NASA, SpaceX to study boosting Hubble to higher orbit in a bid to extend its life
Officials at NASA have signed a Space Act Agreement with SpaceX to investigate the benefits and risks of having a private mission provide service to NASA's nearly 33-year-old Hubble Space Telescope, boosting it to a higher orbit to extend its life, the space agency announced Thursday.
Posted — Updated"Hubble is amazingly successful. ... It's doing great science as we speak," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, during a news conference.
But SpaceX approached the space agency a few months ago with the idea, he said, and the team at NASA is now planning to assess how a private mission might help "boost" and maintain the telescope.
Zurbuchen added that it is not yet certain whether or not such a mission could be carried out, and the goal of the agreement is just to explore the technical feasibility of the idea.
Jessica Jensen, vice president of customer operations and integration at SpaceX, said the private aerospace company "has a lot of experience docking (spacecraft) with the International Space Station."
SpaceX wants to use that knowledge as a foundation and find out whether it's possible to carry out a similar docking maneuver with the Hubble telescope, Jensen said.
It could be done at "no cost to the government," according to a NASA news release.
Launched in 1990, the space observatory has had several servicing missions during NASA's space shuttle era, with the last mission carried out in 2009. But the space agency retired the space shuttle in 2011, and no spacecraft has been back since.
SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft missions have already taken over much of the work that the space shuttle program used to carry out, including ferrying astronauts to and from the ISS.
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