Hubble in need of more repairs

According to WIRED, that great big telescope in the sky needs some more repairs, as one the Control Unit/Science Data Formatter has malfunctioned. Fortunately, the malfunction happened two weeks before a planned maintenance mission, which was scheduled for October 14. If Hubble had malfunctioned any later, repairs could have been well over a year in coming, because of the phasing out of the Space Shuttle.

This is a prime example that I can see of why private spaceflight can be so important. The Hubble telescope has been making discovery after discovery. If it was out of service for the next few years, what sorts of discoveries would we miss? If we had private companies launching and going to space on a regular basis, we wouldn't have to worry about malfunctions in our space-faring instruments, satellites, etc. Someone would always be available to fix them. And instead of costing the tax-payers a billion dollars on a space shuttle, they could pay a few million dollars (or eventually less) to have the repair mission carried out privately.

And now for some cool Hubble pictures.