I read this on cnn.com http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/01/2 ... index.html
it seems Bush has deside that scientic endevers are less importent then funding his war.

Please read the article carefuly. They're getting rid of Hubble because it costs to much and they need the money for other space programs, not the war. Please get your facts straight.

More accurately, Bush & Co. are shifting money from one area of exploration to another. Bush has long been an opponent of basic research missions, such as the Hubble or the Pluto/Kupier Express and has repeatedly tried to get them canceled in favor near Earth missions and the government contract boondoggle that looks to be a Mars mission.

We do need to fix Hubble. Hubble's replacement isn't scheduled for launch until 2012. If Hubble conks out in 2006 as scheduled, that will leave a sizable gap in our ability to observe in this frequency range. For the first time, we have the gamut from radio up to X-ray covered by space born telescopes. VLA is in radio, Spitzer's got the IR, Hubble's got visual and Chandra is monitoring X-Ray. We can look at anything that happens in the heavens (the largest high energy physics lab ever) in just about any interesting frequency we want.

So what happens if something interesting, something crucial, happens and we don't have visual? We missed it. So sorry. Keep watching, maybe it'll happen again in 50,000 years.

Besides, Hubble's replacement, for all its glory, just won't be the same. It'll be put at the L-2 point on the far side of the Moon. Great spot, but no service missions possible. Bad mirror? We're screwed. Ten years to build a replacement. New, nifty keen camera with 10 times the sensitivity? So sorry, maybe on the next bird in 20 years.

Right now, Hubble badly needs new gyros and batteries. This was not a part that was expected to be serviced when the 'scope was designed, so the astronauts will have their work cut out for them getting to the parts. On the other hand, replacing the old electromechanical gyros with NASA's hot new solid state gyros should fix the problem for decades. And battery technology has come a long way from the mid eighties when Hubble's first battery was installed.

We can keep her flying. It's a challenge, but we can do it. And if we do so, and she'll keep showing us wonders.

As it happens, money is not minted specifically for one purpose; it's infinitely switchable from one use to another (which is called being fungible). If we weren't pissing it away in South Asia, we could allocate more of it to space research.

Oh foo, Bush is off on a boondoggle to Mars. He's also going to kill the ISS before it does anything useful. 8 Billion down the drain there. This man has no common sense.

It's another case of letting something useful die that just needs fixing, in favor of a New Republican Thing (that may or may not work). I'm not sure whether it's based on philosophy or what, but this administration does seem to prefer its own approach, no matter how hare-brained or unrealistic, to programs that date to unbelievers (ie Democrats).

Amen, Brother.

Meh, I see Hubble as a drain myself. Let the girl go peacefully...hey, maybe if/when it crashes out of orbit, Taco Bell will put up another one of those big targets in the ocean and we'll all have a chance for free tacos!

Do you, along with the Republican Industrial complex, view pure research as a drain, and think that only applied science is worth funding?