NASA interested in Hubble reboost if costs can be reduced
As NASA prepares an attempt to reboost an astronomy spacecraft in a decaying orbit, the agency is open to doing something similar for the Hubble Space Telescope, provided its operating costs can be reduced.
NASA announced June 5 that the Link servicing spacecraft built by Katalyst Space had arrived at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The spacecraft had been at Katalyst's Colorado facilities for final preparations after completing environmental tests at the Goddard Space Flight Center last month.
At Wallops, NASA will integrate Link with the Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket that will launch it. That launch is projected for later this month, although NASA has not announced a launch date.
Sign up for First Up: Get the latest updates on SpaceX, Artemis, NASA and more. From Jeff Foust, First Up is a recap of the day's space industry news, including civil, commercial, and military space developments.
By submitting this form, you agree to the SpaceNews privacy policy and terms and conditions and to receive email from us and our partners. You can opt-out at any time.
NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract last September to develop and launch Link. Once in orbit, it will rendezvous with and attach to NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a gamma-ray observatory whose low Earth orbit is decaying because of atmospheric drag. Link will attempt to reboost Swift so that it can continue its observations.
The agency has acknowledged that this is a high-risk mission: Link will be Katalyst's first mission, and Swift was not designed for on-orbit servicing.
"This has always been a long-odds effort. Any time you try to go from the boardroom to the launch pad in a year, you're taking on a lot of risk, and we are here," said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division, during a June 1 meeting of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee.
NASA is doing it, though, because of the return on investment from extending Swift for a fraction of the cost of replacing it. "Also, we think it's a good way to signal demand to the commercial community that we are here to do things like this when they do make sense from that ROI standpoint."
That could include reboosting a much larger spacecraft, the Hubble Space Telescope, whose orbit is also gradually decaying. At an American Astronomical Society conference in January, Jennifer Lotz, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, said models of its orbit provided a median reentry date of 2033.
Domagal-Goldman said the effort to reboost Swift offers a model for Hubble. "These reboost things are now not just available to us as an agency, but the costs are lower than I think I anticipated," he said. "That does make that return on investment more enticing."
One issue, though, is the high cost of operating Hubble. NASA spent $98.8 million on Hubble in fiscal year 2025, second only to the James Webb Space Telescope. "It was built in a different era, and it's more costly to maintain and to get the best science out of it," he said.
NASA's Science Mission Directorate has been grappling with the costs of extended missions, and officials have discussed their desire to reduce costs to free up funding for new missions. Domagal-Goldman said NASA would need to find a way to reduce Hubble's operating costs to make a reboost affordable.
"We are open to a reboost of Hubble," he said. "So, we have to first figure out how we're going to bring down the operations costs." He did not say how much of a reduction in operating costs NASA was seeking.
If that is possible, he said, Hubble might be able to operate for many more years once its orbit is raised. "It could be a nice bridge to the Habitable Worlds Observatory," the next large optical and ultraviolet space telescope NASA is developing for launch in the 2040s.
Thank you for reading the article! Follow us at Google News.
