"NASA May Silence Voyagers on April 15"
from Universe Today

http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/na...rs.html?1242005

First Hubble, now this...

This was first reported in "Nature" about 3 weeks ago.

I doubt that NASA will actually follow through with the threat
to turn off the Voyagers (and Ulysses) at precisely the time when they're
about to maximize their scientific importance for the first time in 16
years. Instead, I imagine this threat is an atttempt to squeeze yet more
NASA money out of Congress, with an appeal that's more likely to actually garner
Congressional support than an alternative threat by NASA to reduce
funding for the International Space Outhouse by $10 million would do. That is, NASA's anti-Voyager threat is along the lines of National Lampoon's "Buy This
Magazine Or We'll Shoot This Dog".

In the event they ARE crazy enough to be seriously considering turning off
the Voyagers right now, though, see the Boston Globe's editorial (
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial.../articles/2005/
04/11/lost_in_space/ ). This newspaper is surprisingly attentive to space
issues -- my only objection to this editorial is that, like a lot of others,
it sees the Bush Exploration Initiative as a worse villain than our stupidly
pointless maintenance of Shuttle and Station at this point.

As for Hubble: let's not jump the gun. There is a very good case to be made (although most of the save-Hubble newspaper editorials don't even mention it) for simply building and launching a replacement Hubble rather than repairing the current one with either a Shuttle crew or a robot. The real cost of a single Shuttle Hubble repair flight turns out to be about $1.2 billion (NASA, as usual, was using shamelessly phony accounting techniques to conceal 60% of that cost until Sean O'Keefe exposed them). According to the Aerospace Corporation which NASA hired to examine the three alternatives, this is about the same cost as that of simply building a replacement Hubble (probably with superior capabilities) and launching it on an unmanned booster -- and the odds of success for the latter would be about 20% greater, to say nothing of the fact that it wouldn't risk a crew's lives unnecessarily. Many other observers agree. In fact, a detailed design for just such a mission (the "Hubble Origins Probe") has already been proposed by Space Telescope Science Institute member Colin Norman and presented to both NASA (which found it feasible) and Congress.

The prospect of using Shuttle crews to repair Hubble in orbit was, in fact, yet another part of the methodically fraudulent arguments NASA used to trick Congress into funding Shuttle in the first place (including its bizarre, and entirely deliberate, order-of-magnitude underestimates of the Shuttle's flight cost and frequency). The scientists initially advocating Hubble back in the 1970s suspected this, and were literally threatened by NASA into keeping their mouths shut or else they wouldn't get a Space Telescope at all. This argument has suckered a great many people otherwise sensibly skeptical of the manned space program because of our intuitive feeling that fixing something is cheaper and more sensible than throwing it away and building a whole new one. But when you have to go as far just to reach something and repair it as is the case with orbiting spacecraft, this intuition is very often false. It will, in fact, be quite a while before we have an infrastructure that would make in-orbit repairs of satellites -- either by manned crews or by robots -- cheaper than simply launching replacement satellites using the same pre-tested design, including satellites as big as Hubble.

I doubt NASA will stop listening to the Voyagers too. This NewScientist Interview with Francis Everitt who is a principle on the Gravity Probe B has an interesting vingette about NASA and congress regarding funding:

I got a phone call at home from a senior person in NASA's office of space science at 3 pm. "Francis?" he asked. "Are you sitting down? I have just cancelled your programme. You have four to six weeks to do something about it, but I can't tell you what."

What did he mean?

If you're living in the US and someone in the executive branch give you that kind of message, it's really a code.

For what?

To go and inform Congress. NASA cannot lobby Congress itself and cannot suggest that you lobby Congress. Maybe I decoded it incorrectly, but that's how I decoded it.