Can Hubble Be Saved?

The last human hands to touch the Hubble Space Telescope let go of it in May 2009. Two spacewalkers, John Grunsfeld and Andrew Feustel, finished the fifth and final servicing flight, Atlantis backed away, and Hubble has been alone ever since. It kept working. It is still working. Thirty-six years after launch, it is still the only big telescope we have that sees the universe the way your eyes would, in visible and ultraviolet light, and it is still producing the pictures that end up on bedroom walls.

It is also, slowly and certainly, falling. On October 29, 2026, NASA asked the commercial space industry a question it has asked before: can anyone go up and catch it? This page is what that request says, how long Hubble has, what a rescue would realistically cost, and which companies have a credible shot.

Why Hubble is falling at all

Hubble orbits inside the very top of Earth’s atmosphere. At its altitude the air is almost nothing, but almost nothing acting on a bus-sized telescope for decades adds up to real drag. Hubble was built without a propulsion system of its own; on every servicing flight the shuttle simply pushed it back up. The last of those pushes was in 2002, from Columbia. The 2009 flight repaired and upgraded the telescope but did not raise its orbit, and the shuttle fleet retired two years later, so nothing has lifted Hubble in 24 years.

The numbers tell the story. In 2002 the shuttle left Hubble at about 583 km (362 miles). Today it is around 470 km (292 miles), and the lower it gets, the thicker the air and the faster it sinks. NASA’s own analysis now puts re-entry in the 2033 to 2034 window if nothing is done, which is why the agency says any mission would need to fly by 2032. Solar activity swells the upper atmosphere, so that forecast can move in either direction by a year or two, but the direction of travel is not in doubt.

Left alone, Hubble does not fade politely. A 12-ton spacecraft with a 2.4-meter mirror comes down somewhere, mostly burned up but not entirely, which is why a controlled re-entry is the third option in NASA’s request. The agency would rather pick the ocean than let the atmosphere choose.

What NASA is asking for

The request sets a specific bar. NASA wants to know who can capture Hubble and lift it to an altitude of at least 600 km (373 miles), higher than it has ever been. Ars Technica’s read of the orbital math is that a boost to 600 km would likely keep the telescope aloft for at least another 25 years. The mission must not harm the telescope, which sounds obvious until you remember that Hubble was designed to be grabbed by a shuttle arm and a human in a suit, not by a robot that has never seen it.

Whoever answers would be expected to bring the whole package: the launch vehicle, the servicing spacecraft, mission operations, and, in NASA’s words, “crew if applicable.” That last phrase leaves the door open to astronauts, but every signal around the request points the other way. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman wrote on X that he expects the request to draw interest from robotics companies, and SpaceX plans to retire its Crew Dragon fleet by 2030, which would take the obvious crewed vehicle off the table before the 2032 deadline.

Isaacman’s own statement framed the logic plainly: “If there are innovative and cost-effective ways to extend the life of an asset already on orbit, we owe it to the American taxpayer and the scientific community to explore them.” The word doing the work there is cost-effective.

We have been here before

If this sounds familiar, it is. In 2022 Isaacman, then a private astronaut who had flown with SpaceX, approached NASA with an offer to fund most of a crewed Dragon mission to Hubble that would have raised its orbit by at least 50 km. NASA signed an unfunded study agreement with SpaceX and put out its own request for ideas that December. Eight responses came back, including a joint robotic proposal from Astroscale and Momentus.

Then, in 2024, NASA said no. The head of its astrophysics division at the time, Mark Clampin, said the agency would not pursue a reboost after reviewing the options, and described the SpaceX plans as “really just notional concepts.” The risk of damaging a priceless, aging telescope outweighed what the proposals had shown.

Two things have changed since. The man who made the 2022 offer now runs NASA. And the satellite-servicing industry that looked notional in 2022 has flown real hardware.

Who could fly it

Nobody has been named, and no company has publicly answered the new request as I write this. But the field of plausible responders is small enough to list, and the request’s own emphasis on robotics tells you where NASA’s head is.

• Northrop Grumman. The one company with a track record of docking a servicer to a satellite that was never designed for it: its Mission Extension Vehicles have been latching onto commercial communications satellites since 2020 to extend their lives. Ars Technica reports the company launched a far more capable robotic servicing spacecraft earlier in 2026 in partnership with DARPA. If NASA wants a proven grappler, this is the first phone call.
• Astroscale. The Japanese-founded servicing specialist, with a U.S. arm, that teamed with Momentus on the 2023 Hubble concept and holds servicing and refueling demonstration contracts with the U.S. Space Force. Expect it to answer again.
• Starfish Space. A smaller startup with its own Space Force and NASA servicing demos, built around a compact docking vehicle. A dark horse, but a real one.
• Katalyst Space Technologies. The company NASA hired in 2025 to rescue its much smaller Swift observatory. It built and launched a rescue craft in nine months, got within about 10 km of Swift, and stopped there after power and control problems. A near miss, but the fastest anyone has ever gone from contract to rendezvous.
• SpaceX. The 2022 plan was a Dragon with astronauts aboard. With Crew Dragon retiring by 2030, a SpaceX answer would more likely be a ride to orbit for someone else’s robot than a crew of its own.

The hard part is not getting to Hubble. It is grabbing it. The telescope carries a docking fixture the 2009 crew installed precisely so a future robotic vehicle could attach to its base and, one day, deorbit it. That fixture is the reason any of this is possible without a human in the loop. Even so, a robot has to close the last few meters on a 36-year-old spacecraft with delicate solar arrays and a mirror that cannot be touched, then push it 130 km uphill without bending anything. That is the engineering problem the whole request is really about.

What a rescue would cost

Nobody has published a number, and NASA says so. The request exists partly to find out. But there are real anchors, and my read of them is this.

• The floor is the Swift rescue: $30 million. That is what NASA paid Katalyst for a nine-month attempt on a telescope a fraction of Hubble’s size, and it did not quite close. Ars Technica reports NASA would want to give a Hubble contractor more money and more time than that. Reasonable.
• A pure reboost, robotic, no repairs, is a tens-of-millions problem that could stretch past a hundred. The servicer, a launch (a rideshare slot on a Falcon 9 runs in the single-digit millions; a dedicated rocket runs far more), and a year or two of operations and testing against a one-of-a-kind target.
• Servicing, meaning new gyroscopes or instruments, is a different animal. Every past upgrade needed a human with a toolkit. A robot that can open Hubble’s doors and swap hardware has not been built, and building it pushes the bill into the hundreds of millions.
• For scale: the shuttle flights that kept Hubble alive were each full shuttle missions. Whatever a commercial reboost costs, it will be a rounding error next to how Hubble used to get its tune-ups.

Set that against the asset. Hubble cost billions to build and fly, and 36 years in, it is still oversubscribed with astronomers who want time on it. Twenty-five more years of that for the price of a mid-sized satellite is the easiest math in space. The question NASA is really asking is not whether it is worth it. It is whether anyone can do it without breaking the telescope.

Isn’t Webb the replacement?

No, and this is the part the headlines skip. The James Webb Space Telescope and the Roman Space Telescope, which launched in August 2026 on a mirror that started life as a spy satellite’s spare, both see in infrared. That is a deliberate choice: infrared cuts through dust and reaches the early universe. But it means neither can do what Hubble does in visible and ultraviolet light, the wavelengths where hot young stars, auroras on Jupiter and the atmospheres of planets around other stars give themselves away.

NASA’s planned successor in those wavelengths, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, is not expected until the 2040s. Lose Hubble in 2033 and astronomy goes a decade or more without its visible-light flagship. That gap, more than nostalgia, is why this request exists.

Can you see Hubble from your backyard?

Yes, and this is the part I like best. Hubble is a bright, naked-eye point of light when it passes overhead at dusk or dawn, dimmer than the space station but easy once you know when to look. The catch is where you live. Hubble’s orbit is tilted only about 28.5 degrees to the equator, so it never climbs far enough north to be seen from the northern United States, Canada or most of Europe. From roughly the southern half of the U.S., the Mediterranean, and anywhere closer to the equator, it makes regular evening passes.

Our guide to spotting the space station covers the same tools and the same timing; the free pass predictors it recommends list Hubble too. Watch it cross the sky once, a steady star sliding silently between the real ones, and the idea of sending a robot up to catch it stops being abstract.