NASA's FY2025 budget request means tough times ahead for Chandra and Hubble

NASA has published its budget request for the fiscal year 2025, and it is not good news for the Hubble Space Telescope or the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The total budget request is unchanged from FY2023's Operating Plan, meaning that it had to make some tough decisions to accommodate increases elsewhere in the agency's remit. …

[Phones Sheridan]

If... Nasa was to get no budget for Hubble, and they decided to let it just drift into orbital decay with the intention of it burning up in the atmosphere, could a private organization or a mad man with a volcano lair, and the means to launch into space, do so, and claim salvage, repair it, stick a logo on it, fit a newer camera in it and send it back up into a long term orbit and change it's name?

Ideas like this keep me up at night!

[Anonymous Coward]

If they had all that, they'd be daft to claim such an old bugger and not send up their own, new telescope. Only a mad man would... Oh. I see.

[Phones Sheridan]

Maybe convert it to a space hotel then!

[John Brown (no body)]

Amazing views! Great selling point!

[Hurn]

If they really want to make money with it, after the refit, they could point it towards Earth and rent out time to those countries which can't afford their own spy satellites.

[Annihilator]

Presumably a lot of this is Wooden Dollars time. For example: "the budget request for the veteran Voyager spacecraft is set to increase from $6.5 million to $7 million for FY2025, increasing to $7.6 million in FY2029." I'm guessing they've not actually got (say), a team of 100 scientists on $65K pa working full time on it, it's more that's primarily time required on the deep space network which has a notional value attached to it?

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Legal fees for reviewing each press release saying it's still out there. Licensing fees for using the NASA logo on the release

[Andy The Hat]

"...having managed more than 24 years of a planned five-year mission ..."

Pah! Can't celebrate until it approaches 60 years of a five year mission ... :-)

[Anonymous Custard]

And had boldly gone somewhere...