Hubble Is Scrapped?

Apparently the White House has denied funding for a rescue operation.

The idea of an observatory in orbit seemed like a good idea when they first came up with it. Now though, with the new focus on space exploration, the Hubble just quite frankly doesn't fit. What's worse is with these new safety guidelines that have been imposed on Shuttle flights I'm willing to bet dollars to pesos that that the marginal cost of each shuttle flight is going to balloon.

It was pretty obvious from the beginning that the White House was pretty uncomfortable with the idea of extending the life of the Hubble. This is all part of giving NASA the new direction it's been needing for the past twenty years. NASA, since Apollo, has been like a chicken dancing around with its head cut off. It didn't know what to do after it got to the moon. It just kind of sat there and said "hey let's build a space station" and then came Skylab. Eventually that went under, so then came the idea of the "Space Shuttle" that was supposed to drastically reduce the costs of space travel. No pay dirt on that one. So then they went full circle and built the "ISS." NASA utterly failed to build on the success of Apollo.

Then it started to get involved into these grand science projects, testing dead frog legs in space and the rest... I've used Hubble pics as wallpaper tons of times, and I'm sure we've learned more since Hubble came into operation about extra solar planets than ever before. But I'd like to see human exploration come first.