Quoting Patrick Wiggins <paw@trilobyte.net>:

start some interesting debate.

Becareful what you wish for Patrick. ;) For instance, I think we OUGHT to bring Hubble back to Earth. Forget a Hubble grabbing spacecraft. NASA has the technology to crash, er, land, uh, bring the Hubble Telescope back to terra firma with almost pinpoint accuracy. And there is precedence here. As we know, Utah has experience as a receiver of such equipment. And as our resident NASA planetary volunteer, you could petition NASA to dump the Hubble Telescope right on top of SPOC, or better yet, the skate board park, or the duck pond. I'm sure something might survive such a crash, and heck, there may even be a mirror or two we can use for something down the road. If you need more convincing look at it this way. IF, NASA could put the Hubble Space Telescope in the duck pond, the overwhelming heat generated by the unassisted entry might do to the "West Nile Virus" scare at SPOC, what the meteor did to the dinosaurs. JMHO ;)

And for those of you who say that we need to launch some kind of

Hubble-grabbing spacecraft anyway to make a controlled deorbit of Hubble, I

say that this requirement is ludicrous. Tons of space junk and natural

meteorites fall on the Earth every year, and there is no reliable record of

anyone being killed.