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Courtesy of Slashdot, the Mars Scorecard:

Earth is currently the underdog in the solar system division in the Expensive Hardware Lob. For every piece of hardware that returns useful information from the Lobbee's planet, the Lobber scores a point. For every piece of hardware sucessfully thwarted by the Lobbee..., they score a point.

I'm a little dubious about a couple of the scores assigned by the referee, but that's sports for ya. The official score at the moment is 20 to 16, in Mars's favor.

Meanwhile, NASA has canceled the upcoming maintenance trip to the Hubble telescope. (NYT link, requires free registration.) The article initially gives the impression that this is Bush's fault—that the decision is due to Bush requiring NASA to reallocate funds toward human exploration—but late in the article it quotes NASA officials as saying that crewed missions to the Hubble are too dangerous; problems like the one the Columbia had can be found and repaired at the ISS, but not at the Hubble.

That actually sounds like a pretty compelling argument to me; much as I'd love to see the Hubble continue to the end of its originally planned lifespan, I wouldn't want to see another Columbia disaster as the cost. But the article goes on to suggest that the danger argument is just an excuse, that the funding is the real issue.

The article ends by pointing out that Hubble will likely continue for several years yet even without the planned trip:

Dr. [Steven] Beckwith[, director of the Space Telescope Institute,] said: "We at the institute are devastated by the potential loss of Hubble. But we will do our absolute best to make the final years of its life the most glorious science you've ever seen."

(Thanks, Aaron!)