A Good Decision...

It would appear that leveler heads have prevailed. The new NASA chief has decided to send a shuttle mission up to fix the ailing Hubble Space Telescope. I know it’s expensive and risky, but this one piece of space junk has provided, and continues to provide, quantum leap views of our universe. It takes pictures plain and simply, and amazing pictures they are. One of the most trickiest dilemmas NASA and all scientists for that matter have in ensuring that their research continues to get funded is explaining their work to the non-academic and the scientifically challenged. Once the race part of the Apollo program was decided, NASA couldn’t make the important geology they were doing on the moon exciting enough to keep the public interested and the program funded.

The Hubble Space Telescope does not have that problem. One only needs to be shown some of it’s pictures and have an astronomer explain what they are looking at (essentially looking at the ancient past), and you’re convinced that HST is about the coolest damn thing since the invention of the toaster. It's a gigantic billboard for every other project that NASA has in the works.

So thanks Michael Griffin for righting this wrong.

For all those who will cry and whine about money being better spent elsewhere, blah, blah, blah... know this: If there is a comet or asteroid on a collision course with this big blue marble we live on, this telescope will be the first to actually SEE it.