Posing for the STS-125 crew portrait, from left, are astronauts Michael J. Massimino, Michael T. Good, both mission specialists; Gregory C. Johnson, pilot; Scott D. Altman,
commander; K. Megan McArthur, John M. Grunsfeld and Andrew J. Feustel, all mission specialists. The STS-125 mission was the final Space Shuttle mission to visit
the Hubble Space Telescope for repairs and upgrades. Credit: NASA
Grunsfeld had also been present at
that meeting when Sean O’Keefe
announced the cancellation of
all future Hubble repair missions.
Grunsfeld had by that time, visited
the telescope in orbit twice.
Though he was disappointed,
Grunsfeld continued to spend time
working on possible scenarios for the
robotic repair missions to Hubble that
had been suggested and other in-orbit repairs that did not include using
humans. The National Academy of
Sciences had also looked at robotic
mission to service the telescope and
had concluded that it was in no way
a feasible option and in light of the
scrutiny of the return to flight changes post Columbia they said a Hubble
repair mission should be reassessed,
that of course including humans.
When Sean O’Keefe announced
his resignation as NASA Administrator
in December 2004, members for the
senate, the media and science community and those within NASA saw
hope for the telescope’s servicing
mission to be reinstated.
Now that Michael Griffin had
been appointed Sean O’Keefe’s replacement, he literally took just two
months to announce that he actually
disagreed with Sean O’Keefe’s decision, and that he would now consider sending a shuttle again to repair
Hubble, maybe because he had
close links to the telescope himself,
given he was as an engineer and he
had previously worked on Hubble’s
construction. He totally and utterly
respected the discoveries the telescope brought to the science community and wider public audience as
a whole.
When STS-114 the return to flight
mission post Columbia was deemed
a success and was then was then
followed by STS 121 all the lessons
learned and improvements in flight
mission management, the managers and engineers started to work
on a plan that would see a return to
Hubble that would still adhere to the
Columbia enquiry requirements.
On October 31, 2006, a major milestone was achieved, Michael Griffin
finally announced that the Hubble
servicing mission was reinstated and
should be scheduled for 2008. He
also announced the crew that would
fly the mission, which included astronaut and physicist John Grunsfeld.
On finding out about the reinstated mission Senator Mikulski said
“The Hubble telescope has been
the greatest telescope since Galileo
invented the first one. It has gone to
look at places in the universe that
we didn’t know existed before” (We
know it wasn’t Galileo that invented
the telescope, but we know what
she meant)
Once the mission had been
agreed it was then important to
schedule the mission to fit in with
the existing flight manifest. originally
the STS-125 mission was assigned
to space shuttle Discovery with a
planned launch date sometime
around May 2008 but delays to several space shuttle missions resulted in
yet another change in mission ordering, and the orbiter assigned to STS125 was eventually changed from
Discovery to Atlantis.
Following tropical storm Fay in
August 2008, Atlantis was rolled from
one of the three Orbiter Processing
Facility (OPF) to the huge behemoth
that is the famous Vehicle Assembly
Building (VAB), where it was mated
to the external fuel tank (ET) and the
solid rocket boosters (SRBs) some issues were then encountered during
the stacking process, and more terrible weather due to Hurricane Hanna