Who are you going to call if your telescope falls out of the sky?
The United States has a space force. Nope, that's right.
Are you talking about NASA? It's possible that maybe not.
Is this group of people billionaires? That is a possibility according to the reports.
The billionaires in question are the founder and chief executive of Musk's company, and a technology mogul who led an all-civilian trip to space.
A six-month study will be conducted to see if a Crew Dragon capsule can be used to raise the altitude of the Hubble Telescope.
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for science, said at a news conference that the company had approached the agency with the idea. He said that the agency was willing to consider a proposal, but that it was still in the early stages. Dr. Zurbuchen wants to be clear. We won't make an announcement today that we will go forward with this plan.
The Hubble's mirror had been ground to a slightly wrong shape, which made it hard to see. During a space shuttle mission, astronauts fixed that problem. The Hubble telescope was dropped off by the space shuttle Atlantis at an altitude of 350 miles. The telescope has fallen by 20 miles.
Hubble is not in immediate danger of falling out of the sky, but as it brushes against air, it will slowly and inexorably fall. NASA might have to make plans for how to guide the telescope's re-entry and destruction so that it doesn't fall into the ocean unless someone could push it back up again.
Crew Dragon is NASA's primary ride for astronauts and cargo going to and from the International Space Station.
Jessica Jensen said that they want to expand the boundaries of technology. Commercial partnerships and public-private partnerships can be used to solve challenging and complex problem missions such as servicing Hubble.
Polaris is a follow-up to the successful Inspiration4 mission that was launched last year. The first mission, Polaris Dawn, will be launched towards the end of the first quarter of next year and will include the first private spacewalk.
He said that a future Polaris mission could rendezvous with Hubble, nudging it higher up and possibly performing other repairs to the space telescope, which has experienced periodic outages.
The space shuttle's cargo bay was large enough to hold Hubble, which is approximately the size of a school bus. Hubble is 27 feet tall and 13 feet in diameter.
During the last shuttle mission to Hubble, a docking ring was put in place to help NASA take Hubble out of the air. The crew dragon could link to the ring to raise the observatory's altitude.
What comes out of the feasibility study is the next step.
Ms. Jensen said that Dragon capabilities would need to be modified in order to dock with Hubble. There are details of exactly how that is done and how we safely do that from a trajectory point of view.
Dr. Zurbuchen said that was worthwhile. Some NASA experts will work with the company, but they are not paid to explore the idea.
Dr. Zurbuchen said that they work on crazy ideas all the time. That is what we should do.
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