Bush Kills Hubbell

Report has it tonight that the first victim of Bush's new "let's get men on Mars at any cost" initiative is the Hubbell Telescope. All funding has now been cut to it, after we spent billions to get it up there, billions more to fix it, and it's only started to deliver a wealth of information. Right now, they're still talking about doing the Deep Space Telescope, but it's not supposed to be up and operational until 2011 and because it's not part of Bush's manned-only initiative (read: Hallburton and Boeing only want Mars, not anything else right now - and they're the two companies who've pushed the hardest to colonize Mars), it may also bite the dust.

The Hubbell will become expensive space junk in just a few years so even if the deep space telescope goes forward (and I doubt it), we'll be blind in space for several years between the Hubbell's death and the new telescope's debut.