There were some uncontaminated plates inside the remains of the vehicle, but much was lost to being penny-wise. It costs about a billion dollars for a mission to the Hubble because we haven’t designed or built the next generation of the Shuttle.

We should already have a vehicle that is designed to be maintained in space and not returned to Earth at the conclusion of every mission. The overwhelming majority of the fuel is used to leave the Earth’s gravity.

If we don’t start the project fairly quickly we won’t have the engineers to do it.

Remember how close they came to having a useless Hubble telescope, because they saved about a million bucks by skipping a final end-to-end test of the optics? I don’t remember the final cost of the Space Shuttle mission that fitted the Hubble with “glasses,” but it was a lot more than any mere million bucks.

We can’t go on like this. I don’t doubt there are some wasteful government programs, most probably instigated by this wayward administration, but some things, including space programs, really cannot be cut any more without disastrous consequences.

An observation: the first several Moon missions, before Apollo 13, were successes. They worked. How likely is it that our return to the Moon will go that well? And Mars? I don’t even want to think about it.