[Elspode]

If Halliburton was in charge of NASA, you could bet they'd be getting the money.

I wonder if the funding would have been cut if there was a better actual plan to rescue Hubble. There is much dissent about the proposed robot servicing mission, even amongst the science community. It might not even work, so in one sense I understand not throwing the money at it.

On the other hand, there have been numerous qualifed astronauts who have made their opinions known that they would volunteer to go on a now-forbidden human/Shuttle servicing mission, which would cost much, much less.

In the end, this sucks.