NASA Will No Longer Repair Satellites

Once the space shuttle Atlantis successfully landed on Sunday at the Edwards Air Force Base, in Southern California, NASA's satellite repair program ended. The fifth and final mission to repair the world's most famous telescope also represented the last manned mission in space to repair such instruments, at least for the foreseeable future. By 2010, the shuttle will most likely retire, although no decision on that has yet been made. If it goes, then it would be at least five to seven years before the space agency can again contemplate the idea of visiting another satellite for repairs.

“This is the last scheduled servicing mission of Hubble with the space shuttle, and what I think it's demonstrated is the extreme utility of having people working in space and accomplishing things that are different than what was expected,” NASA Astronaut John Grunsfeld said last Wednesday from aboard Atlantis. The shuttle was at the time docked to the space telescope. Grunsfeld is a self-proclaimed Hubble-hugger, and is a veteran of three repair missions to the instrument.

“To go out in a spacesuit and perform the extraordinarily intricate operations that we see, and do it successfully – I think that is one of the most remarkable achievements that NASA has ever done. I think that is just one of the most valuable things that NASA has learned how to do. And it just makes me want to cry to think that this is the end of it,” the Hubble Project Scientist, David Leckrone, told last week during a briefing, Space informs.

If NASA will want to resume repair runs to satellites and telescopes in orbit in the future, then it will have to build a new class of spaceships, different from those currently planned for the Constellation Project. Neither the Altair Lunar Lander, nor the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle has the capacity to allow astronauts to perform maintenance operations on these devices. They are designed to land on the Moon and dock at the International Space Station (ISS), or other similar structures, respectively.

Orion will have a robotic arm, but it will not have a cargo bay in which to pull a satellite for repairs. From this point of view, the shuttles were the best bet, and also the most effective. Plus, Orion will not have a docking port that will allow for spacewalking, but just one for connecting to the ISS.

“There is no person out there, there is no leadership out there, there is no vision out there to pick up the baton that we're about to hand off and carry it forward. And I think that's just a shame to abandon one of the most impressive, refined, sophisticated capabilities that this agency as a whole – human side and robotic side – has achieved,” Leckrone also shared. Once the shuttles retire, there will be no space agency capable of repairing vital satellites and telescopes for at least a decade or so.