NASA and SpaceX study a Hubble telescope boost, adding 15 to 20 years of life

NASA announced Thursday that it plans to study the possibility of using SpaceX’s Crew Dragon vehicle to boost the aging Hubble Space Telescope into a higher orbit.

The federal agency has signed a “Space Act agreement” with SpaceX to conduct a six-month study to determine the feasibility of docking Dragon with the 32-year-old telescope and boosting it into a higher orbit. The study is not exclusive, which means other companies may come up with similar concepts with alternative rockets and spacecraft.

The deal comes after SpaceX and the Polaris program – a series of private missions self-funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman – approached NASA about potential servicing missions, including the Hubble Space Telescope. Isaacman is the first private citizen to command orbital spaceflight, when he led a crew of four aboard SpaceX’s Dragon in 2021 as part of the Inspiration4 mission. With Polaris, he seeks to push the boundaries of private space exploration. The first Polaris mission is scheduled for March 2023 on Dragon, and will fly to an altitude of 1,400 km while performing the first private spacewalks.

Get a boost

It is possible that this spacewalk experiment will be useful with Hubble, and potentially the second Polaris mission.

Among the questions that the new Hubble study will answer is the cost of such a mission, and its technical feasibility. The main goal is to raise Hubble’s altitude from its current level of 535 km to 600 km, the same altitude it was at when it was launched in 1990. Since the fifth and final servicing mission in 2009 , Hubble has been slowly losing altitude, and the process is expected to accelerate as the telescope lowers.

Telescope project manager Patrick Crouse said in a conference call with reporters that in the absence of a boost mission, NASA may have to launch a propulsion module to the telescope by the end of the day. 2020s. This would allow Hubble to make a controlled re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere and land in the Pacific Ocean. A Dragon mission to raise Hubble’s altitude could add 15 or even 20 years of orbital lifetime, Crouse said.

The study will also look at potential servicing options, though nothing like the detailed instrument replacements and major upgrades performed during Hubble’s servicing missions with NASA’s Space Shuttle. Instead, NASA and SpaceX engineers will assess the feasibility of replacing the gyroscopes that control the pointing of the telescope. Only three of the spacecraft’s six gyroscopes remain in working order.

None of the officials on Thursday’s conference call spoke specifically about costs. No funds will change hands for the study, but if there is a viable path for a Crew Dragon mission to dock with Hubble and bolster the instrument, it will need to be worked out. It seems likely that Isaacman will contribute a significant portion of the cost of the mission, as he did with Inspiration4 and the initial Polaris Dawn mission. But if NASA wanted one or more of its astronauts to fly alongside Isaacman, it seems likely the agency would provide some funding.

Long story arc

This type of private funding is far from unprecedented in space exploration. In his book The Long Space Agespace economist Alexander MacDonald notes that of 38 American astronomical observatories built in the 1800s and early 1900s, 36 were funded and operated largely with private funding.

“American citizens, through collective fundraising and singular philanthropy, privately funded the increasingly expensive technology necessary for the continued exploration of the skies for more than a century before NASA or the invention of the liquid fuel rocket,” MacDonald wrote.

In the book, he argues that the future of space exploration may involve a similar level of private investment, both for commercial and philanthropic reasons.

The potential public-private mission is championed by the space agency’s chief scientist, Thomas Zurbuchen, who said he welcomes commercial solutions to help NASA achieve its goals. “We’re looking at crazy ideas all the time, and that’s what we’re supposed to do,” he said. “This one is really compelling.”

NASA will conduct the study and also review solutions from other vendors that are in the interest of taxpayers, he said. But it’s not clear that another crew vehicle would be able to service Hubble in the near future, and Hubble is running out of time. Each additional year means it sinks further towards Earth, making a reboost less effective. For NASA, he said, the benefits are clear. Hubble continues to provide the world’s best optical view of the universe, and taxpayers have spent over $10 billion to build and fly it. Zurbuchen wants to extend the value of this investment, especially with the ability to now couple Hubble observations with those from the James Webb Space Telescope in the infrared part of the spectrum.

“Hubble is an incredible success,” Zurbuchen said. “He’s doing great science as we speak.”