spacetoday.net: NASA to permit independent review of Hubble decision

Posted: Fri, Mar 12, 2004, 10:58 AM ET (1558 GMT)
Hubble Space Telescope (NASA)

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said Thursday that he would ask the National Academy of Sciences to review the safety of a shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, hours after members of a Senate committee asked him to perform such a review. During a hearing Thursday morning of the subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee that oversees NASA, Senators Christopher Bond (R-MO) and Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) asked O'Keefe to perform such a review. O'Keefe told reporters later in the day he would commission such a review, although he insisted that he felt it would not be possible to safely carry out a shuttle mission to Hubble before the telescope fell into disrepair later this decade. Also at the hearing Mikulski released a five-page letter sent to her from Admiral Harold Gehman, the former chairman of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, with his opinion regarding the risk of a Hubble servicing mission. He concluded that a Hubble mission would be "slightly more risky" than a shuttle mission to the ISS, but that more study was required.