NASA and SpaceX announced this week that they will explore whether a SpaceX spacecraft, the kind that currently flies people-professional astronauts and space tourists alike-could visit Hubble, somehow attach itself to the telescope, and then raise it higher. A new possibility has emerged, and it’s so unusual, so random, that it seems as if NASA used a giant game-show wheel to come up with it: The space agency might let (spins wheel) a couple of billionaires (spins wheel) use SpaceX technology (spins wheel) to lift a national space treasure into a higher orbit and thus make it last longer. But the future of Hubble, which turned 32 this year, just got a lot weirder. On its way down, Hubble would streak through the skies like a meteor and then fall into the sea. When the last crew of astronauts visited Hubble for repairs, in 2009, they installed a special piece of hardware on its exterior so that, when that time came, a spacecraft could come up, clip on, and guide the telescope to a safe reentry through the atmosphere. According to NASA’s latest projections, the observatory could reenter Earth’s atmosphere as early as 2037-a grim fate that the agency has been anticipating for many years. The beloved observatory, which has spent decades revealing cosmic wonders from its perch a few hundred miles above Earth, does not have a propulsion system to maintain its altitude.
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