NASA put out a formal call on Oct. 29 for commercial companies to say how they would raise Hubble to a higher orbit, upgrade it, or bring it down safely at the end of its life. The agency’s analysis predicts the telescope will reenter the atmosphere in the 2033 to 2034 timeframe if nothing changes, and NASA anticipates that any mission would need to fly by 2032.
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Administrator Jared Isaacman said Hubble still has important science ahead of it, and that NASA wants to hear about innovative, cost-effective ways to extend the life of an asset already on orbit. The statement, in NASA’s announcement, positions the request as a search for value rather than a commitment to spend: the agency is asking what the market can offer before it decides whether any mission is worth funding.
Three servicing options in NASA’s request for information
The request for information covers three areas of commercial interest: boosting Hubble to a higher altitude to extend its science lifetime, servicing it to enhance its capabilities, and performing a safe, controlled reentry or orbital disposal when the mission ends. The full text sits on the federal contracting site SAM.gov. Responses are due at 3 p.m. EST on Monday, Nov. 30, according to NASA’s announcement. A request for information commits the agency to nothing; it is a way to learn what industry can actually do. Hubble has operated for more than three decades, which is part of why the agency wants options on paper before the orbit decays far enough to force a decision.
Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, called Hubble a national icon that has fundamentally changed how humanity views the universe. Fox said commercial industry has evolved rapidly in recent years and that NASA is eager to explore the breadth of possibilities for boosting Hubble to a higher orbit. The emphasis on the boost option, ahead of servicing and disposal, matches the order of the three areas in the request.
NASA says it issued the request on Oct. 29 to learn about industry capabilities for in-space servicing of Hubble. Companies with a servicing vehicle, a rendezvous capability or a deorbit stage would be the natural respondents. The agency has not published how many responses it expects, nor what it would do next, and the release lists no budget.
Drag, no propulsion, and a 2033-2034 reentry
Like every spacecraft in low Earth orbit, Hubble loses altitude slowly to atmospheric drag, and it carries no propulsion system to counter that. The telescope launched on April 24, 1990, and NASA’s Hubble mission page lists it in low Earth orbit. It is a joint project of NASA and the European Space Agency, managed by Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with science operations run by the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. NASA’s release gives no altitude figure for the 2026 call; a 2024 briefing reported an orbit near 320 miles.
No astronauts can reach it today. The last shuttle servicing mission flew in 2009 and the fleet retired in 2011, so any repair or reboost now depends on uncrewed commercial hardware. Space.com’s 2022 coverage noted that NASA had no current plans to fund a new servicing mission, and the 2026 request is the agency’s first public step in that direction.
Dates for reentry depend on how thick the upper atmosphere is, which swells and shrinks with solar activity, so the 2033 to 2034 window is a prediction from analysis and not a fixed date. A boost mission by 2032 would give any contractor a few years to build, test and launch a vehicle that can rendezvous with a telescope never designed to be captured by a robot. NASA has not said whether it would prefer a boost to a controlled deorbit.
A reboost idea NASA already studied and shelved
Commercial reboost is not new. In 2022 NASA signed an unfunded agreement with SpaceX to study lifting Hubble with a Dragon capsule, an idea developed through the Polaris program funded by Isaacman, then a private astronaut, and proposed at no cost to the government, as Space.com reported in December 2022. NASA issued a request for information that month. By June 2024, Space.com reported that Mark Clampin, then head of the Science Mission Directorate, told a briefing the agency would not pursue a reboost, citing risks that included mirror contamination and an unfamiliar docking procedure.
Isaacman now leads the agency that shelved his proposal. The 2026 request widens the question from reboost alone to servicing and disposal, and it arrives with Hubble’s gyroscope health in view: in June 2024 one of its three remaining gyros failed, and project manager Patrick Crouse put the chance of operating at least one gyro through 2035 above 70%. Which companies answer by Nov. 30, and with what hardware, will show whether the economics have changed since 2024, and whether any proposal can beat the risks that sank the last effort. NASA’s announcement carries media contacts at Headquarters and Goddard but no cost estimate for any of the three options.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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