Why destroy the Hubble space Telescope? Near the end of its service life around the year 2020, nasa plans to destroy the Hubble space telescope with a robot. This robot will attach itself to the rear of the telescope, nasa will fire a on board rocket which will cause the orbit to decay and the telescope to burn up harmlessly over the Pacific Ocean.

There are two options I can think of to save the telescope. The first would involve a modified apollo second stage fitted with a heat shield on one end that pops out when the space telescope is docked safely inside. balloons could be mounted on the both ends and middle of the return craft. Opposite the heat shield end the new extra large parachutes they are going to use with the new orion reentry craft could be modified for this return craft.

Another option that is even grander in scale would be to make the space telescope a lunar based telescope. I am surprised this was not mentioned before. With the cargo capacity of Ares 5, I am sure they could manufacture a mount for the telescope. And instead of having a robot send the telescope to watery grave, they could have that robot to send hubble into a lunar trajectory and land it on the moon to be mounted. Or if this is to far fetched they could modify a Ares5 to be the mount and a lunar lander and perhaps have a space walk in lunar orbit and connect them. Then land it. Since the international space station will only be operational until 2015 or so, this seem to be the next best option.

The international space station could be recycled as well. As the our lunar base expands nasa and the world could disassemble the space station for use on the moon for living space. Just think about all that extra electricity they would have by using those extra solar panels. They could turn a ares5 into a flat bed truck and land the components on the moon. These are some ways nasa could save some cash. Since the most expensive part was getting these components into space in the first place