The GAO has released a report on Hubble servicing costs:

At our request, NASA prepared an estimate of the funding needed for a shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble. NASA estimates the cost at between $1.7 billion to $2.4 billion. However, documentary support for portions of the estimate is insufficient.

What a surprise.

NASA, an agency that has already internally decided that it isn’t going to use Shuttle to save the Hubble, comes up with an outrageously high cost number to do so in order to help justify its decision, but doesn’t substantiate it.

This number is simply incredible. I’ll bet they’re using a cost per flight of between half a billion and a billion dollars (which is the average cost, but isn’t the appropriate number to use when estimating the mission cost, which should be the marginal cost–between one hundred and two hundred million). I’ll also bet that they’re including the cost of Hubble replacement hardware that has already been built and paid for. I’ll also bet that getting the basis for this “estimate” from NASA will be like pulling teeth from an unanaesthetized elephant on crank.

The only costs that need to be compared are the cost of developing the robotics necessary to do this mission without Shuttle (already estimated to be hundreds of millions, if not over a billion), the cost of any modifications necessary to allow the equipment originally designed to be serviced by astronauts to be instead replaced by the aforesaid “robot” (which is really not a robot, but a teloperator, and which will up costs even more), to the cost of launching another Shuttle mission, training the crew, and using the equipment already designed and built to do so. I would truly be shocked if any honest analysis would indicate that the Shuttle mission isn’t the cheapest way to go.

[Via NASA Watch]