NASA seeks commercial plans to boost, service or retire Hubble Space Telescope

NASA has taken an early but concrete step toward extending the life of the Hubble Space Telescope, asking industry for ideas on whether commercial spacecraft could boost the observatory to a higher orbit, service it in space or eventually help dispose of it safely.

The agency said Oct. 30 that it issued a Request for Information a day earlier to gather details on commercial in-space servicing options for Hubble. The notice, tied to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, is a sources-sought market-research posting, not a solicitation, contract award or mission approval. Responses are due by 3 p.m. Eastern on Monday, Nov. 30, 2026.

The exercise matters because Hubble’s orbit is slowly decaying, and the telescope has no propulsion system of its own to maintain altitude. NASA said its analysis predicts Hubble is likely to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere in the 2033-2034 time frame, meaning any mission to extend its life or manage its end of mission would probably need to happen by 2032.

NASA said it is seeking information on one or more of three possible mission types: raising Hubble’s orbit to extend its science life, on-orbit servicing to improve its capabilities and resilience, or safe, controlled re-entry or orbital disposal at the end of the mission. Procurement metadata associated with the notice says boost concepts should describe the capability to raise Hubble to at least 600 kilometers, though NASA has not announced that as a final mission plan.

“Hubble is a national icon that has fundamentally changed how humanity views our universe for more than 35 years,” Nicky Fox, NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, said in NASA’s public statement. “Commercial industry has rapidly evolved in recent years to offer new capabilities for in-space satellite capture and servicing.”

Hubble, launched in 1990, remains one of NASA’s flagship observatories even as newer telescopes have come online. Its science output is still strong: Documentation from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which runs Hubble’s science operations, shows the observatory continues to produce more than 1,000 peer-reviewed papers a year, and demand for observing time remains heavily oversubscribed.

That continuing demand helps explain why NASA is exploring whether commercial companies can keep Hubble operating longer. Goddard manages the telescope and mission operations, with Lockheed Martin Space supporting mission operations. Hubble’s last servicing mission came in May 2009, when astronauts visited it aboard space shuttle mission STS-125.

A new servicing effort would be much harder to pull off than those shuttle-era repair flights. Hubble was designed to be serviced by astronauts, but the shuttle tools and mission architecture used in those missions no longer exist in the same form. Any commercial approach would need to safely rendezvous with, capture and control a sensitive observatory already in orbit.

The new RFI also builds on an earlier effort. In 2022, NASA announced a feasibility study with SpaceX and Polaris to examine whether a commercial mission could reboost Hubble. The 2026 notice is a more concrete procurement-stage move, but still only a request for industry information.

For now, NASA is asking companies to outline what they could do, how much it might cost, how long it would take and how they would manage technical and mission risk. The agency has not announced any procurement decision, selected any company or approved a mission to visit Hubble.