doable.
Agree although I doubt it is ever coming back to the ground in one piece. Unless SpaceX just wants a PR piece. That being said, not even sure they are designed to land with a payload of that level.
I mean, Elon did put his Tesla into orbit out to Mars. A PR boost to save one of the most beloved science projects sounds like a winner after the crap he’s been pulling with x.com fka twitter.
Not sure his rockets have the ability to bring back a large and heavy load. Currently the landing of the first stage requires an empty vessel and the second stage certainly does not have the capability. He would need to engineer a brand new rocket to do just this.
The starliner configuration is designed to take 100 people into leo and back. I think that alone could be close to the 12 tons that Hubble weighs. It’ll be interesting to see capabilities when the variants are produced, specifically the cargo version for me.
The starliner configuration
Are you referring to Starship? Starliner is a Boeing project.
Yes, my bad. Testing a new keyboard with gesture typing. I should’ve caught that
It would be great if/when that happens, but it’s a few years off the Elon deadline ATM, and doesn’t look close to operation soon
I think the current mission being explored is docking a dragon trunk and boosting it and servicing it. That could buy us enough time until starship cargo is ready. STS-125 added a docking port for capture, which is going to be used by a satellite to deorbit if it comes time to do that.
need to engineer a brand new rocket to do just this
SpaceX is currently doing precisely that. The new rocket is called Starship, and both the first and second stages are designed to be reusable.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CST (Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules ~ Central Standard Time (UTC-6) STS Space Transportation System (Shuttle) Jargon Definition Starliner Boeing commercial crew capsule CST-100
[Thread #23 for this sub, first seen 4th Dec 2023, 23:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
