Transcripts For CSPAN2 Kathryn Sullivan Handprints On Hubble 20240713

Welcome to all of our regulars, for anyone who is a first timer the secret science club is at event series and we bring sciences of all disciplines out of their labs and onto the public stages. Here they can be part of the cultural life of new york city and people like you and me can come and be informed, energized and be engaged by scientific ideas and discovery and interact directly with some of the scientist. Secret science club, our regular hang out our main layers in brooklyn but secret science club north, we are back here tonight in manhattan as a part of our fifth miniseries at sympathy space. We would really like to thank all of the people at symphony space, the staff, particularly kathy led down Johanna Thompson Rebecca White mary mead, james lazio, and zach ricci for help us expand our showing. Began for them. [applause] very big special thank you to the bar, we have the bar actually to the back and left if youve not visited yet. They have concocted our cocktail does your or however you say it, its called the atlantis. Fabulous blue glowing drink. Its name for the Space Shuttle in which our speaker was a crewmember. And its very tasty, we highly recommend it. To expand your universe further. Also thanks to cspan who is covering is here tonight, i want to give a shout out to them. If youd like to find out more about the secret science club and our Upcoming Events here in brooklyn or anywhere in the universe, sometimes we are out there, please visit our charmingly retro website yes we are blogspot secret science club. Blogspot. Com, you can also signup for our mailing list and we would love to have new members. You are a member just by being here. But if you sign up you get to know about all of her goings on. So on the evenings event. Tonight we are thrilled to present astronaut, scientist, and author Kathryn Sullivan. As a nasa astronaut Kathryn Sullivan spent over 500 hours in space. But before that she trained as a scientist receiving a phd in geology and she actually went from studying the ocean floor onto nasa to train some more, and become the First American woman to walk in space. She is a veteran of three nasa suspicion missions and she was on the crew of the discovery shuttle that launched the amazing Hubble Space Telescope which has so radically revolutionized our views of the universe. But she did not stop when she left the astronaut corps. After words, Kathryn Sullivan served as the administrator of the u. S. National oceanic and atmospheric administration, and oaa. Overseeing ships and airplanes that looked back at earth, monitoring the health of our oceans and atmosphere. And now, after 2017 she has written a book its called handprints on hubble, and astronaut story of invention. And that is a subject never talk tonight. The lovely folks at books on call nyc are our booksellers tonight. Kathryn sylvan will be signing copies after the talk and after the q a. She is going to come and talk, followed by q a with you our wonderful audience. And then we will have the book signing. Please welcome doctor Kathryn Sullivan. [applause] april 24, 1990 found us right where we had been 14 days earlier. Suited up, strapped in, and ready to go. With the countdown clock stopped at t minus 31 seconds, again. This time, the Launch Control center computers had halted the countdown because of an indication that a valve on one of the pipes used to field the fuel tanks had failed to close. If the indicator was correct, then only one valve was left to prevent the fuel in the tank from leaking overboard instead of feeding into the Space Shuttles three main engines. And if that happens, we could end up too low to deploy the space telescope and aborts to the other side of the ocean or splash into the ocean. The launch would be scrubbed rather than accept that risk. If the indicator was wrong, however, think about the flaky tire Pressure Sensor on your car, and the system was fine, and there is no reason to scratch. So which was it . Serious problem . Or faulty indicator . Go for lunch . Or scrub . This highstakes call fell to the launch team controller responsible for the shuttles main propulsion system. Someone i still know only by his call sign as mips. Time was not on this guys side. The shuttles auxiliary power elite limit had a strict limit on how much more we can hold this point, just 12 minutes more. In the cockpit wheat listened intently as the Launch Controller worked out the problem. Mps what your status the launch director asked . The propulsion engineer talk calmly to the data on his display. Temperature and pressure readings in line surrounding the valve were not consistent with it being open. Fundamental physics said it was closed. He proposed to send a manual command hoping this would make the indicator read correctly. That works. But the control center computers still had a lock on the countdown clock. Mps what your call . The launch director pressed. Im prepared to manually override the software, proceed with account replied. With a crisp and rapid cadence, the vessel through nb the launch director gave him go to do that until the other Launch Controllers to get ready to resume the countdown. Then he involves jet advised that the launch team was again go. The call we had been waiting for came a split second later. All controllers, this is ntd, the countdown clock will resume on my mark. Three, two, one, mark. The entire episode had taken less than three minutes. Thirtyone seconds later discovery roared off the launchpad. Well thats the moment at which my Hubble Telescope adventure really launched into the phase that matters. But the early stages of the story go back several years before that. In fact, they start here in 1978, february of 1978 when nasa introduced to the world their newest class of astronauts chosen specifically to fly aboard the Space Shuttle. Their brandnew space truck and research vessel. As a group of 35 people, we quickly became known as the tf and gees, 35 new guys, but if you come for the military would also know theres another phrase where the f does not stand for five, but for something else. So there was a double entendre on that military phrase. The other interesting thing about our group as we had strange people amongst us. We had 25 military test pilot types as every other group of nasa astronauts have had, but we also had six women, eve see the six of us here, and three africanamerican men and one Asian American man. By the end of our first day, right after we had been introduced to the public, it became clear to all of us that the simple way to describe our group was ten interesting people and 25 standard white guys. [laughter] the 25 standard white guys were out of the publicity building and off to the gym, or the beach, or whatever they wanted to do, about a half an hour after the introduction ceremony ended. And the six of us and our four other strange people were besieged and barraged with interviews all the way to the east coast news hour and beyond. It was a kind of life, new phase of life that none of us had ever expected. Two of us in this picture here, me on the middle left in sally on the far right, we had only just turned 206, we were straight out of graduate school, we had just finished our phds. Astronaut interview was our first ever serious Job Interview and astronaut was our first ever fulltime job. [laughter] which if you think about it, is just beyond crazy. [laughter] [applause] so what happens when you are a baby astronaut . What happens when your baby astronaut is you go back to school you start learning more things. We spent about a years or group going through a highly compressed graduate school for astronauts. Think of any aspect of science or engineering, Earth Science, physiology, space physics, systems design, anything that might faintly touch on spaceflight, we got a crash course in it from some of the nations best experts. Its about equivalent to the first year of graduate school coursework. When that was done we were actually entitled to wear the insignia of the astronaut corps, silver because you hadnt flown yet, but still. Then we started getting plugged into supportive roles, basically helping other flights come into being. Helping the preparations, the planning for the operation of Shuttle Missions that would happen before our turn in line came along. Its a little bit like starting your career at a company in the mailroom and learning by rotating around from one part of the company to another learning all of the bits and pieces of how the enterprise actually works. We did that for a number of years, before we started getting our group got to the front line and started getting slotted into flight opportunities. For me, my first Flight Opportunity came about in october 1984. My colleague and classmate, sally ride had earned the distinction of being the First American woman to fly in space june the year before. And a late 83, nasa put a press release out announcing this new mission with a fallacy acronym i wont bother you with, it meant cooler science things thats all you need to know. And announcing that sally ride would be on that crew again making her second spaceflight. Kathy sullivan would be aboard for first base flight and spacewalk. Now ive got to tell you there is an absolute delightful wave of excitement and congratulation that swept across the Johnson Space center as our colleagues came up to us and said valid this is so cool youll be the first woman ever to fly twice. And to me you will be the woman to ever do spacewalk. In sally and i looked each other and said, these people have not been paying attention history. Our flight was announced in late 83 for an october 84 launch date, and we had been paying attention to the soviet Space Program. We knew that ten months was plenty of time for the soviet Space Program to put her on another mission and let her do spacewalk. So if you asked sally writing Kathy Sullivan that she owes us both her second flight and her spacewalk. So what do you think is happening here . This is on the launchpad, on october 5, 1984, were getting ready to board the Space Shuttle challenger for our fancy Earth Science mission i told you about. And shouted out guess whats happening here question rick there you go. Limits i was really happening here. The seating arrangements in the cabin dictated that sally and i would board the shuttle last. We waited our turn in the Small Chamber just outside the hatch known as the white room. We were keenly aware that the cameras above our heads meant our every move was being monitored by the Launch Control center and perhaps broadcast on National Television as well. After a few minutes of idle chitchat, we decided we probably ought to appear to be doing something more important than just waiting around. Watches are already synchronized before big mission in the movies. So we decided to pretend that we are synchronizing ours. Happily, there were no microphones in the white room to hear us saying so what you think the news answers are saying about us right now . Or i dont do think we stretch this out quite enough . Im delighted to say that when we landed, there were press clippings from all the coverage are flight had received, this featured probably in all of the articles and the caption says kathy smit sullivan synchronize their watches. Stupid astro joke one, more to follow. That was a great eightday mission, the science was fabulous. Dave gleason i were outside in the second to last day for several hours out in the shuttles payload bay to do a Pretty Simple engineering demonstration to prove some specialized tools would actually allow nasa to begin refueling satellites on orbit. Something to this day that is still never been done. But important to life extensions for battle light untrained sidelights in orbit. We landed, and there is this schizophrenic thing that happens when you fly in space. You go through several weeks of being the center of the universe. Your prime crew, youre next in line, every single thing you need is at your disposable as soon as you need it. If you need an airplane to go fly summer, got it. You need to get into to the doctors, got it. Need another hour the same leaders, god appeared you can cut in line is front of absolutely everybody else for every resource to get you ready for flight. Then you had to some magical crazy indescribable eightday experience, but the thing you dont know is that moment your Space Shuttle clears the launch tower on your way out into orbit leaving the earth, the first four seconds of your mission, there is this other crew in a Conference Room in houston that stands up and says prime crew you are now first in line and when you land you are nobody. You are at the back of a long line of people waiting to get back into the cycle and get to go fly again. Its a really disappointed lonely sort of wandered around with a deer in the headlights look trying to remind yourself you actually really did this stuff, you can see yourself in the photograph but youre trying to remember you did it. I was fortunate that that period did not last too long for me after my first flight. By early the next year, my boss boss called me into his office and said i was going to fly a mission coming up soon with this thing here. The Hubble Space Telescope. What he said to me was, you know the big large space telescope payloads in the manifest, yes ive seen that, its supposed to be maintainable in space by astronauts. And last for 15 years. Ive heard that. But i dont think i actually have any of the equipment. I need the tools and equipment that it will take to do that. So you and bruce mccandless, go get in the middle of all of that now, and make sure that by the time you take it into orbit we actually have all of the stuff we need to fulfill that promise of maintaining it in space at 17000 binder miles an hour for 15 years. So the time i was assigned to that flight this is all i had ever seen of the Hubble Space Telescope. This is an artist concept of right around 1982 or 83 vintage, it had not even been named for Edward Hubble it was still called the space telescope with a large space telescope. But you see, the shuttle just having left it off, nice cartoon, thats all i knew about it for a wild. In parallel with getting ready for this flight however, i was also working on a president ial commission assessing the future of the United States Space Program. And sort of to capture the vision of the past, and the prospect of the future in that report. Our boss, a guy named tom paine, went back to an illustration that had made many, many, many years earlier. This illustration by chesley appeared in initiative colliers magazine in 1952. I encountered it in middle 1985. At the age of 33. I looked at it, and i read the little paragraph in the article, this is of course described is a space station, people are living there, there are tours visiting there, there are scientists working there. Its a jumping off point for destinations beyond lower orbit. This is the craft that takes people back and forth from the earth to the station, at specialized comments tailored for just that 200mile hop back and forth. Its the hardest step off our planet is that first 200mile step. So this is a purpose built a vehicle that will just do that and do it repeatedly. This is described as a telescope that is input into orbit above the atmosphere so its never bothered by clouds, never bothered by turbulence, and that guy there, is obviously an astronaut who is attending it, fixing it, upgrading it. Chesley bosco sketch this out and made this illustration in the year i was born. In my early 30s, i looked at this picture and i have flown on this thing, it turned out to be white and have a different shape of wing. But there is one and it is a shuttle and it really does just what the vision was when this illustrated was created. Im assigned to put this thing into orbit. It exists, it looks different than that the details came out different but the ideas there. The vision that went back to the mid 40s and 1950s to a time when engineers almost did not have the skills to do it, has become a reality, and im going to take it to orbit in a year or two. And the space station, it also did not end up looking like Arthur C Clarkes hub and spoke wheel of a space station. At looks more like a tinker toy or erector set. But that too was on the drawing boards in the engineering was beginning to turn it from a conception conceptual sketch to an engineering reality and into the four room house larger than a football field, space station that is over our heads right now. That has had People Living on it continually for almost 20 years. I was just stunned by this picture and how rapidly, both how long it takes to make the engineering matchup with the vision, but also how vivid and powerful division was in the year i was born. When i had no inkling, nor did my parents, of where my life would go. This is where hubble really started and really came from. As i did the research for this book, the timelines between my life and hubbles really started to jump out at me. It almost became like we were born at essentially the same time. By five years hes my older brother if you want to look at it one way. At the different junctures where ive matured in the highschooler off into college or grad school, those time points also interestingly kind of lined up when hubble began to win enough political support, financial support, enough engineering definition it took the next leap to become a reality. In 1978, when nasa welcomed me into the astronaut core and set me really on the road to space, that was the Year Congress finally supported a budget that let hubbell start to be built and put hubble on the road to space as well. While not many months after being assigned to that mission and seeing that illustration, i found myself out in sunnydale, california meeting the real Hubble Space Telescope. Here it is on the left. That is shown in its cradle just as its about to be taken out to package up and shipped down to florida for its launch. These are human beings done here these little dots you can sort of see. The size of a school bus, roughly. About 15 feet diameter, something that fits very snugly into the payload bay of the Space Shuttle. If you went to hubble windows bolted in the payload bay and try to put your fist between the telescope and the side of the shuttle, it was not a whole lot more room than your fist. Thats how tightly squeezed into the bay it was. One of the really remarkable things to me about hubbles i dug into the history, it sort of hinted at in the sketch on the right, thats an exploded diagram that shows you all of the equipment bays, all of the little doors are open they give you access to the scientific instruments, these big boxes on the bottom, and to the operating electronics that sit here in the middle. All of the stuff that makes hubble work. That makes electricity, that route sit around, that runs the data that processes the onboard observations. The science interments, the cameras and the spectrometers, the architecture that hubble was given again back in the late 60s an early 70s, back in the infancy of the space age, hubbles engineers had the foresight, drawn largely from their experience on cars to think about how to give hubble an architecture that would let spacesuited astronauts work on it hundreds of miles above the earth at 17500 miles per hour. Imagine putting on two fullbody snowmobile suits, bolting a bucket on your head hefty gloves under mittens, and then go change spark plugs in your car. By the way if you put otoole down, it will float away from you. Its incredibly difficult working environment to be doing things like taking out flying screws so you really have to think about how do i make a wrench that someone with that big klutzy hand connection hold onto. This stuff is not found on il4 at home depot. A few things are found that ill for that you can modify for this. You can go get a ratchet wrench off file for and modify it so it has a fat enough handle that a spacesuit club can hold it. And a big mushroom at the pivot point of it so you dont have to make a fine grip, you cant close your hand this tight in a spacesuit glove. A lot of other stuff, just as it exists in the universe and needed to be invented. The choreography of getting all of this repair work done also had to be invented. And that we work out largely underwater. You see two different water tanks here and two different simulation sessions. This water tank is not deep enough to let the whole telescope stand up altogether, so we would break the model and have the backend over here as if it was mounted in the shuttle and the front end of it off to the side. Thats me on the left thats me again moving around and lock up a rough model. For this kind of choreographing of the spacewalk you want this box to be as close to exact the right dimension, the right shape, the right size but you dont want to have to move a real box through the water. Think about how hard it is to pull your hand to the water. So if you look carefully you can see through this box theres a mesh on it like screen door mash to give you a sense of the shape, remind you you wont be able to see around of this thing. To learn can i hold it, do i have a place to grab . Can i see around it . Do i need a partner to help me spot worked out . If im trying to precisely inserted back into its slot. That choreography took dozens and dozens of long test like this with bruce and me and a dozen other astronauts to make sure that more than just the two of us had good familiarity with the telescope so we had good bench strength on being able to work on hubble. And heres another discovery i made working on the book, i thought, because of what my boss said to me i thought it had always been the plan that anything would need to be repaired by hubble would be done by spacewalking astronauts. I learned as i was researching this book, that that was not true. The original idea, these big boxes scientific estimates and batteries, short list of things that you knew you wanted to keep abreast of technology or you knew they would tend to fail earlier, that shortlist of things was designed for spacewalking astronauts to work on. All the other electronics were never done with that in mind at all. The first ideas we will bring it back to earth every five years or so. So we will design these jobs to be sorted easy, definitely doable in a spacesuit. The other stuff, the really hard stuff we will just bring it home. We will let folks in short sleeves and a specialized Maintenance Facility do it. That idea did not die until late 1984. And when it died, then engineers looked at the whole list of other electronics boxes and realize, holy cow, that stuff can fail to. We actually have to find a way to modify that stuff. The telescope is built exist you cant take it apart to redo it somehow we have to make those pieces maintainable in space as well. That drove another wave of innovation. The first thing have to deal with if youre going to go repair something in orbit is how do i hold my feet still . Its easy here and got gravity, im held onto the stage i can move this podium because of the gravity creating friction between my feet and the stage. You dont have that in outer space. You need one of these called a portable foot restraint. You slip your toes through here but the back of your heel through here, and he might infer, if you touch or toe to this little pedal you can pitch forward and back. If you touch this petal you can pivot left to right. And all these other little places here, you can tweak this thing around so they can stick you to be just we need to be to do some work. This did not exist me started on hubble. We had to create it through some of that choreography in the water tank and then clever engineers figuring out what happens inside this gizmo here that makes it possible for this little pedal to tilt and pivot their foot what is the problem with that, i had to go outside and fixes telescope, the robotic arm that we sometimes use like a cherry picker, it would be dizzy, it was holding the telescope above her head. So we were going to have to move, hand over hand we were moving across the jungle gym, we would have to move hand over hand on whatever point of the telescope that we needed to work on and direct the signal along with us. Just tether it you would say. Sure and every time i move my body this 35pound goes drifting around and bangs into the telescope, the skin of the telescope is thinner than a beer can, 35 pounds banging around like that is a sure way to injure career by destroying the telescope. [laughter] so we needed tether, we had to attach it to ourselves, how to get it behind me because i needed all the space to use my hands to maneuver but i needed to ever enter tether that was stiff and rigid so i can make bendable to get this thing off. We created a semi gadget tether, have you ever worked with the monkey tripod for your camera or go pro that you can bend around, that sort of principle but larger, we created one with a foot restraint. Like the foot restraint itself, it is still in use, the scene youre seeing here is from the opening moments of the space rock that Christina Koch and jessica did a couple weeks ago and im going to draw your attention, this is jessica here, ill draw your attention to this right here, she also had to transport the repair in new unit and also needed it to stay out of her way to be controllable in the thick connecting package to her is the same read writ rigidr used on the same space nation today. Those boxes and suddenly we realized we would have to be able to work on, they were a problem in their own life, you can see the electrical connectors, no one put those on the box thinking a fat hand would have to get at them, theyre imagining a nice slender finger from a ground technician. This is an odd set of players and does it go this way so you can reach down around the connectors and undo them without damaging the cable or the box theyre attached to, here you see me and bruce with one of our british engineers, this is the modified ratchet that we had to create and testing the actual telescope and this was the solar array that jammed on the day we were deploying hubble and i almost ended up, i was in my spacesuit, i was dumped out of the airlock and i was going to have to go out and crank it open except sadly some snarky Software Engineer figured out a way to solve that without his going outside. I was conflicted, i thought i was ready for this and you know you know your stuff but suddenly the life of the Hubble Space Telescope is in your hands before you ever start, no pressure. On the other hand its a safer, it creates a little tension. So we come finally to where hubble is there and were all trained up and weve created the entire toolkit intake and everything will tool, every single one of a hundred tools we take in the hubble and we proven by checking this on every fitting that it works in all the settings and theres no way anyone is ever going to get to hubble on a repair mission and have to call home and say this guys ranch does not fit, that will never happen. And we go down to the cape for countdown dress rehearsal which happened in the shuttle world about three weeks before liftoff. This is what we created to signify our mission and a tradition is that you get a batch thats nicely done enam all with the crew emblem and the crew members go around and visit all the engineers who have spent months getting the Space Shuttle and the cargo ready for the next light. And you take pockets full with you and you think these folks, they have been working just as long as you have in working with just the same school of professionalism that you have been bringing to the work, they do not get the flight suits, the ride, they dont get the view and they dont get any cool things that come with it. But they are doing just as fine a job with just as much commitment and so we got bags, the better part of a thousand lovely pins to give to guys and someone have a good idea of putting an extra bar down here that would tell the team so they can work with great pride and point out that the crew gave me this. There was just one small problem. [laughter] these are now the most covenant collector at the Kennedy Space center, they attempted a recall, you guys give those back. [laughter] how do you do spellcheck, it is spelled correctly, its the wrong word though, autocorrect fails again. So here we are on april 24, 199, april 23 we had launched so this is the day after we launched, steve hawley and charlie lifted hubble up, held it over our heads in the team on the ground commanded antennas to unfold in the solar rays to unfold, this is the one i almost had to go crank out and look at this little gap right here. A really cool picture, let me remind you what is happening, all the stuff down here in the little soda straw, that the 200,000pound multibilliondollar craft called a Space Shuttle. It is currently doing 17000 170n hour. Its a 55000pound melted bullion no telescope its doing 17500 miles an hour. So you have two multibilliondollar spacecrafts flying 10 inches apart and very, very close formation. In a moment after the picture was taken, Lauren Schreiber a commander on the shuttle and back the Space Shuttle away from the telescope and let it go off to do its remarkable mission in sullivan and bruce who only worked five years to get to this day would imagine our appear gazing out and taking pictures, no. Were locked in something roughly the size of two linen closets behind the round circle, as i said we were in the airlock, in our suits, they were pressurized we dumped half of the air out of the airlock and we cannot go out were in with the the whole series of steps proved were tracked in the airlock, hubbles batteries are draining so quickly became more important to get hubble off on his own and get the solar charging battery then to get kathy and ruth out obruceout of the implement. But this was five years, we dont get to watches, so what happened next . Are high hopes for spectacular first image from hubble came crashing to earth a few weeks later when the world learned the multibilliondollar space telescope we put into orbit had blurry vision. Charlie and steve spent many long weeks worrying they might have caused this by bumping it when they lifted it out of the cargo bay. They mustve been the only two people on earth who were relieved to learn the hubbles 94inch to remoter primary near was the wrong shape. It was too flat at the perimeter by. 0001inch. Which is about one 50th, 50, the diameter of a human hair or one 40th the thickness of the typical hardcover book page. This was unbelievable news and unthinkable air, a title wave with shock and anguish swept over nasa and the hubble science community, congress and the media corrupted in outrage, it was as if an eagle turned into a back row are Arthur Fisher in popular science. The pain was clearly written on the faces of the nasa officials who broke the news to the public. The crippled telescope became the newest metaphor for incompetence and technological, ridiculed by virtually every talkshow and on the silver screen. Some pundits leaked to the mistakes that caused the loss of challenger and casted as nasa had long since lost its way. Congress followed hot on the heels of the comedians and pendants competing public hearings as which they grilled senior nasa leaders mercifully, as you all know this becomes a part of the hubble story that is more familiar, the hubble team pulled itself together and discovered one helpful fact and then had a clever idea. The helpful fact was, you did screw up, but you screwed up very precisely. Which meant is like your eye doctor can precisely calculate what optical formula will make your eyes see more clearly it was possible to calculate very precisely what adjustment would be eyesight to hubble. The clever idea, now i know optics i need, but how do i get those into the light path of a telescope thats already in orbit. The inspiration for that, believe it or not came from a shower in holland, an engineer named jim crocker got his head whirling about all these problems and issues and try to come up with some way to get these mirrors, small corrective mirrors into the telescope goes into the shower one morning in his hotel room in holland, hes a really tall guy so he loosens the showerhead in loosens up the pool to a nice height and adjust the tilt, it dawns on him that a mechanism that could extend up out of a science instrument with small arms that was bring out and put them years and just the right place could be exactly the way to get the corrective optics into hubble. That became a device called costar, the corrective optical device. Press the right button kathy, it was carried by the ss 61 crew in 1963, with the hubble they installed the corrective device and while, the galaxy in 100 the way hubble saw in the first phase of life, heres the way the galaxy looked immediately after the correction and hubble if you image the galaxy today with hubble, because of all of the upgrades to the instruments that had been made over the servicing flights, 2009 to hundreds of times better because new technology and new detectors and objects were put into place each time a shuttle crew went back in service the hubble. Thats why hubble has brought us images like this. This is what you get if you point hubble in a very fine focus mode at a patch of the sky that based on ground telescopes your positive was empty. And then stare at it for a while. All these thoughts of light, that one might be a star but all the other. Tousey, everyone is a galaxy like our galaxy, hundreds and hundreds of galaxy and small quadrant of the sky if we looked at with the telescope we would say is blank and mc. In structural detail of the galaxy interacting and swirling together, black holes revealed away that weve never seen them before are really a revolution in how we understand our universe. Hubble has done another thing that is pretty remarkable, thanks to the comingofage and going to service, this was the internet era and the personal computer era lost them, hubble entered the pop culture, the popular imagination in a way that no scientific interment has ever done. From cat to socks to cell phone covers to lunchboxes, tshirts, hats, it is remarkable how far this is fred in part because we now can propagate it further anytime were intrigued with an image or we can make a scam, please dont do more tattoos, anything hubble took on and put it right there on your arm. Its the first and only scientific spacecraft that has evolved in improved in orbit through the course of the lifetime for that has entered the popular imagination globally i would add, not just in the United States, its quite extraordinary in that way as well and then scientifically it has transformed our understanding of the universe that we live in. So back to the crew that went up in 1993 and installed the unit that fixed hubble, the first of many honors that the Servicing Mission team would receive was awarded in the middle of the night on december 13, 1993, and never touched down on the space Center Runway just before 2 30 a. M. Eastern standard time, about an hour later as the crew was disembarking, Shuttle Mission control in houston past responsibly for the spacecraft back to the ground Operation Team at kennedy. Flight controllers from each of the three aroundtheclock shifts are part of the mission, crowded into the main control room to witness the traditional ceremony that marks the end of the Successful Mission of johnson. Hanging the plaque, adding the emblem of the just completed flight to the array of mission plaques, lining walls of control rooms is the highlight of the celebration. The flight director awards the honor of climbing the ladder to do this to a team whose work was most essential to the mission success. Theres often some suspense around who would get this honor but there was not any that morning. Everybody knew it belongs to the eva team. Jim thorton would climb the ladder along that evening. But he would be climbing for everyone on the Satellite Service team that got him for the crew as well as a large supporting cast to designers, technicians, machinist whose work reach back fully 20 years. So i will close with this image, this is an actual picture from the final hubble servicing of the outer skin of public, the foot restraint sockets, and these marks are scuffed, handprints, they are places where the walking astronauts touched outside of the telescope and scuffed it just enough with the bombardment of particles of auto space and made it a little differently otherwise shiny silver skin. There are now handprints on hubble in orbit but the machinist, the engineers that i refer to in the last expert, they have handprints on hubble two. Metaphorical rather than physical but in every way the same contribution to the success in life of hubble that my spacewalking colleagues made between 1993 and 2009. And now i would be happy to take your questions. [applause] i think we have someone out there running around with the microphone. Here we are. How but a hand for Kathryn Sullivan, handprint on hubble. [applause] were gonna do a q a and unfortunately we have some technological problems, we have one microphone and we could used engineering expertise to get this fixed but we will be manning both sides, the two of us, when you ask your question just give the mic back to us so we can scurry around to the other side because we want to cover everybody. Here we go. Young folks first. How was the air on the Hubble Space Telescope made. Hubble does not have any air. It is not pressurized vehicle, its an open cylinder. I met like air or. I misheard you, thats a mistake. There were two ways to measure the shape of the mirror when you are fourminute and check if youre getting it right. In a nutshell one was an old fashion way and one was a slick new way. The new slick way was basically bouncing a laser beam and measuring the time difference between setting up the laser beam and getting back. The oldfashioned way was more of a physical device. So there behind schedule, the overbudget, everyone is really annoyed with the guys making the mere, they think theyre done and they measure with both gadgets. In the old gadgets is nope, you are wrong. By a little bit but youre wrong. In the nude enter gadgets is your right. If youre good engineer, what you do you disassemble both determines and you give them an entirely Different Group of people and make everything get done independently because they have to agree. If youre overbudget and behind schedule and people are really mad at you its a temptation to talk yourself into the answer youd like. So they essentially talk themselves into the new answer and the reason the new gadget gave them the wrong information, it was missing some bold, there was a place where a washer shouldve been inserted and it was inserted in a different place so the measurement was off and is a deconstructed this after the fact they sound exactly where it was by exactly that its a bit that the mere was wrongnearwas wrong. Why didnt you get back the badge when it said lunch team instead of launch team. We did not want it back because we thought it was really funny and we gave it to the engineers who had been working on our behalf, everyone loves a good joke so they thought it was really cool, the only people that wanted it back were the ministry to people, they were responsible for ordering it and they did not check it carefully enough so they were embarrassed. The guys who were embarrassed because they felt like it was their mistake, they were embarrassed and they wanted them all gone but those of us giving amount thought it was really fun. , nobody wanted to give them back enough we will get an adult here. I was going to ask if you were ever nervous or scared and how you dealt with that if you were. I think every astronauts is a certain prayer multiple times in their career which is please god dont let me scrub, and this is a very individual thing, some people feel much more anxiety and fear before they launch whatever my wiring is, i grew up around airplanes, i knew there was risk seen airplane crashes, and your writing bombs for living, you gotta be clear minded but if the purpose and the benefit compliance to humanity in whatever way you point that is worth it and if you have basic confidence in good intentions as a team youre working with because you cannot be everywhere, you cannot be the person checking everything. To me that was father, if youre in a you gotta be all in, yet people to have to do it and you have to do with things that dont go the right way, someones in the corner because they got scared, we need all the hands and brains. Back here. Did you ever get scared that you would mess up and everyone would be mad at you. You have a lot of responsibility in your hand when youre an astronaut, nasa in the United States had invested billions of dollars in the telescope and gave it to us and say carry it up there please and you dont bang it against the side and if you have to go out and do a spacewalk please do not kick a hole in it. , you practice a lot and train a lot and you also count on each other, no one on a shuttle crew ever did something completely alone, if i was doing steps of the spacewalk or checklist one of my crewmates will be right there. Reading the checklist with me or watching as i did it, efface only about to do something incorrectly or if i made a suggestion, lets try this and not the best suggestion we can come up with they would step in and Work Together to make it work. But i think we all took the responsibility really seriously and like i said, you will hear almost any astronaut tell you more than once in their life and sometimes were the ones on their flight, please dont let me screw this up. We have a question on your left. It says your ranking was captain at nasa so all refer to you as captain sullivan. I did not have that rank at nasa but i did have the rank in the navy. Captain sullivan, what was one of your most favorite moments while traveling to the orbit using the Space Shuttle . My favorite moment was every moment between when it started and when it ended. [laughter] thank you so much for sharing your stories tonight, im interested in your vision of where we should go in space now, the future of space for us. My answer is mars. In my rationale is a parallel argument to apollo for technology for the country. You set a goal, a big goal deliberately beyond what you know you can do at the moment. And then do not link, pursue it. With vigor. If i was at apollo, i see a cascade of benefits, the range of problems that have to be solved from human health and physiology to lifesupport systems, how do you monitor human health from 250,000 miles away, computers, a lot of people do not appreciate apollo, the Apollo Program work the changeover from the era when people brag about how big their computers were to when they began to brag how small they were. So with the cusp of digital circuitry and apollo was the first really demanding more from driver on reliability and power in the small lightweight package buried you could evolve computers and be very different. Apollo triggered the first wave and microelectronics. That was done within nasas need delivered out to private industry and private industry innovate response. So that synergy was really huge. I believe if we said go to mars and if we meant it and stuck with it, the range of problems we have to solve in the cascade of benefits would go back to all of our lives on earth would be hugely rich. I was wondering how your body felt when you initially came back to earth and what that recovery would like and how long. My flights were five, eight and ten days which is really not that long, youre aware of the differences and you sort of feel like your body is made of wet sand. You dont really think about the weight of your arm until you havent felt it for ten days. You fall down or sleep on your bed and look at your arm and think why is that so hard to move. And you forget a lot of the affectations you make when you living in 0 gravity, your vocabulary changes, he your nice manners, you dont say please pass me the camera, you very quickly start to say please send me the camera. And it floats across the room, you have to remember not to do that anymore. [laughter] im going to ask a question that Prince Philip was trained to ask about the crown, i dont know if anybody got to the episode yet. When youre up there, maybe the first time, did you have a moment where you reflected on our own humanity in the second part of that, do you think theres life after . I think its inconceivable that theres not life elsewhere in the universe. Its not likely to have a bmw auto business card, its the ingredients we understand ingredients of life can be in a crazy range of exotic and harsh environments that we would not have thought. We discovered life on this planet and an environment that never wouldve been believed even when i was in college, right here in this planet and the deep sea. I dont think that you can have this experience without having some expansion and shift in your reference. You see your home planet, you can see your hometown, you see places that you come from and you never see in that context before. At the same time youre in this place that youre very much normal. It was an odd schizophrenia to be floating over the earth looking down at cities lit up at night in bright sun still shining on the spacecraft and realizing some people saying look there goes the satellite, pointing up at me. Did you feel any of the sexism or the height of the tables we heard about that recently. A comment on the spacesuits it is not the case that nasa made spacesuits and expected us to wear a bit for the shuttle era they intended to make a spacesuit that would hit any person from the percentile of 6 percent or 95th. But the problem was so with those different positions to fit different size people well they needed to have enough inventory to cover a range of sizes. It was a well intended agnostic design that failed in implementation. So that is predominantly your disproportionately. Said you remember it was easier on that bar then the shorter one on the playground cracks it takes extra effort the longer the live the lower proportion of that energy tax is your muscles. And then to spend 40 years we got a remarkable week clear line we walked into nasa but they waste you to the astronaut with that respect and treatment that we got that very much in the first round to earn your own stripes i couldnt think of anyone to assert that we didnt belong there. So one of the bigger threats of space travel so what kind of firefighting training protection and those fire extinguisher bottles in the freon system to suppress the fire in the station as you can imagine. And then no open flame. So as the short sitter circuit that happened on mere and oxygen generated a combustion system in one of those went wild and started the fire on mere mir. I am curious about your transition to the underwater explorer. Can you tell us more what it was like to go underwater quick. It is a full circle story i did my undergraduate work as a geologist while doing expeditions if not selected by nasa through those ridges of the Atlantic Ocean as i was leaving and oaa i had a couple of opportunities to dive in the deep submersible. So my roots are a fascination to explore every facet of the of that that i can so to fill out the astronaut application if by some miracle that i could get to see the earth with my own eyes so it was natural completion after my shuttle flights came back down to earth and it was such a powerful Vantage Point within the planet to produce information to help us make better decisions about how we live on the planet and what attracted me what i liked about noaa that was their niche to the things that i could help us make those better decisions than transmit the information to us as a water forecaster heads of state. You mentioned briefly of the design of the telescope with the shuttle was there a correlation between the diet and design of the shuttle quick. Yes. There very much was a correlation between the design of the telescope and the shuttle and in various ways in particular i would say 66 in that timeframe it was a codependency the telescope was big because there would be a shuttle and its very expensive but we can promise it will live a long time and to keep up with technology because prior to hubble there was a instrument or a satellite at the podium and thats where they did their observation so this idea is to make one great big telescope and multiple teams would be able to use it. Because we could get back to it and then put your instrument on and your instrument on. Then we came up with a better computer for that. And it wont be stuck in the rut to keep it advancing. So its now probably 1000 times better telescope. The only thing that is the same is the outer silver skin and the two mirrors essentially Everything Else we put up in 1990 has been taken out and replaced with a higher power or higher resolution. So it got better with age. Wildly better and thats part of how they argued its worth this big investment because it will pay all these dividends with the scientific questions and technology because we will make it maintainable and i shuttle has the capacity to go back and forth to do that. I know you talked about how you went from first putting things on earth like geology and then you studied to join nasa burke im currently a junior in high school looking to college so im wondering if you could talk about how you made that transition from earth to space and how you joined nasa. The short answer is by having more curiosity than common sense virchow when i was your age in high school i was studying languages and somehow that turned into a life where people bought me Airline Tickets to go explore all these places and then i got to college and they said its lovely you are an arts and language major but you have to take three science courses during your freshman year i thought it was a terrible idea and they argued against and lost all of the arguments the first class introduce me to Earth Science and oceanography and more importantly to the energetic passionate professors so i could see a lifestyle in them that included that adventurous lifestyle i was hungering for. And then people are buying me Airline Tickets to fly off to interesting places. So i changed majors at the end of my freshman year. I did all my calculus in physics backwards so dont look at me for that. But some of that is just try. Reach beyond. Have the courage to reach beyond what you know you can do and see what you can do and be curious and give it a try. Sometimes you scuff your knee and it is hard work but take what lessons come from that and try again. I just want you to speak of your transition from nasa to noaa the politics of it all of nasa gets criticism and budgetary constraints did you consider hostility with budgets and political activity at noaa quick. As a bipartisan treasure unlike any other civilian agency and occasionally they took a haircut in the budget the requested ask was not fully granted. The budget level is vastly below the level that was in the apollo era. But it has consistently grown. Also noaa has enjoyed bipartisan support talk about the way to measure the time that politics are more complicated than nasa because theres not one single law. There is a lot in the United States called estate tax passed in 1958 to lay out comprehensively what nasa is and why it exists and what it is supposed to do so it has a unified this is what you are about. Noaa came into existence during that environmental era of making people realize we need to get the bits and pieces that are scattered apart to understand you are required to understand that interaction so we cant have these doing ocean these doing atmosphere so it has to be connected and integrated. So being around since the 18 hundreds several other pieces. s the politics on capitol hill leaned toward particular program of different states for different members rather than a unified vision. You have to be more convincing to more people to move that budget forward. What was the hardest part of getting where you are today . The coolest part is i get to continue to learn all the cool things but the hardest part sometimes you try something it doesnt turn out as well as you thought and you are disappointed and maybe you feel embarrassed or somebody criticizes you because it did not work out or teases you for that. You pies and get yourself past that back to where you are willing to try again. I write about the super biggest best worst mistake. You can read about in the book. [laughter] out of all the constellations you have seen from hubble which is your favorite . It is seriously hard to pick a favorite star. I am really fond of the quiet ease and this gentle man here and i really fond of the catseye. I remember reading the report about the future of the Space Program and being really excited by it and really angry when nothing happened. What were your expectations and how that ended up on the shelf quick. If you ever on a president ial committee youd you definitely will be a doorstop and you might have some impact. That the scheme that i would say was that instead of publishing to the Government Printing office we publish through valentine books and the hope was we will make it possible directly to put into all of your hands because the way it is supposed to work is you are talking to members of congress but i want you to know its important we still act so if you leave any group of people stewing in their own juices a couple of things that need to be done and that would benefit the country but they are very long range i have to make a commitment now to put money on this instead of that if i put it here you could benefit tomorrow in a couple months there would be a benefit thats hard to describe that could benefit your kids or grandkids and thats a hard thing of human nature to do for politicians and voters. I think we all love looking at space. You have looked at space from space talk about looking back at the changes of perspective looking at the stars. You are not measurably closer. [laughter] you are in a wildly different place the oddly when you look at the shuttle you know like the airline is supposed to be look way different but because of that perspective across continents and mountains it is a vastly different sense. If you look out word even something as close as the moo moon, it is not measurably closer if you think of school kids in 12 inches diameter the shuttle was a little above that mine was a big blue beach ball. That is it for the questions. And from hubble. She will be signing copies of the book. [applause] no memorabilia so dont bring your jar up there. [laughter] backup to the left you can find someone who will direct you and also no cell fees but you can do candid photos. Thank you for coming we hope you will join us again. [applause] those of us in the upper middle class who are very well educated or at least graduated high school with some college we have a a fairly wide path in front of us. If we fall we pick ourselves up but in the small towns around america walking on a tight rope there is no safety net. Most politicians listen to us for quite will give you a couple of examples. The civil rights movement. You think they pass the civil rights laws on their own . Martin luther king went to see john kennedy and kennedy left the white house and he said kennedy did not care. He was really upset about it. What happened over time because of king and some of the people i mentioned, people began to see and then the pressure came from the bottom up the marches, gassing, the dog bitings, it did not square with us as people. We demanded justice and the politicians ultimately after a decade long struggle began to pass the laws. Womens suffrage. Do you think those guys wanted to give you your power . They didnt. If you think about how long it took women to get the right to vote, if you are an africanamerican you had to wait even longer to get the right to vote because you were not favored. How does that happen . We demanded it from the bottom up. I am convinced if we hadnt had the protest on College Campuses we would still be in vietnam today. And there are reasons as to why we would be it was ended by the students and those that said enough. The same will be true about environmental awareness. Some of this will be true about guns lets just talk about that for a second. When i was governor i tried to pass a law. Think about this it said if somebody in the workplace was a threat to fellow workers or two students on College Campus , that there would be a judicial proceeding along with input from Law Enforcement and that gun would be taken away from somebody who was unstable. They could get it back whenever they were stabilized. That will become law. It will take a long time that people will demand it. Are getting tired of this it will only happen when it comes like this. So folks, a couple things, join the movement, start a movement, give somebody a hu hug, put yourself in somebody elses shoes, have a smile on your face be patient and this is what will heal our country. Because we are in charge. Not the. We are in charge. If we come together all across this country, people are hungry for this. They just want to know what to do you dont have to climb Mount Everest you dont have to be greta. You dont have to do these magnificent things in the lk said if you cant do great things then do Little Things in a great way. Together we can and the fighting and the vitriol to do the things we want out of our government and community to have a healthier and more together nation and neighborhood and family. We would like to get started. I am Brian Anderson the editor of city journal welcome today on behalf of the manhattan