Force will be our guest live, starting at 8 00 p. M. Eastern, taking your phone calls and questions on the coronavirus pandemic. Standing by now for a go for auto sequence start. T minus 33. Hold at t minus 31 seconds. The ground launch sequencer would not hand off to the orbiters computers to complete the count because the liquid oxygen was showing off when it should be on. T minus 10. Go for main engine start. Were go for main engine start. T minus six, five, four, three, two, one, liftoff of Space Shuttle discovery with the hubble space telescope. Our window on the universe. Dr. Kathryn sullivan, youve written a book about the hubble and were going to talk a lot about it today. Watching that video all these years later what was it like for you, knowing you are on board . It was one of my favorite moments. You just saw the skill, professionalism and calm of that Exceptional Team on full display. We all sat in the cockpit. We had no role in this at all. It was the guys on the screen but we just sat and listened, not to the commentator but to the technical communications, followed the discussion through. It was just a marvel. I had the Launch Control center get me the audiotape of the technical control loops because i wanted to be able to have that souvenir. These were my guys, the team im a part of. You tell this story as your book opens about the 32nd hold. What happened there . So there is a set of fuel lines, you saw that big orange tank through which one of them fills the oxygen tank within it. And because you want all the oxygen to stay in the tank there are two valves that you close to make sure nothing leaks out and one of the final checks before the big computer hands over to the shuttle Onboard Computers is that all of those valves are closed, everything is cool, and the indicator on one of the two valves for the oxygen tank read open. It didnt show the right reading, so, you know, that could be really bad. You are one failure away from propellant leaking out. It should be taking you to orbit. It may not get you high enough to deploy hubble, only with enough to get across the atlantic. It landing landed in an emergency runway. In the worst case you could end up splashing into the Atlantic Ocean so the engineers needed to stop and look at that and determine if the second valve was really not closed or is it just a flaky indicator and thats what we heard the engineer talking through, and he was doing physics 101 as he was talking it through. Its super cold oxygen. If that valve is really open the temperatures should be like this in the area around there and they arent. They are warmer than that so it cant be true that the valve was really open. So he ran through all of that in his mind and sent a repeat command to the valve and that sort of made the indicator flip to the correct state. And then its been his call, the bosses in the control center, are you prepared to go now or not . On you, and he was confident about it. He said we go and you heard the pickup then, countdown resumed and we flipped over to the automatic sequencer and seconds 31 seconds later left the earth. What is it like for the astronauts sitting in the seat knowing all those decisions are really out of your control . You cant say stop at this point, i dont want to go. If the commander onboard was really dissatisfied with what he or she is hearing they could in principle do that but the team of engineers in the washington control center have countless more indicators and readouts than we have so they have the better picture in front of them. At the end of the day youve got to count on the competency, skill, and composure, you dont apply to sit on that console, and be that control engineer, its a multiyear process of demonstrating your skills, backing up somebody else in apprentice mode. Its a very elaborate and very formal certification process to sit there and make that call. And for obvious reasons. The entire Space Shuttle program is going to stop or go based on your word. I looked up for this conversation, with all the years of Space Programs in several countries, there are still fewer than six hundred people who have been in space. So for all of us earthbound humans, whats the experience like . Yeah, its a very small club. Well, launch, at least on Something Like a Space Shuttle, is kind of like being in an earthquake. There is a lot of shaking, the back of your chair is being pushed skyward at a pretty impressive rate. For the shuttle we only got pressed into our seats three times the force of gravity. Some other rockets expose you to twice that amount. So youre squeezed into your seat. Its loud, youre rattling, youve got to break through the atmosphere and get up into the no weather area. Thats where you can accelerate. Use all that rocket power. Now start going fast. Getting into orbit means going 17,500 miles per hour. Thats really hard to do in the thick atmosphere near the earth. So, you know, the liftoff is an amazing experience, embedded in that ball of energy for 8. 5 minutes and then it flips to this other completely magical experience, being able to float anywhere in a room. Of course, were really familiar with the cockpit of the shuttle from all of our training. Its like this room here. That is a floor and that is a ceiling and you need a table to put something on and all of those rules change once you get to zero gravity. You can move massive objects with the tip of a finger. You can flip it anyway you want, its just a delight. Was it different from your zero gravity training actually being there . The zero gravity training i always found completely worthless. Its never really sustained zero gravity. Its twice the force of gravity and then for 20 seconds its none and then back and forth but the training we did for space walks where you put on a spacesuit, its a real spacesuit thats just never going to get used in orbit and you put yourself in a large tank of water, neutrally buoyant. If the scuba divers let go of you you wont pop to the surface or sink to the bottom. That gives you a feel for gravity. Just put your body where you need it to be to access without worrying about what is conventionally up and down and left and right. As we heard that 1990 mission, was the launch of the hubble, youve had a career filled with scientific achievements. Where does the hubble project fall for you . Being part of the hubble project falls at the top for me. Its the most amazing machine weve put into orbit, the most amazing scientific instrument. Its transformed how we understand the universe, our universe, our solar system. How stars form, and, you know, to have any little part in something so transformative and something that seeped out so pervasively in the popular imagination, thats always been the pinnacle. One thing that you asked me that im proudest about is that i was on team hubble. Who was the hubble named for . Edwin p. Hubble, an astronomer from princeton, i believe, if i remember correctly. He was a guy back in the 1920s and 1930s who figured out the universe must be expanding and you can figure out how fast its expanding by looking at the red shift of stars, lightwave equivalent of what we all experience when a train comes toward us and goes past us. You hear the train whistle. Light will do that as well. If the star is moving toward you, the Natural Light will be pushed towards blue, higher frequency and moving away it shifts towards red. If you could very carefully measure how much towards the red the light has shifted you can get an indicator of how quickly the universe is expanding. They named this telescope after hubble because being above the atmosphere with long duration, ability to see, not blocked by the atmosphere, and with the instruments it had, it was going to be able to make it a much more precise measurement of that constant, more tightly on how the universe is actually functioning. Its been 30 years since that mission took off. Why are you writing a book about it now . Im writing a book about it for a couple of reasons. One is the promise that the engineers made when they were designing hubble is that it would run for 15 years and that would have been a complete success. Its going to turn 30 next year. Not only that but its not the same telescope anymore the outer skin is the same. The structure that holds the two big mirrors is the same and the antennas that beam the data back and forth is the same. Virtually Everything Else on the telescope is different from the pieces that we put up in 1990. That comes down to the foresight that engineers had starting in the mid 1960s actually to think about actually building a telescope that you could repair and upgrade while it was in orbit. They reasoned, they really drew a parallel to a mountaintop observatory. They will last hundreds of years. You bring an instrument up every time the Technology Changes or when the mirror on the mountaintop is a constant. They wanted to go in that direction with hubble and it was an amazing amount of foresight in the earliest days of the Space Program, and then the years that i worked on hubble before we took it to orbit the task then was to hypothetically maintain it in orbit but you guys dont have tools and equipment yet. You have to equip the shuttle to be able to do that, and i dont think youll be surprised to hear you dont go to home depot and look on aisle four for hubble tools. They had to be modified. What are the biggest engineering challenges that have to be solved . Really the biggest one, a telescope has to do three things to succeed. It has to see clearly, point precisely, and hold really still. So getting the mirror fashioned correctly and shaped correctly, which, of course, we later learned they didnt quite do. That was a huge demanding technical undertaking. The whole control system that points hubble and then holds it very still gave them fits for years and years and years. In comparison to those problems, setting an architecture, layout of boxes and units on the hubble, setting that so you could get at things easily to replace them, if this breaks i want to be able to reach in and get it out, that architecture was set very early on in the design history. And then the challenge in 1985 to 1990 was to go look at all of those boxes and be sure that astronauts really did have tools that could do those jobs, you know, could reach that fastener, could open that latch. Could do the repair or the replacement of all the different boxes. So how important was it that the European Space agency was involved in this project . Politically and budgetary it was important to have the space agency involved. They took something on the order of 20 of the cost. They shared that and in return they got observing time. So it expanded the Scientific Community using hubble. Probably the reality is it was kind of a gonogo thing with congress. Were not going to do this all by ourselves. If this is a compelling enough scientific endeavor surely some other partner countries will join in. Nasa, go get some other people to join in. Was there competition . Wanting to build a competitors telescope . Not that im aware of. The start of this story beyond the time we put into orbit was still the cold war era. Certainly at my level, being privy to what the russians was planning was pretty low but you never caught anything about russia planning to build a telescope. The diplomatic relations at that time would have prohibited a direct partnership with them. If you could explain because you want to tell the story and inform people but what was the role of nasa in this project and what was the role of private industry . The role of nasa was to talk to the Scientific Community, astronomical community, determine what the science objectives should be, and do some of the first order calculations about what kind of telescope would it take to deliver that science program. And then the role of industry was, design and build that. One of the things that really surprised me, as i did my research for the book, i started asking myself, when nasa put the bid out to private industry, we got permission to do this telescope, when youre going to build it, tell me how and show me the mathematics that will convince me that it will do the things i need it to do. I started to wonder what did nasa say to those companies about maintenance at that time . That would have been 1976, 1977, 1978. Did they have a list of things you will need to provide . I found some of the bid documents in the archives at the air and space museum and it boiled down to nasa said it shall be maintainable. You guys figure it out. You tell me how you will do that. Because they didnt know . Nobody knew. I mean, you think where that was in time, the Skylab Missions had only just happened. Those were arguably the first really complicated space walks that anyone had done. It was clearly the most complex thing at that time. No one had a basic experience in space walk to draw on and the engineers that were designing hubble all the way through, they were motorcycle guys, they were car guys, train guys, they were taking that kind of practical experience from a very groundbased enterprise and good engineering principles and their imagination and applying that to the telescope. What company won the largest portion of the contract . Lockheedmartin. Lockheed missiles and Space Corporation was the prime contractor and the integrator. Based where . In sunnyvale, california, and they had a contractor to make the big mirror and with other universities to do the scientific instruments and gyros came from another company. It was quite a cascade to get the pieces together but setting the architecture was lockheeds responsibility. Verifying that their maintenance would work starting with choreography and getting more refined as time went forward. That was led by lockheed. So do you want to give credit to some of the players, who are some of the most important people that the rest of the public should know about . Yeah, i think anyone who works close on hubble would tell you that the primary name is Ron Sheffield. He was in a second career. He finished his illustrious 30year army career, was hired by lockheed and plunked on to the Hubble Program on day one. He and a small team stayed with hubble and the repair missions to the final repair mission. They are the unifying thread. They were the continuity. They were the memory. They had all the detailed data of every tool and every fastener and everything. Once hubble got into orbit the nasa responsibility for planning and Services Missions shifted to the Goddard Space Flight Center in maryland and a key figure there was a guy named frank cepollina, widely nicknamed the father of satellite servicing. And i know and adore and respect him tremendously but i could argue that sheffield was more the father of satellite servicing because he designed and built it off. Built it all. So ron, certainly his two lieutenants were peter leon and brian woodford, and we had a couple of spectacular tool designers in houston. Michael and robert and th folks that would talk with us on console, our engineering interface for space walks, but all of those people i named after Ron Sheffield they would all say, no, no, sheffield deserves the credit. Does someone know the exact number or close to the number of people that were involved completely on the hubble project and how much the entire thing cost . What are the estimates for this effort . The cost estimates was in the 3 billion to 4 billion range. To build or the whole project . To build, launch and what was each Servicing Mission over the ensuing years, 2009, i dont know those numbers. Very safe estimate for the number of people is thousands. But you would argue the American Public got their moneys worth . I absolutely i think mankind got their moneys worth and the American Public more than got their moneys worth. The inspiration, everywhere you go in schools, hubble images are everywhere. We all have the stars over our head and the moon over our head. Were all fascinated by it in different ways and to have this super crazy clear magical Looking Glass to show us more of what they are really like, it just seems to entrance everybody. Your book also gives a real sense of the engineering and the science involved in this one. One story that immediately pops to mind thinking about reading it, was the clean room and the enormity of the clean room. Can you talk about the importance of not even particle of dust going into the room. That was really crazy. That was really crazy. Lockheed was, at that time, building lots of satellites for the Defense Department and intelligence world and i think this big facility was probably built for them. But it was perfect for hubble. Hubbles mirror, the technical term is hubbles mirror was supposed to be refraction limited, which means it will operate right at the limit of the optics and the physics given its size and even a tiny bit of dust would start lowering the amount of signal. It wanted to look at very distant, very dim stars so you dont want any little bit of film at all on this gigantic mirror so this room that it was assembled in, the sidewall of the room was a Basketball Court on end and the whole wall was an array of huge large fans that pulled air from the outside and pushed the air through high precision, better than hospital filters, better than operating room filters. They pushed it through with enough velocity that if any little bit of dust got past the filters it would stay suspended the whole 120 foot length of the building before it could possibly fall. You would happily have cooked your meals on the floor. Everything came into the building downstream of hubble. So if were going to come in and maybe have a little bit of dust on me, coming downstream of the hubble, the dust will go in the other direction. You consciously limited how many people ever went between the telescope and the filters, to not have clothing fibers or dust that we might be transporting get into there. And as i described in the book, the process of getting to be able to go into that room had a very strong resemblance to getting ready for a space walk. The Space Shuttle and hubble go handinhand with one another. President nixon approves the shuttle in 1972. How long before the first shuttle flew after that . The first flight was in 1981. Nine years. Obviously, the hubble approval came in 1978. Six years later. So were they envisioned together or did they together they were very much envisioned together and they became mutually dependent politically. Hubble was one of the big offerings to the Science Community. This new truck that nasa is building is not just going to haul satellites back and forth for commercial industry. Its going to do remarkable things for the Science Community as well. Like taking an instrument the scale of hubble up to orbit and keep it repaired and operating, and at the cutting edge of technology because we can replace things as the technology ages. The shuttle was approved in 1972 by president nixon. Congresss first approval to start more detail design on this idea of the telescope that came in 1973. So from 1973 to 1978, the shuttle design is getting more and more refined because it was still very much on the drawing boards when hubble got its first okay. So, you know, we think the payload bay will be this big. We think it can carry this much. We think the telescope will look like this. Those went back and forth through that fiveyear interval of 1973 to 1978, getting more attuned to each other and tailored to working together. When did the Shuttle Program owned . What was it, 2011 . Why did it end . Nasa had been getting pressured for quite some time to not stay stuck in low earth orbit. Go back to its original mandate to break open the new frontiers and they have been working for a number of years on the design of a new launch system, and new spacecraft that could go beyond low earth orbit, at least the moon, maybe to mars, and as with hubble, you can do some of that design work basically on paper for quite some time and get the math and the engineering all refined but at some point you need to Start Building pieces and prototypes and confirm that the design is going to work like you think on paper. That cost more money. And so both the white house and congressional political decision that nasa would not be given an increase in budget to accommodate that prototyping. They would have to take it from Something Else and the decision was, lets retire the shuttle. Elon musk and jeff bezos and several private Sector Companies were even then saying we think were getting close to the point where we can be the airline that takes people back and forth to low earth orbit so stop running a shuttle of your own and get ready to hire us, well take your astronauts back and forth. Thats also taken longer than the 40s were back when it started but that was part of the argument. As someone who spent a lot of your career in space, how do you feel about the privatization of space travel . I mean, i dont have any big philosophical objections, it was being done by private sector contractors, very confident people, very responsible people. Companies operating very well. We didnt care too much which badge you had, a nasa badge or a contractor badge so im fine with that. I think any of these companies that are going to try to operate Shuttle Services back and forth to low over the orbit either for cargo or for people, i think they are finding they will be held to a very similar safety standard as nasa. They might find more efficient ways to meet that standard but, you know, things you take to space, even equipment you take to space is expensive. Insurance Companies Wont be very happy with you losing two or three of them in a row and obviously the American Public would put a pretty quick halt to things if you were getting cavalier with the lives of private astronauts. This book tells something of your story. You come into the picture in 1951. Where were you born and you describe yourself as a sputnik baby. So for the younger folks out there. What does that mean i was born in patterson, new jersey, the Northeast Corner of new jersey. My father was in the aerospace engineering, his first big job after his masters degree. In 1957, the soviet union launched sputnik. I think even in those first six years or so, my dad was so into aerospace we kind of had as little kids attuned to that. He would come home all excited about Little Things going on and share pictures from magazines with us but i have a pretty clear memory of him hustling us out into the front yard of our little apartment in october of 1957, it would have been the day after my sixth birthday and pointing up to this little light moving across the sky. I think i was excited about it because dad was excited about it. I probably didnt really understand what it was, certainly i didnt understand the big geopolitical implications of it. But pretty soon after that we moved out to southern california, where the epicenter of aerospace was really starting to take anchor and lived there through my high school and college years. Right in the middle of all of the space stuff. How many kids were in your family . Just me and my older brother, grant. And hell have a role well talk about in a minute. Your career in science was given because you write that you actually had a gift in another direction. Languages. Yeah, i sort of bounced back and forth. In second grade i was the odd little girl, when we had a chance to take any book we wanted from the School Library i took one about Rocket Propulsion and i discovered there is this thing called equation for escape philosophy. I was amazed that anybody could know how fast you needed to get away from earth. In fifth grade a family friend helped me to recognize my talent with foreign languages. My real motivation was somebody needs to buy me airplane tickets so i can travel and live in exotic foreign countries, i decided the best area of action was to learn a lot of languages, somehow that would become your key to life adventure and travel. How many languages do you speak . French and norwegian. Why norwegian . I did my third year of university in norway and its so close to sweden and danish that i can converse and read in those languages. I was quite fluent in german by the end of my first year in college but its the rustiest. Where did you go to college . University of california santa cruz, fighting banana slugs. Fighting banana slugs. And what was your major . I started as a language and linguistics major and was informed that language majors like me had to take three Natural Science courses in our freshman year. I thought it was a terrible idea and argued and fought and looking back, now i am glad i lost the arguments, two of the classes were marine science and geology courses and thats where i saw a different way to think about this life of adventure that i was interested in. Two key professors were not a whole lot older than me, young faculty, very dynamic, passionate about their subjects, taking us up into the mountains or out to the shoreline every weekend doing this, lets see how this works, what is over there . These guys are amazing, they are having so much fun. My french professor sitting in his office was, we can annotate and mark it, i can have a quiet office with a dog or i can go with these guys out into the field and they were always traveling off somewhere to join a ship or do some other field work, and i thought im going with these guys. [inaudible] yeah, i mean, i wondered for about a year, i bashed my head about what sort of a waste that you didnt go this way your senior year of high school, all the lost time kind of thing. But the literature and the language work that i did through high school and really have continued since, absolutely pays huge dividends. It gave me my communication skill, cultural empathy. It gave me a fluency to move around large parts of the world that has been hugely valuable personally and professionally, so, you know, it really wasnt either or for me. Its been both of them welded together. Thats inspiring. What did you do after College Graduation . With that exchange here in norway, i had got an glimpse of the geology of the north atlantic which was just being transformed into plate tectonics at that time and one of the active vibrant Research Groups doing that was based in halifax, nova scotia, in canada, so i ended up at grad school in nova scotia and working with the Bedford Institute of oceanography. Owned a little piece of the sea floor that no one had mapped. Got to map it and name the features. Great fun. We actually have a video of your graduation. Wonders of the internet. Lets watch. Kathryn sullivan. By the authority by university, i admit you to the degree of doctor of philosophy with all the rights and privileges thereto, and i congratulate you. [applause] dr. Sullivan leaves us to go to nasa, the u. S. Space agency, to be one of the first women to enter the Training Course as an astronaut. [applause] and the two delightful things about the way he did those ceremonies, your president has just hooded you and shaken your hand, ladies and gentlemen, the first time anyone called you doctor and your family is there, and then you go sit with the faculty onstage instead of going to the audience because you are now a credentialed member of the academy. This is interesting. You were getting your ph. D. In oceans, and you are often you are off to nasa. This is what your brother comes back into the story. What was his role . Christmas time of 1976, he had been tracking all the advertisements nasa had out to recruit for the Shuttle Program. Hes the flying nut in the family, from this tall, and he already applied both for the job i ended up with and pilot Space Shuttle and he was lobbying that i should apply, too. You know how to run expeditions from smaller planes to small boats to the research ships. They are looking for women. How many 26yearold female ph. D. s can there be in the world . And in the course of the christmas vacation i just dismissed him out of hand. The area i was working in, in the atlantic, about 13,000 feet of water. Its hard enough to do geology through 13,000 feet of water. Going 200 miles further away struck me as ridiculous but when i got back to halifax after the holiday i saw one of nasas advertisements in a trade publication, and thats where a different perspective clicked in. I said they are actually looking for people that can run expeditions. They are building a research ship. Of all the things i liked about oceanography, it was the operational aspect of expeditions at sea. You make a plan, you know what the science objectives are, nothing ever goes quite the way you planned. The weather hits you, something fails and youre always improvising and adapting to get it done despite whatever banana peels get thrown at your feet. I loved the challenge, i loved being at sea. I was good at it. I thought if they were looking for expedition managers i think im one of them. How many people applied in your class . It was something north of 8,700. Closer to 9,000 people. How many were selected . 35. And every class ive read has a nickname. What was yours . We were probably the least Creative Class in a very long time. There were 35 of us. We spent probably a month trying to come up with clever things on 35s. There is a military acronym, tfng, in a squadron, that person is called the tfngs new guy. Folks that have been there before us are ab entirely happy to have 35 newbies show up so we became the tfngs. But you werent new guys. I think most of us were quite happy just letting that term be used. The class was not all men at that point. But the six of us at that time, we sort of didnt care. And what was the makeup of the class . So 15 of the class were military test pilots, the sort nasa had hired many times in the past. Except that one of them was africanamerican. And then 20 were this new category called mission specialists. Scientists, mds, engineers, i think we were about 1 3 with military Something Like1 3 with military backgrounds and 2 3 from civilian backgrounds, and thats where we had the six women and two other africanamericans, and asian american. What year was this . This was 1978 when we finally joined nasa. And how much training did you have before you actually get a Space Mission . Well, we were in line behind all the astronauts who had been waiting around since apollo. And the shuttle, when we joined in 1978, the shuttle supposedly was going to be flying its first test flight within a year or a year and a half. That turned out to take longer, more like three years to get to. So we did, as every class does, a oneyear condensed crash graduate school for astronauts, basically is what it is. Think of every element of science and engineering that might have anything to do with space flight and youre going to get a crash course in it from national experts. They are like a first year grad course crammed into eight weeks. Everybody goes through it together. Phd astronomers are in astronomy 101 with me. I sat through oceanography 101, and at that point you are blessed as welcome to the Astronaut Corps and entitled to wear the Astronaut Corps symbol and then you start getting plugged into support roles in flights that are coming up. So you learn how a Shuttle Mission or a Space Mission comes together by doing some of the background work and seeing from within how all the pieces and parts of the mission have to be planned, integrated and connected together. Make sure they work together. I liken it to starting out in a Big Corporation down in the mail room where you can see how all the pieces interact and if you move up to a more senior position that knowledge of how the system behaves will be really helpful. If you had to describe the qualities that it takes to be a successful astronaut what are they . Goal or purpose oriented. Persistence. Selfdisciplined. Youve got to be a selfstarter. Love learning. Close to insatiable curiosity. Did everybody that was selected make it through the program . They did. Nasa selects to fly. The military will select a hundred people to go through Pilot Training knowing or planning that they are going to wash out a third or a half. Nasa went the other way. More care, more precision and diligence in the selection. So that everyone is going to fly. From the 1978 class it was sally ride, one of your colleagues, who was chosen to be the first woman in space. You write about that Selection Process and how ultimately you were happy that it wasnt you. Yeah. We were all pretty competitive. I think we all knew, believed, that if we got the nod to go first we could do a fine job. I still think that was true about all six of us. Sally was certainly a fine choice in countless ways but yeah, we were all used to finishing first, getting as and winning anything we would go after and suddenly its not going to happen. Youve got to get over that little disappointment moment. But when she landed, when their flight landed, weather forced them to land in california, at Edwards Air Force base instead of in florida. Nasa had assembled a massive crowd of vip people in florida to watch the landing and to be the first people to meet this crew and now very famous woman. Jane fonda, all sorts of names that the white house had invited. Nasa invited and sally had invited. When it became clear that they were going to end up in california i got tapped along with one other astronaut to fly down to the cape and basically stand in for the crew and entertain the vips, and help them get through the disappointment of not getting to meet them all so quickly. I was less than really thrilled about that. Sort of but yeah, when we walked into that hallway, a big massive auditorium, two thoughts went through my mind right away. One was, im really glad sally is not here because if they had landed in florida she would have had maybe an hour and a half from landing to get showered and changed, and checked by the docs and then, you know, be catapulted into that room to be nice with all the hundreds of people that were there and i could appreciate how you would rather have some quiet time after such an amazing experience, a bit of a quiet time with just your crew to savor it a little bit before you have to go on and be a public presence for everyone and my immediate Second Thought was, if this is what you get for going first, she can have it. But you had your own first certainly thereafter and weve got some video. This is from october 11, 1984. Were going to watch, and this would be, as we watch, helpful if you help narrate it for us. This is me on the upper deck of the Space Shuttle. Not quite sure what im organizing there. Sally i think thats bob crippen. John mcbride is the guy on the right and is helping to hook up the cooling garment. Its like long johns but its got thin tubes of cold water it in. Dave with the red stripe is already out in the bay. Thats me slipping out from the airlock. Spacewalk is the wrong verb, you can see its more like swimming than it is like walking. And our job was really pretty simple. We moved all the way to the back of the cargo bay to work on an experiment. This antenna that you see here, dave on the left, me on the right, it had broken so my final job was to move along, the path you see me on here getting near that antenna so i could put it into the position that it needed to get to so we could bring it home safely. With that you became the First American woman to walk in space. I did. What is that honor like . Well, its not anything that really drove why i was there or how i prepared for it. My first space walk was going to be my first space walk no matter how many had gone before me. Men or women. If you want to get assigned to do a second space walk you want to do the first one well. I appreciate the opportunities it has given me, in particular to inspire younger people, encourage them to reach for the stars to set a big goal and work for it. Opening those doors, opening hearts and minds of younger people thats a real privilege that comes with the honor. I wrote down a sentence from the chapter, i was keenly aware that the environment outside my suit was deadly. Yet felt utterly comfortable. Youve spent so much time in a spacesuit by that time mostly in the water tanks, training and moving around, but youve actually been in your own qualified suit in a chamber where they pump all the air out. Youve had that experience of, im okay, actually there is no air in this room anymore. I was always bermudas. The room looks the same with and without air. Have to remember if you open a visor right now it doesnt work. Youll be quickly unconscious and dead. Whats the greatest risk . A puncture in the suit is the greatest risk. There is an oxygen supply that can overrun that. But a really big puncture or something that shatters and cracks the visor, that would be the biggest risk. After this first, how did your life change . I had never expected to talk directly to the president of the united states. Within a couple of hours we were on the airtoground loop with president reagan and a couple of months later i was seated next to him at a steak dinner at the white house. A little girl from suburban southern california, this is not where i thought i would end up. But, you know, the main thing for me was that i was pretty quickly after that put back in the flight rotation and assigned to another flight so i wasnt going to have to cool my heels on the ground for too very long and it was the hubble flight which was really a standout cargo. In all the cargos and flights that were listed out down through the calendar that was really, no pun intended, that was a real stellar standout. Wouldnt it be cool to go on that mission. Youll go way high and be part of putting this amazing thing into orbit. It was six years between that 1984 space walk and that first video we saw, why did it take six years . The main reason it took six years was because of the challenger accident. Hubble, while i was flying, was slated to fly in 1986. In fact, the day that challenger exploded, i was flying back to do some work on the telescope. It was a tight timeline to get all the tools and equipment prepared and loaded, that we needed for the flight. Challenger explodes, the whole fleet is grounded. It takes a very long time, it takes many months to dig in to all the engineering and find out whats the root cause, why did that happen . And then, of course, everyone steps back and says where else might we have missed a hazard of a similar magnitude. Youre checking everything upsidedown. All of the assumptions and risk calculations. To get through that you end up with a list of things that youve got to fix before you fly again. All of that combined, it took 3 1 2 years before the shuttle flew again. 1988. But once it started flying again, there were cargos that had higher priority to get into orbit quickly and hubble was just kind of flexible. It could go whenever. It wasnt trying to get to mars and have to hit launch window. It wasnt a high Value Communications satellite. So we just kept slipping further and further to the right, in the sequence of payloads. By coincidence, while taping the shuttle challenger, tragic accident, the anniversary day, was there some thought that the whole Shuttle Program would be stopped as a result of that . Yeah. I dont know how real or widespread that thought was in the key decisionmaking circles, but i certainly felt worried about it. The anguish and the human cry about the loss of the shuttle and the crew, you know, it became a worry of mind, that if were going to stop this whole program because we lost one vehicle and one crew, i had given a lot of thought to the risk and reward equation. If were going to knock it off because one tv episode turned out badly, then i was clearly fooled. I thought we were doing this for really worthwhile purposes. Worthwhile to the country, worthwhile to mankind, and if you guys were just doing it because its Good Television and Nice Entertainment until you have an unhappy day and then you stop, then i miscalculated what we were really about here. I thought we were about something really deeply meaningful to the country, to the future, and so i fretted about that quietly, but i was really, were going to go fly again or im going to be really mad. In fact, you did. Yes. Who was bruce and why was he important to the hubble launch project . Bruce is one of the really most interesting and unique astronauts that the program has ever had. Super bright guy. Graduated second in his class from annapolis. The son and grandson of medal of honor recipient naval officer. He came to the Astronaut Corps in the early 1970s with was the excess 11 group. When he came along, he was incredibly talented, very intense design engineer. Youve all seen bruce. If youve seen a picture of an astronaut hanging off by himself against the backdrop of space, little white spacesuit with right shapes, thats bruce, and the little rocket patch that he used to fly that far away from the shuttle he codesigned with some folks at the Johnson Space center. He had done some of the very preliminary early work on it back in the 1970s. He was my cospace walker for the hubble deployment flight. We had done space walks. We were the two that if anything didnt go right on the day that we were deploying hubble, if everything didnt unfold properly and so on, we would hop into our spacesuits and go out and fix it. So that mission we saw in the beginning was five days in length. What was the most critical part of the mission . Other than successful getting to orbit the most critical part was the next day when we were deploying hubble. A school bus size piece of equipment. It fits like with inches to spare in the shuttle cargo bay. Steves job was to grab with it shuttles 50 foot long robotic arm and very carefully lift it occupy out of the payload bay. Dont bump it and poise it above the cargo bay so hubble team on the ground could send up all the computer commands that would unfold solar rays and unfold antennas and power the electronics and things started taking too long and not go well pretty soon in that sequence. Why we were spring loaded, as hubble had been riding on shuttles electrical power until we started all of that deployment, we pulled the plug, when steve began lifting up, so now youre relying on the onboard batteries and they could only run for so long. So everything needed to be unfolded and in the right place, solar rays, electricity by a certain time, not many hours away. Or you could lose hubble before you even got started. So thats why bruce and i were, we actually went halfway through the space walk preparations before steve started lifting the telescope. So that if something went wrong it would only take us two hours to get outside. In that five days it worked, go home. Yeah, we dropped it off that day finally. It all happened and we backed away 20 or 30 miles and did station keeping while the ground crew did some more checkout. If Something Else had popped up to be wrong we could have flown back in and grabbed it and tried to repair it, but it was around the fourth day that Mission Control came out and said, everything is checking out okay. You guys can now start preparations to come home. How long did it take before the world knew that hubbles telescope didnt work the way it was intended . Yeah, we put it in orbit in april and i think it was something around, it was months, because for ordinary if of time you let the telescope get in orbit and then you start checking and testing everything. The key thing was, move the secondary mirrors, small mirrors back and forth to get it into focus and it wouldnt focus. Of course, everybodys first idea is were doing something wrong. Try this all again. It took weeks for the data to accumulate enough that people could not escape, scientists could not escape the conclusion that the reason it wont focus is because the big mirror is wrong. What a hit to nasas reputation . Yeah, it was devastating. You could see it in the first briefing of the science team and the Headquarters Team had to come before the press and basically announce and confess this big expensive thing, blah, blah, blah, it cant see straight. Its got blurry vision. They were ashen face, the media erupted. Congress erupted. It was a painful year or so where hubble was the butt of every joke about incompetence on late night tv shows and one of the naked gun movies, it was just painful. The story, of course, everybody watching this knows it has a happy ending. We have a video from three years later, 1993, and this is from our world, the senator from former maryland senator at a breath press conference talking about the fix. Lets watch. [video clip] i chaired the subcommittee that financed the manufacturer of the most significant contact lens in american history, the fix on the hubble tastes space telescope, and then bank rolled this extraordinary space hmo that went out and gave Hubble Telescope a new contact lens. And im happy to announce today, that after its launch now in 1990, some of its earlier disappointments, the trouble with hubble is over. [end of video clip] the senator was always a huge champion of nasa, which didnt mean she was always kindly. She had High Expectations and pushed them. She believed in the agency. As she said, she was persuaded and came to the rescue. The hubble upgrade missions, it shall be made attainable, the five maintenance missions, space 16 spacewalkers, and over that time threefold increase in sensitivity. What should we take away from those stats . Thinking ahead about making this amazing machine maintainable has paid extraordinary dividends. The hardware to get it there has paid huge dividends. It was why we were able to fix the hubble in the first place. I guesstimate, and i am only a geologist, so this is a guesstimate, i guesstimate hubble today is about a thousand times better than the telescope we put into orbit in 1990. Every instrument when it went up put the new prescription in it, and new detectors of higher sensitivity and higher resolution. The solar rays got smaller but produced more power. The batteries got smaller but produced more power. All the mechanical equipment thats prone to breaking and failing like olden day tape recorders became solid state. The computers, from Something Like an old 28 machine that no one can even remember anymore much closer to stateoftheart. So scientific power, accuracy, sensitivity, reliability, all of that just evolve continually through the Servicing Missions. Its estimated to be how long now . Were at the 30year mark. Is it going to keep on going . Were at the 30year mark which is twice the lifespan promised back at the design phase. And its going, its going well. Its got no major defects with it at the moment. It will go until one of three things happen, i would say. Probably, gyros start to fail so it cant point and hold as still as it need at. A micrometer hits it and creates other damage because without the shuttle its no longer possible to repair the telescope, or, you know, its success, designated successor gets out to its orbit sometime in 2021, at some point nasa and or Congress Might say, why am i paying to run two telescopes at once . The hubble community has had a fantastic 30year run, twice as long as we promised you. Time to send you home. Will the hulk of the hubble stay in orbit or what happens to it . The last Servicing Mission attached a fixture to the back of hubble that a cargo craft, a robotic cargo craft could fly up and grab that and use its onboard motors to slow hubble down so it would land at a predictable point in the ocean. That possibility is now feasible. It wouldnt have been before. Whether that would in fact be what they would choose to do remains to be seen. You have a favorite series of hubble images . Im a real fan of the galaxy images. Sombrero galaxy. The cats eye nebula. My cell phone is full of hubble favorites. In the largest sense what have we learned from this project . Weve learned that we have so much more to learn about the universe we live in and how it forms and operates. But weve also learned a ton more about black holes, where they are, what they are, about how galaxies form, how stars form. Weve been able to look into stellar nurseries where stars are forming. Weve been able to look much further back in time because of the distant seeing power of hubble. You know, its our place in the universe and how this universe works is a big part of what hubble is unlocking. It spotted some of the first exoplanets, planets orbiting stars other than our sun and its passed the baton to some other astronomical satellites. Its given us very close up looks at other planets in our solar system. It let us watch a comet hit the atmosphere of jupiter and so and teach us so much more about how the gaseous planets in our solar system work. The title of your book is hand prints of hubble. Where does that come from . Ive said for many years that although my name is not one of the most commonly associated names with hubble, names of the space walkers that did the repairs are more talked about than mine but i made enough contributions to hubble i feel like, i used to say a fingerprint on every hubble discovery and as i was writing the book i learned that there are actually are real hand prints on hubble where the space walking with astronauts that did the repairs touched it and john, who is known as dr. Hubble, john took a picture on his last space walk of some of those scuff marks and some of those hand prints. So i switched fingerprints into hand prints, the alliteration is a little better and i used that picture to close the book. The people i wanted to celebrate here, Ron Sheffields, and peter leons, like i, they have hand prints on hubble even if our names are not front and center and top of mind when people write about it or talk about it. So there are metaphorical hand prints on hubble by many thousands of people and ten there are the real hand prints from those 16 space walkers. You left nasa how long after the launch of the hubble . I made another flight in the spring of 1992, and the day we landed i was asked to allow my name to go forward to the white house to be can nominated as the chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration so i moved from houston up to washington in Something Like july of that year and got confirmed the following spring. The rest of my government career largely with noaa. If you look back across the arc of your scientific career, whats been the meaning of it for you . What are you trying to accomplish with your lifes work . I think whats always driven me has been a deep broad curiosity about our planet and its geography. Peoples, cultures, landscapes how the Natural Systems work, atmosphere of the ocean. My deepest motivation for applying to the Shuttle Program if i got in would get to see the earth with my own eyes from orbit. I could not pass up the possibility. Even if the odds were remote you had to give it a try. How we do understand this planet better and how do we connect our understanding of it to some of the decisions that we make. The way we live on this planet. Take care of this planet. If there is a young person watching that aspires to a career in space, what would you say to get them started . Go for it. Dream big, work hard, dont let everyone edit the things dont ever let anyone edit the things youre interested in. Go for it. Its going to be worth it. Its really, really worth it to be part of something thats so much bigger than yourself. So reach for your stars. Go for it. Thank you for the hour that you spent with cspan. It was delightful to go back in history and look at the Space Program through your eyes. Thanks for the chance to talk about it. Loved it. All q a programs are available on our website and as podcast at cspan. Org. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] cspans washington journal, live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. Coming up monday morning, the response of u. S. Health Insurance Companies through the coronavirus with julie of Kaiser Health news. And how washington is addressing job losses amid the coronavirus pandemic with the Economic Policy director of a bipartisan policy center. Be sure to watch cspans washington journal live at 7 00 eastern monday morning. Be sure to watch washington journal prime time on monday. Dr. Anthony found she member of , the White House Coronavirus task force will be our guest , live starting at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. Taking your phone calls and questions on the coronavirus pandemic. The house and senate are expected to return to legislative business after the easter and passover holidays on monday, april 20, but that is subject to change due to the coronavirus pandemic. Watch live coverage of the house on cspan in the senate on cspan2. Monday night on the communicators, American Economic liberties project founder sarah miller on Big Tech Companies as monopolies and the impact of corporate concentration. Now theres essentially a couple of strategies, if eurotech started, are you going to sell to facebook or to google . It has worked the ability of innovators in Silicon Valley to actually innovate according to our needs and ipos. Instead, everyone is guessing, how can i develop something that facebook or google will buy . And that is not necessarily how we want and economy or an Innovation Sector to function. Watch monday night at 8 00 eastern on cspan2. British Prime MinisterBoris Johnson gave a statement after his release from the hospital where he was being treated for the coronavirus. He spoke about his condition and the role of the National Health service in responding to the pandemic. P. M. Johnson after a week of which the nhs has saved my life. No question. It is hard to find words to express my debt. But before i come to that, i want to thank everyone in the entire u. K. For the effort and the sacrifice you have