NASA’s iconic Hubble Observatory still has years of life left in it, and there are ideas in the works to perhaps keep it around longer — but those proposals may face uphill battles.
The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, has been serviced five times by astronauts and remains in good health. But the telescope is aging and slowly falling toward Earth through natural drag from the atmosphere, so billionaire entrepreneur and private astronaut Jared Isaacman helped push a proposal to send a maintenance mission to the telescope for the first time since 2009.
Isaacman — the commander of the private Inspiration4 mission in 2021, which he also financially supported — is also a funder and astronaut of the Polaris program. Polaris is a three-mission series of private astronauts flying SpaceX hardware that plans to conduct its first commercial spacewalk later this year with Polaris Dawn.
Hubble’s proposal for the Polaris program was first published in 2022, and NASA asked other companies to submit ideas as well in a request for information (ROI) that ended in early 2023. There are still no official updates on the ROI, but The issue recently resurfaced in the news with a report from National Public Radio. The Broadcaster obtained internal NASA emails through a Freedom of Information Act request that show a range of reactions, including concerns from some about the risk to Hubble.
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Hubble’s last servicing mission in 2009 was a difficult decision for NASA. The agency, operating since the 2003 space shuttle Columbia disaster that killed seven astronauts, initially canceled the planned maintenance mission. Their concern was that the space shuttle Atlantis could not reach the International Space Station for assistance if needed because of Hubble’s orbit, far from the orbital complex.
After the scientific community expressed concern, however, NASA reinstated the mission with a backup: another space shuttle, Endeavor, was placed on the launch pad, ready to assist Atlantis if needed. The carefully choreographed support mission, however, needed no reinforcements; it fulfilled its primary mission of servicing Hubble and the astronauts returned home without incident.
Hubble continues to make observations after decades of groundbreaking work in fields ranging from the expansion of the universe to studying changes in planetary weather.
Hubble can’t go on like this forever, though: instruments and systems are aging, the telescope is periodically going into “safe modes” (most recently for about a week in April), and the drag of Earth’s atmosphere is slowly pulling it out of its roughly 320-mile (515-kilometer) orbit. . (For comparison, the ISS is approximately 250 miles, or 400 km.)
Moreover, the space shuttle and its spacious payload bay are no longer accessible for repair; that program retired in 2011, requiring new engineering solutions if anyone wanted to serve Hubble again. The schedule for such a mission would likely require years of planning, and since there has been no update on the proposals since 2023, the status of any potential new servicing effort is unclear.
Hubble’s instruments and primary subsystems (such as solar arrays and batteries) “will continue to operate into the second half of the 2020s and possibly into the 2030s,” barring unforeseen events, NASA officials said. However, Isaacman and the Polaris program hope to keep Hubble going much longer – perhaps two more decades – through a maintenance mission.
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NPR’s lengthy report highlighted several different positions from interviewees and from e-mails, ranging from praise for Polaris’ innovation and the quality of its technical work to concern about a few things. Among those concerns was that Polaris had yet to perform a spacewalk, that a SpaceX EVA [extravehicular activity] the suits have not yet been tested in space, that reaching Hubble is difficult even for NASA astronauts, and that any spacewalk near the telescope risks damage to it.
(Isaacman was not available for an interview with NPR due to his Polaris training schedule, SpaceX did not respond to NPR’s requests, and NASA sent brief statements to the broadcaster, promising a detailed public follow-up in the near future. The European Space Agency, also funding for the telescope, not interviewed.)
The joint NASA/Polaris Hubble feasibility study has not yet been published, but “hopefully it will come to light,” Isaacman wrote on X (formerly Twitter), saying that six months of technical analysis had been done and a formal recommendation has been made.
Isaacman added that he fears that public discourse since then has, he says, incorrectly fallen into camps, including “new space vs. old space, or SpaceX lovers vs. SpaceX haters, incompetent tourist vs. real astronaut.”
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“It really should have been about the mission, because if the mission had been planned, it would have had the resources in all the organizations involved in the study to ensure success,” Isaacman stressed.
“It’s not like someone is flying it, especially since a joint study was put together to determine in general how a successful mission could be achieved,” added Isaacman, whose resume includes more than 6,000 hours of flying various aircraft, including time in dealing with contingencies or conducting flights.
Isaacman paid tribute to past service missions flown by NASA. Each required several rounds of spacewalks, along with major instrument swaps and the use of the space shuttle’s Canadian robotic arm, called the Canadarm. These missions will always take several years to plan, including extensive spacewalk practice by the agency’s astronauts.
Advances in electronics over the past 15 years, however, mean that “these days you can pack a lot of capabilities into something the size of an iPhone,” Isaacman said.
As for the risk to Hubble in its re-service, Isaacman said that in addition to the fact that Hubble is returning to Earth, “many of the telescope’s systems have failed and most of the redundant ones have been lost. That’s why he’s still offline.”
In a recent statement from NASA, agency officials pointed to a single faulty gyroscope as the culprit for the safe-mode incident in April 2024, as well as another in November 2023. But there are still two other gyroscopes that Hubble can use to to navigate in space.
While three of Hubble’s six gyroscopes are no longer operational, and the best efficiency comes from using at least three for guidance, the observatory “can continue to make scientific observations with just one gyro if necessary,” the statement said. As for Hubble’s near-term health: “NASA expects that Hubble will continue to make groundbreaking discoveries,” the statement emphasized.
Hubble, Isaacman said, could only be accelerated by Polaris until it reached a “certain altitude,” at which point (according to Isaacman) it would either fall uncontrolled back to Earth or—if a rescue effort was needed at that point—it would have to be addressed by a robotic mission that could be at taxpayer expense depending on what NASA wants to do.
“If a mission was done and I was happy to fund it, I believe it would lead to the development of capabilities useful for the future of commercial space and along the way give new life to Hubble,” Isaacman added.
“I admit that this is not my telescope to touch, and a long time has passed since the survey until now. Government priorities change, budgets become tight. Regardless of who funds the mission, it requires a contribution of resources from many countries to ensure success. Regardless of what happens from here, I’m glad that all of us, including NASA, invested the time to see if this could work.
