NASA officials announced Tuesday they are once again accepting proposals to artificially boost the orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope, hoping the solicitation process will comfortably eat up the remaining time before the $16 billion observatory incinerates in Earth’s atmosphere.
The agency previously requested rescue concepts in 2022, but noted that reviewing those documents had not taken nearly as long as anticipated.
The new Request for Information invites private aerospace companies to submit detailed technical roadmaps for docking with the 34-year-old telescope and raising its altitude. Agency administrators stressed that they are looking for highly specific, hundreds-of-pages-long schematics that engineers can stack on their desks while maintaining a pensive, slightly concerned expression as the orbital decay continues.
The 2022 submissions from the private sector were incredibly innovative, but we read them too quickly and now we have an awkward three-year gap where we just have to watch the telemetry drop.
In 2022, billionaire Jared Isaacman and SpaceX proposed using a Crew Dragon capsule to reboost the observatory at no cost to the government. NASA ultimately shelved the joint feasibility study, citing concerns that a successful mission might accidentally keep the telescope operational and force the astrophysics division to continue answering emails about its aging gyroscopes.
To ensure the new round of proposals takes longer to process, the agency has mandated that all rescue concepts be submitted via a proprietary procurement portal that requires a physical security token mailed from Houston. Industry analysts estimate the ensuing formatting errors and compliance reviews should perfectly align with the peak solar activity currently dragging Hubble toward a spectacular death over the Pacific Ocean.
The agency confirmed that if any aerospace startup accidentally manages to build, launch, and dock a rescue vehicle before the telescope drops below 300 kilometers, the docking sequence will be halted for a mandatory 18-month environmental impact study.