“It changed the way humanity looks at the Universe.” The legendary Hubble telescope is falling to Earth — NASA is urgently looking for someone to save or deorbit it

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration — NASA — has officially reached out to private space companies with a proposal to develop a mission to rescue or safely dispose of the Hubble Space Telescope. As reported on NASA's website, proposal submissions will remain open until November 30, 2026, and the mission itself must take place no later than 2032.

The agency is considering three scenarios: boosting the observatory to a higher orbit to extend its scientific operational life, repairing and upgrading onboard equipment directly in space, or carrying out a controlled deorbit of the craft into the atmosphere over the ocean once its service concludes.

As Ars Technica reports, if a commercial space tug can raise Hubble to NASA's required altitude of 600 kilometers, the iconic telescope will be able to remain in orbit for at least another 25 years. Agency Administrator Jared Isaacman stated that the observatory still has many major discoveries ahead of it, meaning the government has an obligation to taxpayers and the scientific community to explore every economically viable method to prolong its life.

Why Hubble is falling faster than predicted

The telescope was placed into orbit by Space Shuttle Discovery in April 1990 at an altitude of approximately 612 kilometers. Over 36 years of operation, it has conducted more than 1.7 million observations that underpinned 23,000 scientific papers, and on September 19, 2026, according to KeepTrack, completed its 200,000th orbit around the planet.

However, Hubble was designed from the outset without any onboard rocket engines. Its designers anticipated that astronauts aboard space shuttles would regularly visit the craft, boosting it to higher orbits using their own engines during servicing missions.

Between 1993 and 2009, five such missions visited the observatory, with Hubble's orbit last being raised back in 2002 during the Space Shuttle Columbia mission. Following the retirement of the Space Shuttle program in 2011, the spacecraft was left alone against the upper atmospheric layers, which have gradually dragged it downward.

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The telescope has now descended to an altitude of roughly 470 kilometers. The situation was compounded by Solar Cycle 25, which proved substantially stronger than forecasted: heightened solar radiation heated Earth's upper atmosphere, causing it to expand and accelerate the orbital decay of satellites.

According to calculations by the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, without intervention, Hubble will reenter dense layers of the atmosphere in 2033 or 2034.

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, warned in February 2026 that under high solar activity, reentry could happen even sooner — as early as 2028.

As TechTimes notes, an uncontrolled reentry of Hubble poses a direct danger to people on Earth. The telescope weighs around 13 tons and was not engineered for complete atmospheric demise. A study presented at the European Space Agency's Space Debris Conference showed that roughly 20% of its structural mass — about 2.6 tons of refractory parts and the primary mirror — would reach the planet's surface, scattering over a debris footprint 350 to 800 kilometers long.

Because the telescope's orbit has an inclination of 28.5 degrees, its ground track passes above some of the most densely populated regions on Earth: South and Southeast Asia, Central America, and the Caribbean basin.

The risk of human casualty from an uncontrolled Hubble reentry in 2033 is estimated at 1 in 330. This exceeds NASA's own safety threshold — which requires the risk of human casualty to be no greater than 1 in 10,000 — by a factor of 30. In a worst-case scenario where debris strikes megacities such as Macau, Hong Kong, or Singapore, projections anticipate between one and four casualties.

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A single working gyroscope

Beyond its loss of altitude, the observatory is plagued by wear on its pointing system, as Wired magazine points out.

To lock onto distant stars with extreme precision, Hubble must operate three gyroscopes simultaneously out of the six installed by astronauts in 2009. By spring 2024, three of the units had failed completely, while a fourth began delivering telemetry errors.

Consequently, in June 2024, engineers switched the telescope to an economy single-gyroscope mode, leaving the last working unit held in reserve. While this reduced observational efficiency by nearly a quarter, specialists project a greater than 70% probability that Hubble can remain operational in this mode until at least 2035.

Meanwhile, newer space telescopes, including the operational James Webb and the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, cannot substitute for Hubble: they operate in the infrared range, whereas Hubble remains the only flagship capable of observing the Universe across visible and ultraviolet wavelengths.

Its ultimate successor — the Habitable Worlds Observatory — will not take flight until the 2040s at the earliest, while astronomers' proposals for Hubble time currently outstrip available observation schedules sevenfold.

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A single detail simplifies the technical challenge for any rescue team: in May 2009, during their final servicing mission, the crew of Space Shuttle Atlantis attached a special 76-centimeter docking ring to the aft of the telescope — the Soft Capture and Rendezvous System (SCRS). Because of it, a future space tug will not have to grapple the 13-ton cylinder by haphazard protrusions, as a standardized docking interface is already in place.

The Swift satellite failure

The saga of rescuing Hubble also carries its share of political drama. In September 2022, billionaire and private astronaut Jared Isaacman, in partnership with SpaceX, proposed to boost the telescope's orbit by 50 kilometers and replace its gyroscopes at no cost to NASA using a crewed Crew Dragon mission under his Polaris Program. In June 2024, however, NASA leadership rejected the proposal. Mark Clampin, then-director of the agency's Astrophysics Division, explained that thruster exhaust and volatile organic compounds released by a crewed spacecraft could deposit a thin film onto the primary mirror, permanently degrading the telescope's ultraviolet optics.

In December 2025, the U.S. Senate confirmed Jared Isaacman as the Administrator of NASA, and the billionaire has now revived the Hubble rescue concept from the agency's top office.

He noted on X, however, that this time he is looking primarily at autonomous robotic vehicles, particularly as SpaceX plans to retire its Crew Dragon spacecraft by 2030.

This year, the space tug industry took several major leaps forward: in July 2026, Northrop Grumman, working with the Pentagon, launched the first autonomous robotic servicing satellite equipped with a mechanical arm to geostationary orbit, while startups Astroscale and Starfish Space have been testing docking mechanisms in low Earth orbit.

Even so, NASA's most recent practical attempt to salvage a scientific satellite ended in failure. In September 2025, the agency awarded $30 million to startup Katalyst Space Technologies to build the LINK vehicle within nine months and reboost the rapidly falling Swift space observatory. The tug launched on July 3, 2026, but suffered an attitude control failure three weeks into the mission and began tumbling. Engineers could only steer it to within 10–15 kilometers of the target before terminating the effort. Consequently, on November 4, 2026, the Swift telescope reentered the atmosphere and burned up over Indonesia.

Funding poses another significant hurdle to saving Hubble. The budget for the telescope's annual operations was recently slashed by 20% down to $83–87.8 million, and dedicated capital for purchasing a servicing mission has not yet been allocated in NASA's projections. If reviewing the bids reveals that reboosting and sustaining the veteran observatory is cost-prohibitive, the agency will have to resort to the tender's third option: dispatching a space tug to dock with the ring and forcibly plunge the legendary telescope into an unpopulated corridor of the Pacific Ocean.

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