The $6 Billion Telescope
At $500 million apiece, Space Shuttle missions aren’t cheap.
Nor are they particularly safe, as anyone currently examining the underbelly of the Space Shuttle Atlantis will tell you.
Atlantis is currently making repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope, which has consumed the attention of six Shuttle flights due to its perpetually malfunctioning equipment.
Originally, the Hubble was supposed to cost taxpayers $400 million.
It’s current tab? Over $6 billion – or fifteen times its projected cost.
What has Hubble taught us? Well, we now know that the Universe is very, very big. And full of stars.
Awesome!
Of course, since we need to get closer pictures of those stars, Hubble will be replaced in 2013 by the James Webb Space telescope, which has a preliminary price estimate of … wait for it … $4.5 billion.
What will that telescope teach us?
Probably that the universe is very big and is full of stars …
Comments
By Palmetto_Native on May 13th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Who needs science anyway.
By Felicity on May 22nd, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Yeah, really. Compare that to the much lower cost of maintaining your blog, which goes a long way toward corroborating the theory that the Internet is very big and full of retards.