The Hubble Space Telescope will probably die in orbit sometime in the next three or four years. The telescope is down to only three of six gyroscopes functioning properly (two are completely shot and one is performing badly), and a planned shuttle mission to upgrade Hubble has been cancelled, since the shuttles will now only fly to the ISS. $200 million worth of equipment already built for the upgrade will be left on the ground.

NASA is still responsible for disposing of Hubble safely after it no longer functions. NASA had planned to eventually use a Shuttle mission to bring Hubble down for display at the Smithsonian. The current plan is to have a rocket rendezvous with Hubble, attach itself to Hubble and fire its engines to crash Hubble into the ocean. The cost of the deorbit rocket project, some $300 million, would come out of NASA's astronomy budget.

This is a horrible waste of a valuable piece of space infrastructure already in orbit. Hubble's problem has nothing to do with the telescope itself, just power and control. But every spacecraft has power and control, including the proposed deorbit craft.

So why not take the packages that they were going to launch on Shuttle to the Hubble, and instead install them on the robotic craft which is going to meet Hubble anyhow? When the two are linked, they act as one spaceship.

Hubble will soon be replaced by the James Webb Space Telescope already in the works, so its useful lifetime as a deep-space telescope is limited. However, that does not mean that it cannot be recycled to contribute to the new NASA vision for space travel.

In President Bush's speech to NASA last week, he mentioned robotic missions to the moon to be followed by manned missions and a moon base. These missions will not occur without extensive surveying of the moon's surface, far more data than what Clementine gave us.

So, why not kill two stones with one bird? Instead of a chemical rocket on the recovery vehicle, put an ion engine in and boost Hubble to a lunar polar orbit over a period of a few months. The data collected would give us visual and infrared images of the moon in unprecedented detail. This would redirect an asset which would otherwise have been wasted into a valuable tool to further NASA's new mission, the eventual return to the moon.

An added advantage of having the Hubble in lunar polar orbit; the service module that brought it to the moon would double as a communications relay, part of a fleet of such vehicles that NASA would have to send anyhow. The development costs, instead of coming out of the astronomy budget, would come out of the same budget as other unmanned missions in support of the lunar missions. The subsequent polar communications craft need not be substantially different from the craft which recovers Hubble; they may even salvage other defunct satellites of comparable size. Some of those GEO comm platforms are getting pretty old, but they are still useable if given the power, communications and control afforded by these salvage craft.

When Hubble finally does give up the ghost, it may take no more than a small nudge from the service craft to release the Hubble, letting it crash into the moon - a far more fitting final resting place than the floor of the southern Pacific ocean.