"Just because something's old doesn't mean you throw it out. Lots of folks will still have plently of use for it." So says Harry Broderick. And he should know. As the owner of Jettison Salvage, Broderick has spent a lifetime turning one man's trash into another man's treasure.

Harry Broderick is, of course, best known for the daring 1979 exploit in which he and his partners, Skip Carmichael and Melanie Slozar, flew a spacecraft, built from scrapyard materials, to The Moon to claim salvage on the equipment left behind by earlier NASA missions. His spacecraft, whimsically named, "The Vulture" after a different sort of scavenger, was partially disassembled shortly after it's moonflight as part of an attempt to steer an errant iceberg away from commercial shipping lanes, but now, Mr Broderick plans to rebuild The Vulture for a new mission.

"According to [NASA Administrator] Sean O'Keefe," explains Broderick, "NASA has no plans to return to the Hubble Space Telescope. That means it's been abandoned. [NASA] is planning to let it just fall into the ocean, like Mir, but I'm not gonna let them. Hubble has been abandoned, so I'm going to go and salvage it."

What use does a scrapyard owner have for an orbital observatory? Broderick muses, "Well, I'm certain that even piecemeal it would bring in a tidy sum on eBay...." But space enthusiasts and the scientific community needn't worry about the space telescope being turned into bookends and paperweights. Not if Broderick has his way. He has a much loftier goal. "No," he explains, "breaking it up would never do. Hubble's too useful in it's current form, doing basic science. Since NASA won't fly any more service missions, I'm going to lay claim to Hubble and do the service missions myself."

Can a self-described "ordinary junkman" like Harry Broderick do the unthinkable and salvage the Hubble Space Telescope? Many skeptics deride The Vulture's flight to the moon as "a cheap publicity stunt, filmed in a Hollywood studio." But the piece of moon rock sitting on Broderick's desk bears mute testimony to those times when even the impossible is possible.

Save the Hubble!