But, citing security concerns, the commission canceled its mission at the last minute.
"Opportunities to discover new knowledge about Earth are diminished as mission after mission is canceled, descoped, or delayed because of budget cutbacks, which appear to be largely the result of new obligations to support flight programs that are part of the Administration's vision for space exploration".
One mission gets canceled, he said, and "what's our next mission, deorbit the telescope?" For now, of course, the Hubble lives.
As no shuttles were capable of reaching both HST and the ISS during the same mission, future manned service missions were canceled.
But after the mission was canceled, they were kept in limbo.
He began training in 2000 at the Yury Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Star City, Russia, but the mission was canceled when Russia allowed the Mir station to crash to Earth.
Then, at 1 a.m. on April 22, more than eight hours after the man had come forward with his information, the mission was canceled, without explanation, by senior military officers.
The Phoenix spacecraft was originally going to go to Mars's equatorial region as Mars Surveyor 2001, but after investigations of the Polar Lander failure turned up major flaws in the design, that mission was canceled and the almost complete Surveyor spacecraft was put into storage.
But after expenditures of more than $7.5 million, and with more than two dozen students and postdocs deeply involved, the mission was canceled abruptly just a month before a scheduled technology review.
A fifth mission was canceled on safety grounds following the Columbia disaster.
