A major effort is under way to develop a super-powerful successor to Hubble.

The Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) project is designed to work in the far visible to the mid-infrared part of the spectrum. It will focus on discerning how the first stars and galaxies formed. To achieve NGST's demanding scientific goals, the project needs to tame a collage of spiffy new technologies. The challenges are many, from deploying a set of very lightweight mirrors and using advanced infrared detectors and special cooling techniques to finding methods for precisely unfolding the structure once in space.

NGST is to settle into position far from Earth, perhaps in a gravitational balance orbit called L2, some 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away. That will keep the telescope very cold to carry out infrared studies, and also avoids the sensitive scope picking up reflected sunlight from Earth.

Outgoing NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin has often chided astronomers, exhorting them not to become "Hubble huggers." He stresses that new technologies can revolutionize their view of the Universe.

In a perfect world, one in which money, technology readiness, and schedules synchronize, NGST might be lofted by about 2009. But NGST, as one might expect, has run into a set of tough teething issues. Furthermore, budget woes within NASA -- made all the more dire by turmoil in recovering billions in cost overrun dollars for the International Space Station -- have put a haze on a myriad of space projects, including the NGST.

Taking the stick-to-it trail is Bernard Seery, project manager for the NGST at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

"From my vantage point, NGST support from within both the NASA and scientific user communities is at an 'all time' high," Seery told SPACE.com

Seery said the request for proposals that leads to picking the team that actually builds NGST is to be released shortly. "Slight schedule perturbations, due to funding bumps in the road, are likely along the way. But we're really rolling now!," he said.

John Mather, NGST project scientist at Goddard, said that, in his opinion, the technology base is very good for this stage of the program. "The only reason I can currently see for a slip would be lack of funds," he said.

Meanwhile, now making the rounds at NASA is a heady white paper, "Examining the Case for Continued Servicing of the Hubble Space Telescope," obtained by SPACE.com. The ideas in this paper could rewrite all the scheduling and official assumptions for NGST and Hubble's farewell.

The paper ballyhoos the abilities of Hubble, also noting that the observatory has only looked at less than one-tenth of a percent of the Universe.

"It stands to reason that with continued servicing, Hubble's scientific and technological value will extend well beyond the original scope of its mission," the paper states. Moreover, by working in tandem with the other spaceborne facilities, namely the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the soon-to-be-launched Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF), as well as NGST, mysteries of different times and events in the history of the Cosmos can be unlocked.

"Hubble is a healthy, productive, efficient, state-of-the-art international icon. To discard this highly successful and efficient science program due to potential budgetary constraints seems shortsighted given Hubble's history of continuously exceeding expectations," the report argues.

Decommissioning Hubble will mean the loss of NASA's only ultraviolet capability and its only space-based visible light observatory. At today's prices, a new ultraviolet telescope easily tops one billion dollars, the report points out.

Why pour more money into Hubble beyond 2010? The White Paper underscores three points:

• Fantastic new capabilities at a fraction of the cost of developing from scratch;
• Synergism with other observatories;
• It makes good business sense to extract the highest return-on-investment.

Each servicing mission provides new, cutting-edge technology for a fraction of the cost of new-start projects, the paper observes. Advances in optical, detector, and material technologies suggest that Hubble can be souped-up to offer "staggering" observing potential, the paper explains.