EDITORIAL – Space telescope’s funding up in the air

Ground control to President Bush: Don’t cut funding for the Hubble Space Telescope. Officials… Ground control to President Bush: Don’t cut funding for the Hubble Space Telescope. Officials at the White House told The New York Times that the approximately $1 billion needed to keep the Hubble in shape and updated would not be part of NASA’s budget this year. Although the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will receive a 5 percent funding increase, the Hubble package won’t be part of it.

All this begs the question, what is that increase for, if not for maintaining NASA’s most visible program? While the new pictures of Saturn’s moon Titan are piquing public interest, the average person can only get so excited about methane riverbeds 750 million miles away.

The Huygens probe, owned by the European Space Agency and delivered by NASA’s Cassini mother ship, has transmitted some beautiful pictures, no doubt helpful to researchers. But the Hubble, and its spectacular images of the outer reaches of space, are also important and should be maintained.

There is value in keeping a piece of space-age equipment in space-age shape. It’s in the interest of science to do so — and while this hasn’t been the most pro-science administration, it has been a pro-space one.

There’s been some talk that this move was made in part so that the Bush administration could strong-arm Congress into granting funding for the Hubble, while the president can maintain the appearance of being fiscally conservative. This might be a slick move on some other planet, but on this one, it’s just cheap. One billion dollars isn’t a lot to the government — and if we’re afraid to deficit spend, well, that space ship has sailed.

It’s impossible to predict the exact benefits of keeping the Hubble functioning. Discovery, by its very nature, must come as a surprise. The Hubble isn’t a tank or a textbook; instead it’s something that we, as humans, in our self-flattering way, can look at and marvel at our own achievements.

Moreover, keeping the space program alive has other, more tangible benefits. The best way to get people interested in the space program — and get schools to emphasize the sciences, which will lead to more and better qualified researchers — is to have enormous, public projects like the Hubble. The space program used to be a large component of popular culture, and keeping the Hubble around and relevant would help revive it.

In short, the White House should put the billion dollars necessary to keep the Hubble back in the Federal Budget and Congress should approve it. Space is important; after all, as Jean Luc-Picard told us, it is the final frontier.