NASA’s iconic Hubble Observatory still has years of life left in it, and ideas are in the works to possibly keep it running longer — but those proposals may face uphill battles.
Launched in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has been serviced by astronauts five times and remains in good health. But the telescope is aging and slowly falling toward Earth through natural drag from the atmosphere, so billionaire businessman and private astronaut Jared Isaacman helped push a proposal to send a servicing mission to the telescope for the first time since 2009.
Isaacman — the commander of the private Inspiration4 mission in 2021, which he also funded — is also a sponsor and astronaut for the Polaris program. Polaris is a series of private astronauts with three missions flying SpaceX hardware, which plans to make the first-ever commercial spacewalk this year with Polaris Dawn.
Hubble’s Polaris Program proposal was first published in 2022, and NASA asked other companies to submit ideas as well in a request for information (ROI) that closed in early 2023. There have been no official updates on the ROI yet, but the matter has been brought up again recently appeared on the news with a report from National Public Radio. The broadcaster obtained internal NASA emails through a Freedom of Information Act request that showed a range of responses that included some people’s concerns about the risk to HST.
Related: NASA wants ideas to boost the Hubble Space Telescope into a higher orbit using private spacecraft
The last Hubble servicing mission in 2009 was a difficult decision for NASA. The agency, which is working on the aftermath of the 2003 space shuttle Columbia disaster that killed seven astronauts, has canceled an originally planned maintenance mission. They were concerned that the space shuttle Atlantis could not reach the International Space Station for help if needed because of Hubble’s orbit, far from the orbital complex.
After the scientific community expressed concern, NASA resumed the mission with a backup: another space shuttle Endeavor was placed on the launch pad, ready to assist Atlantis if needed. However, the carefully choreographed maintenance mission did not need backup; it met its major servicing objectives for the Hubble and the astronauts returned home without incident.
Hubble continues its observations after decades of pioneering work in areas ranging from the expansion of space to the study of changes in planetary weather.
But Hubble can’t go on like this forever: instruments and systems age, the telescope periodically experiences “safe modes” (most recently for about a week in April), and the drag of Earth’s atmosphere slowly pulls it out of orbit about 320 miles (515 kilometers). (For comparison, the ISS is roughly 250 miles or 400 km.)
Additionally, the shuttle and its sufficient cargo space are no longer available for repairs; this program ended in 2011 and required new technical solutions if anyone wanted to operate Hubble again. The timeline for such a mission would likely require years of planning, and since there have been no design updates 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 late 2020s and possibly into the 2030s,” assuming no unforeseen events, NASA officials said. But Isaacman and the Polaris program hope to keep the Hubble operational for much longer—perhaps another two decades—through a servicing mission.
Related: A private plan to save Hubble may also target space junk
NPR’s lengthy report highlighted several different attitudes from interviewees and e-mails, ranging from praise for Polaris’ innovation and the quality of the engineering work to concerns about several things. Among those concerns was that Polaris had not yet made a spacewalk, that the SpaceX EVA [extravehicular activity] the suits have not yet been tested in space, that reaching HST is difficult even for NASA astronauts, and that any spacewalk near the telescope risks damaging it.
(Isaacman was unavailable for an interview with NPR due to his Polaris training schedule, SpaceX did not respond to NPR’s requests, and NASA sent the broadcaster brief statements promising detailed follow-up publicly in the near future. The European Space Agency, also a sponsor for the telescope, was not interviewed.)
The joint NASA/Polaris Hubble feasibility study has not yet been released, but “hopefully it will come out,” Isaacman wrote on X (formerly Twitter), saying that a technical analysis had been conducted for six months and a formal recommendation had been made.
Isaacman added that he worries that the public debate since then has, in his opinion, fallen incorrectly into camps involving “a new universe vs. old universe or people who love SpaceX vs. haters SpaceX, incompetent tourist vs. a real astronaut”.
Related: Photo: NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission
“It was really only going to be about the mission, because if the mission was planned, it would have resources across all the organizations involved in the study to ensure success,” Isaacman emphasized.
“It’s not like anyone has flown it, especially after a joint study was put together to generally determine how a successful mission could be achieved,” added Isaacman, whose resume includes more than 6,000 hours flying various aircraft. including time to deal with unforeseen events. or conducting flight reports.
Isaacman paid tribute to past servicing missions managed by NASA. Each required multiple spacewalks, along with major instrument swaps and the use of the space shuttle’s Canadian robotic arm, called the Canadarm. These missions would always take several years to plan, including extensive spacewalk training by the agency’s astronauts.
But advances in electronics over the past 15 years mean that “today you can pack a lot of capability into something the size of an iPhone,” Isaacman said.
As for the risk to the Hubble when it is re-serviced, Isaacman said that in addition to the fact that the Hubble is falling back to Earth, “a lot of the telescope systems have failed and most of the redundancy has been lost. That’s why it remains offline.”
In a recent NASA statement, agency officials pointed to a single malfunctioning gyroscope as the culprit for the safe-mode incident in April 2024, as well as another in November 2023. However, there are still two other gyroscopes Hubble can use to navigate space.
While three of Hubble’s six gyros are no longer operational, and the best efficiency comes from using at least three for pointing, the observatory “could continue science observations with just one gyro if needed,” the statement said. As for Hubble’s health: “NASA anticipates that Hubble will continue to make ground-breaking discoveries,” the statement stressed.
Hubble, Isaacman said, could only be boosted by Polaris until it reached a “certain altitude,” at which point (according to Isaacman) it would either fall back to Earth uncontrolled or—if a rescue effort was required at that point—be handled by a robotic mission , which may be at taxpayer expense depending on what NASA wants to do.
“If the mission were to go ahead, and I would be happy to fund it, I believe it would lead to the development of capabilities beneficial to the future of commercial space and give Hubble new life along the way,” added Isaacman.
“I admit it’s not my scope to touch, and a lot of time has passed between the study and now. Government priorities change, budgets are stretched. Regardless of who funds the mission, it requires contributions of resources from many parties.” Regardless of what happens from here, I’m glad that all of us, including NASA, invested the time to see if it could work.”