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Good News Week

Big Hubbles in troubles (GNW 18/5/09: What’s the Story?)

NASA is sending seven astronauts on its most dangerous ever shuttle mission to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope. And shuttle missions are deadly enough when they don’t have to do anything.

NASA says this is a very dangerous shuttle mission. As opposed to the nice safe missions that occasionally explode.

NASA says the shuttle mission is very dangerous. After all, they’ve not only got to go through that take-off bit, but also the landing!

Apparently the Hubble’s got some trouble where a bubble makes it wobble, and they’ve cobbled up a nubble for the Hubble bubble wobble. That’s according to space expert Dr Suess.

What makes the job particularly dangerous is the amount of space-junk up there. Like the shitty old Hubble telescope.

What makes the job particularly dangerous is the amount of space-junk up there – bits of old rockets, broken satellites and the wreckage of past upgrade missions.

What makes the job particularly dangerous is the amount of space-junk up there – bits of old rockets and broken satellites hurtling around at great speeds. And the rescue shuttle will have to dodge all that plus the wreck of a bloody huge shuttle.

The mission is considered so perilous that it was once cancelled, and has only been resurrected after NASA agreed to have a second shuttle crew on emergency standby in case of catastrophe. Good idea, better to get rid of all their astronauts and start afresh.

Lucky they’re not Aussie astronauts, or NASA would be seeing a few moons they’d never seen before – and a coupla black holes.

It’s about time they replaced that camera. It was becoming really difficult to find a place to process the film. / In space, it’s really hard to find one of those 1-hour-photo places.

The old camera was massively outdated. Every time they took a shot of an ancient galaxy or some majestic nebula, they’d have to fly up an astronaut to wind on the film.

Of course replacing the camera is actually the safe part. The dangerous bit is getting the bloody shuttle off the ground.

It may be dangerous, but surely it’s worth a few astronauts’ lives for some more galactic eye-candy for stoners to go “wow” over.

And, for a special treat, they’re going to point the camera at Earth for a group photo. On the count of three, we all look up and say cheese.

They’re going to replace the camera. Now when we want a photo of a distant galaxy or a grand nebula, we won’t have to wait for the flash to charge up.

The camera currently on board Hubble is 16 years old, and is still running Windows 3.1. / so is really overdue for an upgrade to Windows 95.

The camera currently on board Hubble is 16 years old, and NASA figures it’d really be handy if they could upgrade it to operate over wifi.

The camera currently on board Hubble has been running for 16 years, and it’s really overdue for a change of film. / and these days they’re finding it really hard to get the film stock.

They’re replacing the camera with a piece of technology light-years ahead of the last camera which was designed 16 years ago. They’re just going to rip the old camera off the satellite and gaffertape one of the astronauts’ mobiles on.

They’re updating the camera. It’s going to be great to see some of these galactic phenomena in colour.

They’ve decided it’s time to replace the old camera. It turns out all those majestic starscapes were just specks of dust on the lens.

The idea is to get the large Hubble telescope fully functioning. The motto is “Big Hubbles – No Troubles.”

Though of course the aliens won’t realise we’ve stopped using the camera for thousands of years. And by that time their camera will also need an upgrade.

Finally! The Gguggamites from Orblyx 6 are sick of standing there going “cheese”.

The astronauts will pass from the shuttle to the telescope while both craft orbit Earth at 28,000 kilometres per hour. Good thing there’s no atmosphere, or there’d be quite a strong breeze.

So if you’re going to spacewalk in orbit, make sure you’ve prepared an orbituary.

By Wok and Mat

Warwick Holt and Mat Blackwell are long-time writing partners, who created the mega-award winning web series Bruce, and wrote loads of jokes for TV shows including Good News Week, The Sideshow and The Glass House. Several years of their raw material for those shows is posted right here on this blog.

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