SpaceX and the entrepreneur Jared Isaacman are pursuing a plan to rescue the iconic Hubble Space Telescope from a fiery plunge into Earth’s atmosphere
For more than three decades, the Hubble Space Telescope has been breaking new ground in astronomy, cosmology and planetary science, delivering results that few if any other facilities can match—let alone exceed. No other orbital observatory has managed such consistent high performance for so many years, thanks to a series of repair and servicing missions by NASA astronauts.
NASA already is deeply invested with SpaceX, a company that has rapidly come to dominate the global spaceflight industry. When the agency staged its fifth and final space-shuttle servicing call to Hubble in May 2009, SpaceX was still a year away from the first flight of its Falcon 9 rocket, and three years away from the first docking of a Dragon capsule at the International Space Station.
NASA hoped that its final shuttle-servicing mission to Hubble would extend the observatory’s life to at least 2014, by which time its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope , was expected to launch. Although JWST ended up not flying until December 2021, Hubble held on. NASA now expects Hubble to remain operational into the 2030s without any further servicing missions.
SpaceX proposes to boost Hubble into a significantly higher orbit somewhere between 600 and 610 kilometers above Earth. The study, which will be overseen by Barbara Grofic, program manager of NASA Goddard’s Astrophysics Projects Division, will assess Dragon’s technical capabilities and the potential risks to Hubble.
At the very least, NASA figured that at the end of its life Hubble would need to be visited once more—though not necessarily by astronauts. The purpose of another rendezvous would be to install a propulsion module for guiding the telescope’s plunge into the atmosphere or boosting it into a stable, high-altitude graveyard orbit. Whether Hubble would fall to Earth or linger on high, such a mission would minimize the chances of any collateral damage from the telescope’s demise.
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