Study Negative on Hubble Repair

There has been tremendous controversy ever since NASA announced that they wouldn’t sending astronauts to repair and upgrade the aging Hubble Space Telescope. An independent report delivered to the agency says that even sending a robotic mission to repair the observatory is probably a bad idea – it would be too costly and risky. A robotic mission might take $2 billion or more to develop, might not reach Hubble in time, and probably only has a 50% chance of succeeding – it would be more cost effective to launch a new observatory with the instruments built for Hubble.