Scientists. Regularcience club our hangout, our main layer is in brooklyn but at secret science club north we are back your tonight in manhattan as part of our fifth miniseries here at symphony space. So we really like to thank all the people at symphony space, the staff, particularly kathy landau, joanna thompson, rebecca whites, james and zack and wiki for helping us to expand our universe and wehe hope yours al. [applause] bighand for them. A very big thank you to the bar. The bars to the back into the left. They have concocted our cocktail to your or however you say it, its called thehe atlantis. Its a fabulous blue glowing drink. Its thing for the Space Shuttle which our speaker was a crew member and its very tasty. We highly recommend it. To expand your universe further. Also thanks to cspan who is coming us here tonight. Want to give a shout out to dinner if you like to find more about the secret science club and Upcoming Events here in brooklyn or anywhere in the universe, sometimes out there please visit our charmingly retro website, yes, we are a blogspot. You can also sign up for our mailing list and we love having new members. Are a member just by being here. But you can sign up and youll know about all our goingson. So on to the evenings event. Are right. Tonight we are thrilled to present astronaut, scientists, and author Kathryn Sullivan. As a nasa astronaut Kathryn Sullivan spent over 500 hours in space, but b before that she trained as a scientist receiving a phd in geology and she actually went from studying the ocean floor on the nasa to train some more and become the First American woman to walk in space. Shes a better of three Nasa Space 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. Afterwards, Kathryn Sullivan serve as the administrator of the u. S. National oceanic and atmospheric administration, no, forcing a network of satellites, ships and airplanes that look back at earth monitoring the health of our oceans and atmosphere. And now after 2017 shes written a book book. Its called handprints on hubble an astronauts story of invention and that is the subject of her talk tonight. The lovelyy folks at books on call nycrr booksellers tonight and Kathryn Sullivan would be signing copies after her talk and after the q a. So were going to have come shes going to come and talk followed by q a with you, a wonderful audience, and then we will have the book signing. Please welcome doctor Kathryn Sullivan. [applause] april 24, 1990, found us right back where we had been 14 dayse earlier. Suitedrl up, strapped in, and ready to go with a countdown clock stopped at t minus 31. Again. This time the Launch Control Center Computers had halted the countdown because of an indication that a a valve on oe of the pipes used to fill the extra fuel tanks had failed to close. On the other side of the atlantic ocean. Once would be scrubbed rather than take that risk but if it was long think of the tire Pressure Sensor on your the system was fine and was the reason to scratch. Which was it . Series problem or faulty indicator . Scrub . This highstakes call phil to those responsible for the main propulsion system. I still only know him by his call sign in time was not on his side. The shuttle unit said a strict limit how much longer we can hold it just 12 minutes from the cockpit we listened intently as the Launch Controller worked out the problem. What is your status . The propulsion engineer talked calmly. The pressure readings were not consistent with it being open fundamental physics says it is closed he proposed to send a manual command that worked but the control Center Computer still had a lock on the clock. What is your call the launch director pressed . I prepared to manually override the best soldier would envy he gave him the go and told Launch Controllers to get ready to resume the countdown then he advised the National Technical director the launch team was a go the call we were waiting for was a split second later. The countdown clock will resume on my mark. Three, two, one. The whole episode took less than three minutes. Thirty seconds letter we launched off the launchpad where my adventure really launch into the phase that matters but the early status of the story goes back several years before that. In fact it starts here in 1978 and february when introduced to the world nasa picked those astronauts to fly and the shuttle in the Research Vessel the group of 35 people known as the 35 new guys if you come from the military theres another phrase where the f doesnt stand for fives there was a double entendre. But we had strange people amongst us. Twentyfive military test pilot types and every other group that astronauts had had three africanamericans one Asian American man and by the end of the first day it became clear to all of us the simple way to describe our group was ten interesting people and 25 standard white guys. [laughter] the 25 standard white guys were off to the gym or the beach or whatever they wanted to do about half an hour after the introductions ended us were besieged and barraged with interviews through the news hour and beyond it was like none of us had ever expected. Me and sally ride. We had only just turned 26. Just out of graduate school, just finished our phd the astronaut interview was her first interview it was her first ever fulltime job which is just beyond crazy. [applause] so what happens if you are a baby astronaut . You go back to school and learn more things which one year of going through a highly compressed graduate school for astronauts if any aspect of science or engineering Earth Science or physiology and then we got a crash course from the best experts equivalent to the coursework that was done we started to get plugged into supportive roles to help the preparations and the planning and those Shuttle Missions before our turn comes along. So then by learning by rotating around from one part of a company to another with all bits and pieces of how that enterprise works we did that for a number of years before we started to get our group slotted for those opportunities. In october 1984 my colleague in class meet sally ride had the First American woman to fly in space year before in late 83 with a new mission with the fancy acronym and captain solomon would be aboard for the first spaceflight. Now i have to tell you there is excitement and congratulations that swept across the Johnson Space center theyll be the ever first woman to fly twice or do a spacewalk we said they have not been paying attention to the history. Our flight was announced late 83 for a launch date we knew that ten months was plenty of time for the soviet Space Program to let her do a spacewalk if you ask she owes us her second flight and her spacewalk. So what do you think is happening . This is on the launchpad octobeh 1984 getting ready to board the Space Shuttle challenger and shouted out the retiree whats really happening. The seating arrangements in the cabin dictated we board last we wait our turn in a Small Chamber known it as the white room we are keenly aware the cameras above our heads meant every move was being monitored and broadcast on National Television as well after idle chitchat we decided we should be doing more than waiting around. [laughter] watches are always synchronized we pretended. [laughter] happily there were no white room one microphones to say what you think the news anchors are saying right now . I am delighted to say after all the coverage we received all of the articles to synchronize their watches. So that was a great mission. For several hours and then to have some specialized tools and then important to life extension and then there is schizophrenic when you fly in space you go several weeks to be the center of universe you are next in line, prime crew, everything you need is at your disposal. If you have to get in the doctor and see it. Another hour in the simulator, got it. Cut in line for every resource. We need to get you ready for flight. Then than a magical way what you dont know the moment your Space Shuttle clears the launch shower on your way orbit off of earth the first four seconds of your mission another crew in the Conference Room and says you are now first in line when you land you are nobody read the back of the long people trying to get back in the cycle and its really a disappointing and lonely walk of the deer in the headlights look and reminding yourself that you did the stuff that you are trying to remember that you did. This. Did not last too long for me after my first flight and by early the next year my boss called me into his office and said i would fly a mission coming up soon for the Hubble Space Telescope. He said that big large telescope a load in the manifest is supposed to be maintainable and space bar astronauts and last 15 years. But the tools and equipment that and by the time you take it into orbit to fulfill that promise is 17500 Miles Per Hour over 15 years. So this is all i had ever seen. This is an artist concept of 1982 vintage they had not even yet been named it was still called the space telescope. But to work on the president ial commission working on the United States Space Program to capture the vision of the past month my boss tom paine went back to the illustration made many many years earlier appeared in the issue of call years magazine and in the middle of 1985 and there are scientists working there for her destinations there is a craft to go back and forth that is tailored back and forth is the first 200 miles step this is a vehicle that will just do that repeatedly and it is put into the atmosphere and then that guy there and then he is fixing and upgrading it and made this illustration the year i was bor born. In my early thirties i looked at the picture and i had flown on this thing and it turned out to be white with a different shape of a wing but there is one. And it doesnt look like that but the idea is there the vision to the mid forties and fifties when the time to have the skills to do it. It also didnt look like the space station but the erector set and that was on the drawing board to turn that from a conceptual sketch into a reality into a house larger than a football field. And have People Living on it continually for almost 20 years. So i was just stunned by this picture on how long it takes but also how vivid and powerful in the year that i was born where my life would go. This is where hubbell started where it came from so the timeline it was like we were born at the same time and those went to have Financial Support and that definition and began to become a reality. And in 1978 to be on the Astronaut Corps that is when Congress Finally supported a budget and putting hubbell on the road to space as well. Not long after being assigned to that mission i found myself out seeing the real Hubble Space Telescope that was packaged and shipped down to florida for its launch. The size of the school bus about 15 feet diameter that fits very snugly into the payload bay of the shuttle. If you tried to put your fist between the telescope in the side of the shuttle there is not a lot more room. That is how tightly squeezed it was. And then one of the remarkable things with hubble getting into the history that was hinted at the sketch on the right the diagram all the doors that are open that get a access into the operating electronics all of the stuff that makes hubbell work that runs the data to process the onboard observation for the camera and spectrometer. But again back in the late sixties and early seventies hubbles engineers had the foresight drawn largely from their experience on cars to let the spacesuited astronauts work on that is 17500 Miles Per Hour. So imagine putting on two fullbody snowmobile suits with a bucket on your head hefty gloves under mittens and though and then go change spark plugs in your car and then if not buckle down can float away it is and incredible working environment so how do i make a wrench that somebody can hold on to it is not found on il4 at home depot there are a few things are that you can modify you can get a hatchet wrench and modify that for a handle the space glove can hold it or at the pivot point for you cannot closure hand this tight in space but a lot of other stuff just doesnt exist and needed to be invented and that word work out largely underwater this is not deep enough so we would break the models of mounted in the shuttle in the front and off the side. Thats me on the left here is a rough model so for this type of choreographed but think about how hard it is to pull your hand through the water so there is just a screen door mesh that we may not be able to see around this thing can i see around it . Precisely trying to insert that. That took dozens and dozens of tests for just the two of us to have good familiarity with the telescope and then to work on hubble. It with another discovery that i made working on the book i thought because of what my boss said it was always the plan but anything that need to be repaired was from space walking astronauts it was not true the original idea was big scientific instruments and to be abreast of technology that is the short list of things for space walking astronauts all the other electronics because the first ideas we will bring it back to earth every five years or so so it was to be sort of easy and doable but the hard stuff we will just bring it home and then the other specialized Maintenance Facility to do that that idea did not die until late 1984. And with a whole list and realize that can fail we actually have to find a way to modify that stuff. You cant take it apart somehow we have to make those pieces maintainable so that drove another wave of innovation. It is easy here because of fiction we dont have that. And put the slap the last part of your heel to hear and then to pitch forward and back and then pivot left to right to then all the other places you can increase this around for just where you need to be this did not exist when we started on hubble and the choreography of the water tank so what happens inside this gizmo making it possible for the foot restraint. For the use of the International Space station but we had a particular problem for a flight in 1990 coming in at 35 pounds and then to plug into the telescope and then to fix on the deployment mission it would be busy so we would have to move hand over hand to whatever point and tether it. And then to bang into the telescope. 35pound widget that will end your career so we realized we needed tether. We have to attach it to ourselves. We had to get it out behind me because i need all the space to use my hands to maneuver here we need to a tether that a stiff, rigid. But that i can also make bendable so i can get this thing off. We created a gadget called the semi rigid tether. Anybody ever work with those monkey tripods for your camera or go pro you can bend around . That sort of principle but larger. We created one to use with this foot restrain. Like the foot restraint itself its still in use. The u scene where singer from te opening moments of the spacewalk that Christina Koch and jessica meir did a couple of weeks ago and are going to draw your attention to this is jessica. Im going to draw your attention to this right to purchase also to transport this repair, this new unit and also needed it to stay out of her way but be controllable. This bit connecting the package to her is that same semi rigid tether still in use on the International Space station today. Those boxes that suddenly we realize we would have to be able to work on, they were a problem in thehe own right. You can see the electrical connectors. No one put those on the box thinking a fat spacesuit hand would have to get that the. They are imagining some nice slender finger from a ground technician. This is an odd set of pliers that actually doesnt jaws that go this way so you can reach down around these connectors and unto them without damaging the cable on the box they are attached to. Here you see me and this is bruce with one of our british engineers. This is that crazy modified ratchet wrench we had to create the we are testing it on the actual telescope on the actual solar rate, this is actually the sole array the jammed on the day we were deploying hubble and that i almost ended up, i was in telecom in my spacesuit half of the air was dumped out of the airlock. I was going to go out and actually crank the solar array open, except that sadly some snarky Software Enter on the ground figure out a way to solve that without letting us go outside. I was conflicted. I sort of really was ready for thiss and new, you know you know your stuff but suddenly light of the Hubble Space Telescope is in your hands before ever starts. No pressure. On the other hand, it is a spacewalk. It does create a little tension there. So we come file to wear hubble is that the payload bay. We are all trained up, created the entire toolkit. We take it every single tool, y single one of over 100 tools weve taken taken out to hubble. We have proven by checking that if its on every fitting that it works and all the settings and needs to work on. Theres no way anyone is ever going to get trouble on a repair mission and have to call home and say the ranch doesnt fit. That is never going to happen. You get a batch nicely done in animal with the crew emblem and the crewmembers visit all the engineers who spent months getting the Space Shuttle ready for the next flight and take these with you and think these folks. They have been working as long as you have, just the same skill and professionalism you have been bringing to the works, they dont get the ride, they dont get the view or the cool things with getting an astronaut but they are doing the job with just the same commitment so we got bags, the better part of the thousands to give to guys and somebody had the good idea of putting in extra bar down here so they could wear it with great pride. There was just one small problem. [laughter] these are the most coveted Collector Items at the Kennedy Space center. They attempted a recall. How do you dispel that . Autocorrect fails again. Here we are unable 20 fourth 1990. This is the day after we launched, we were on orbit. Steve hawley lifted the shuttle, lifted it over our heads, the crew on the ground commanded antennas one fold in the solar raise to unfurl. Look at this gap right here. Really cool picture. Let me remind you what is happening here. All the stuff down there, that is a 200,000 pounds multibilliondollar craft called a Space Shuttle, currently doing 17,500 miles an hour. This thing here is a 55,000 pounds, multibilliondollar telescope and it is doing 17,500 miles an hour. You have two multibilliondollar spacecraft flying ten inches apart in very close formation. A moment after this picture was taken, Loren Shriver fired the engines and backed the Space Shuttle away from the telescope and let it go off to its remarkable mission. Kathryn sullivan and bruce mccandless, you would imagine we are up here gazing out and taking pictures. Now. We are locked in something the size of two linen closets right behind that little round circle there. We were in the airlock, pressurized suits, half of the air out of the airlock. We cant go out or in without a whole series of steps so we are trapped in the airlock. Hubbles batteries are draining. It became important to get hubble off on its own and get the solar arrays charging the battery and get Kathryn Sullivan and bruce out of the airlock to watch the deployment. We understood that but 5 years and we dont get to watch this. So what happened next . Our 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 had just put into orbit had plenty vision. Charlie and steve spent many weeks worrying they might have caused this by bumping the telescope as they lifted it gingerly out of the cargo bay. They must have been the only two people on earth who were relieved to learn the 94 Inch Diameter primary mirror was the wrong shape. It was too flat at the perimeter by 0. 00 one inch which is about one fiftieth the diameter of a human hair or one fortieth the thickness of a typical hardcover book page. This was unbelievable news. And unthinkable error. A tidal wave of shock and anguish swept over nasa and the hubble science community. Congress and the media erupted in outrage. It was as if evil had turned into a bat it said in popular science. The pain was clearly written on the ashen faces of the nasa officials who broke the news to the public. The telescope became the newest metaphor for incompetence and technological hubris, ridiculed in print by virtually every latenight talkshow in on the silver screen. Some pundits linked it to the mistakes that caused the loss of challenger and cast it as the deathknell for a nasa that had long since lost its way. Congress followed hot on the heels of comedians and pundits, public hearings in which they grilled senior nasa leaders. As you all know because it is part of the hubble story that is more familiar, the hubble team pulled itself together. They discovered one helpful fact and hard a clever idea. The helpful fact with you did screw up. But you screwed up very precisely. Which meant just like your are doctor can precisely calculate what formula will make your eyes see more clearly it was possible to calculate very precisely what would restore the fool eyesight of hubble. The idea was that is really cool, i know what optics i need but how do i get those into the light path of a telescope in orbit . The inspiration for that came from a shower in holland. Lockheed engineer named jim crocker, got his head rolling about all these issues and trying to come up with a way to get these mirrors, corrected mirrors into the telescope. He got into the shower one morning at his hotel room in holland. He is a really tall guy, he loosens the showerhead and raises it to a nice height and adjusts it and it dons on him that a mechanism that could extend up out of a science instrument, small arms that would spring out and put these mirrors in just the right place would be exactly the way to get the corrective optics into hubble. That became a device called costar, there we go. The corrective optimal device. It was carried aloft by the sts 61 crew in 1993. There is Story Musgrave with the hubble. The galaxy m 100 the way hubble saw it in its first phase of life, here is the way the galaxy looked immediately after that correction. The image of this galaxy today with hubble, all of the upgrades to the instruments that had been made over the five servicing flights in 2009, hundreds of times better with new technology, new detectors and new optics put into place each time the shuttle crew went back and surfaced the hubble. That is why hubble has brought us images like this. This is what you get if you point hubble in science focused mode at a patch of the sky that you were positive was empty and then stare at it for a wild. All these dots of life, that one might be a star but all the other dots you see, every one of them is a galaxy like our galaxy. Hundreds and hundreds of galaxies in a small quadrant of the sky we looked at with a telescope we would say was blank, was empty. Exquisite structural detail of spiral galaxies, galaxies interacting and swirling together, black holes revealed in a way we had never seen before, really a revolution in how we understand our universe. Hubble has done another thing that is pretty remarkable thanks to its comingofage, going into service just as the internet era and personal computer era, hubble has entered our consciousness, our pop culture, popular imagination in a way no scientific estimate is ever done. Cell phone covers, lunch boxes, tshirts, hats you name it, uhaul trucks. It is remarkable how far this thing spread, in part because we can propagate it further anytime we are intrigued with an image or make a scan. Please dont do more tattoos. But you can understand anything hubble has done, right there on your arm. It is the first and only scientific spacecraft that has evolved and improved in orbit in the course of its lifetime and has entered the popular imagination, globally i would add, not just in the United States. It is quite extraordinary in that way as well. It radically transformed our understanding of the universe and the universe that we live in. Back to that crew that went up in 1993 and installed the unit that fixed hubble. The first of many honors the Servicing Mission team would receive was awarded in the middle of the night, december 19th, 1993. Endeavor touched down in Kennedy Space and just before 2 00 am eastern standard time. An hour later the crew of twee 7 astronauts was disembarking, they passed responsibly for the spacecraft back to the Ground Operations Team at kennedy. Flight controllers from each of the three roundtheclock shift that supported the mission crowded into the main control room to witness the traditional ceremony that marks the end of a successful mission. Hanging of a plaque, adding the emblem of the just completed flight to the array of mission plaques lining the wall of the control room, the highlight of the celebration. The flight director awards the honor of climbing the ladder to do this to the team whose work was most essential to the mission. There is often some suspense around who will get this honor but there wasnt any that morning. Everybody knew it belonged to the a team. Jim formed in thornton climbed the ladder alone but he did it for the entire servicing crew as well as the large supporting cast, tool designers, technicians, machinists, engineers whose work reached back 20 years. I close with this image. This is an actual picture from the final Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission, the outer skin of hubble and these marks are scuff marks, places where the spacewalking astronauts touched the outside with their glove and just enough that the bombardment of particles in outer space made it whether a little differently from the otherwise shiny silver skin. There are now handprints on hubble in orbit. Shih field, the machinists, the engineers i referred to in that last section have handprints on hubble too. Metaphorical rather than physical but in every way the same vital contributions to the success in life of hubble that my spacewalking colleagues made from 19932009. Now i would be happy to take your questions. [applause] i think we have got someone out there running around with a microphone. I will warn you in advance how about a hand for Kathryn Sullivan. A big hand. Handprints on hubble an astronauts story of invention. [applause] we are going to do a q and a. Unfortunately we have some technological problems. We have one microphone for that, we could have used engineering expertise to get this fixed. We have been manning both sides. Just give the mike back to us so we can scurry around to the other side so we can cover everybody. Here we go. Young folks first. How was the air on the hubble test Hubble Space Telescope made. Not have any air. It is not a pressurized vehicle. It is an open cylinder. Error. The mistake . I misheard you. There were two ways to measure the shape of the mirror and check if you were getting it right. In a nutshell one was an oldfashioned way, and one was a new way. The new slick way was bouncing a laser beam off of it and measured the time difference between sending it out and getting it back. The oldfashioned way was a physical device. They are late, they were behind schedule, over budget, everyone is annoyed with the guys making the mirror. They think they are done and they measure it with both gadgets. The old gadgets were wrong by a little bit but wrong. The new gadget says it is right. If you are a good engineer what you do is disassemble both instruments and give them entirely different groups of people and make everything get done independently because they are to agree but if you are over budget and behind schedule and people are really mad at you there is a temptation to talk yourself into the answer you like. They talked themselves into the newfangled answer and the reason the new gadget gave them the wrong answer is it was disassembled. There was a place where a washer should have been inserted and was inserted in a different place so the measurement was off. As they deconstructed this after the fact they found exactly where and figured it out. It was by exactly that that the mirror was wrong. Why didnt you give back the badge when it said. Team instead of launch team . We didnt want it back because we thought it was really funny and the people we gave it to, the engineers working on our behalf, Everybody Loves a good joke and they thought it was really cool. The only ones who wanted it back where the administrative people. They were responsible for ordering it and didnt check it carefully enough. They were embarrassed. The guys who were embarrassed felt it was their mistake. It wasnt really a mistake but they were embarrassed and wanted them all gone. But the people who had some thought it was really funny. No one wanted to give them back. We are going to get an adult in here. I wanted to ask if you were ever nervous or scared and how you dealt with that. Every astronaut says a certain prayer multiple times, please, god, dont let me screw up. 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 know there is risk of seeing airplane crashes, you are riding bombs for a living, youve got to be clear minded about this. If the purpose in the benefit to science, to humanity is worth it, and you have basic confidence in good intentions and competence of the team you are working with, you cant be everywhere. You cant personally check everything. To me that passed the test. If you are on the crew youve got to be all in. There are people who have to do it, you have to deal with things. If they dont go the right way, someone is in the corner because they suddenly got scared, we need all the hands and brains we have got. Back here. Did you ever get scared that you messed up and everybody would be mad at you . You have a lot of responsibility in your hands when you are an astronaut. Nasa and the United States invested billions of dollars in this telescope, and they give it to us and they say carry it up there please and you dont bang it against the side of the orbiter. If you do a spacewalk please dont kick a hole in it. You practice a lot, study a lot, train a lot and count on each other. No one on the shuttle crew ever did something completely alone. If i was doing the steps of a spacewalk or checklist, one of my crewmates would be right there reading the checklist with me or watching as i did it and if they saw me about to do something incorrectly or if i made a suggestion that was not the best suggestion we could come up with they would step in and we Work Together to make it work but we all took that responsibility really very seriously and you will hear almost any astronaut tell you more than once in their life and sometimes more than once on a flight you say to yourself please dont let me screw this up. We have a question on your left. I saw your Wikipedia Page and its in your ranking captain at nasa. I did not have that rank at nasa but i had that rank in the navy. The captain sullivan, what was one of your most favorite moments when traveling to the lords orbit using the spatial . My favorite moment with every moment between when it started and when it ended. [laughter] thank you so much for sharing your story tonight. Im interested in your vision of where we should go in the space now, the future of space for us. My answer is mars and my rationale is a parallel argument what apollo did for technology in the country. You set a very big bold gold elaborately beyond what you know you can do at the moment, dont blink, actually pursue it with vigor. If i look at apollo i see a cascade of benefits, the range of problems that had to be solved from human health, physiology, like support systems to how you monitor human health from 250,000 miles away. Computers, a lot of people dont appreciate the Apollo Program marks the changeover from the era when people brag about how big their computers were to win a began to brag about how small they were. It was the cusp of digital servitude and apollo was the first really demanding driver on reliability and computational power in a small lightweight package. You could have evolved computers in a room this big and it would be different. Apollo triggered that first wave in microelectronics. It was nasas need delivered to private industry and private industry innovated a response to it. That synergy was really huge. I believe we go to mars, if we meant and stuck with it, the range of problems we would have to solve in the cascade of benefits that would throw flow back into our lives would be hugely rich. I was wondering how your body felt when you initially came back to earth and what that recovery was like . My flights were 5, 8 and 10 days. You are aware, you feel like your body is made of wet sand. If you dont think of the weight of your arms until you havent felt it for ten days, you fall down asleep on your bed and look at your arms thinking why is that so hard to move . There are a lot of adaptations you make when living in 0 gravity. Your vocabulary changes. You dont say please pass the camera. You quickly start to say please send me the camera. You have to remember to not do that anymore. Im going to ask the question Prince Philip was trying to ask buzz aldrin in the crown. Dont know if everyone has seen that episode yet. When you are up there, did you have a moment when you reflected on our own humanity and the second part of that is do you think there is life out there . It is inconceivable that there is not life elsewhere in the universe. It is not likely to have a bmw and a business card, it is more likely to be bacteria and virus. We understand how rudimentary the ingredients of life can be, crazy range of exotic and harsh environments. We discovered life on this planet in an environment that would never have been believed. I dont think you can have this experience without some expansion and shift in your frame of reference. Use your home planet, you can see your hometown, places you come from that you never see in that context. There is this odd schizophrenia floating over the earth, looking down at cities lit up at night, the sun still shining on the spacecraft, someone is pointing up at me. We know how to get there. Completely at home to be in a craft like that. It makes everybody think a little differently about your place on earth. There are many places you see the hand of man, you see the israeli arab treaty boundary from space, the guatemala border, canada and the us. It came through to me that when human beings decide to direct their intention and energy towards making divisions we can make divisions that are visible from space. The planet doesnt have those but we manage to do it. One of the first women in space, as an astronaut, the suits that you war and at the tables, i have seen a lot about that, social media. A comment on the space suits. It is not the case that nasa made male space suits and expect us to wear them. For the silvera they intended to make a spacesuit that would fit any human being from 50 to 90 fifth, a good concept. Sort of mister potato head assemble it by the pieces approach. The problem was you need to make finer size divisions, have enough versatility to fit different sized people and enough inventory to cover a range of sizes. It was a well intended agnostic design that failed in implementation and the failure mode preferentially affects small people which happens to be disproportionately the women in the Astronaut Corps. That is basic physics. You remove her from middle school, a longer prybar it is easier to lift something than with a shorter one. If you are working in a space suit it takes extra effort to move every limb on your body, more effort, the longer your limb is the lower proportion of energy is taxing your muscles. Shorter, more muscle exertion. There are ways to solve those physics problems. If i felt nasa for anything it is under supporting the first suit and 40 years before they moved to a second suit. All six of us say we got remarkably good, clear runway when we walked into nasa. We didnt walk in his book privates but with the standard of astronauts. No one had ever seen an astronaut that looked like me but they always treated astronauts, a title, a standing that supported a certain respect and treatment and we got that very much in the first round and you have to earn your own stripes but i cant think of anyone that through elbows at us or tried to assert that we didnt belong there. Question in the back. One of the bigger threats during space travel is fire. What firefighting training and protection did you have . Pretty thorough, there are fire extinguisher bottles to suppress fire on the station and the shuttle. You mainly solved the fire risk stuff by Material Selection and preparation of the spacecraft. No open flame and things like that. You are vulnerable to a short circuit which happened on mere, an oxygen generator is a combustion system for breathing and one of those went wild and started the fire on mir. Im really curious about your transition to an underwater explorer. I wonder if you could tell us what it was like. From space to underwater. It is a fools oracle full circle story. I love doing expeditions. If i have not been selected by nasa i had the fellowship to go diving in deep submersibles exploring mid ocean ridges and as i was leaving noah in 1996 i had a couple opportunities to dive, take a deep submersibles down the mid ocean ridge. My real roots our fascination with the planet and how it works and desire to explore. My real motivation, deepest motivation was filling out the astronaut applications. By some miracle i would get to see the earth with my own eyes. He was a natural completion of the circle after coming back to earth. What it was was the Vantage Point of space is a powerful Vantage Point to understand this planet and produce information to help us make better decisions how we live on this planet. What attracted me was that was nos niche, to keep the pulse of the planet, measure and monitor the things that can help us make better decisions and broker package, transmit the information to us as a Weather Forecast or heads of state, fishermen. There are a number right down here in the front. Probably feeling neglected. You mentioned the design of the telescope, only room for a fifth between that and the wall of the shuttle. Was there a correlation between the design of the shuttle and the design of the telescope . There was very much a correlation, a coevolution between the design of the telescope in the design of the shuttle. Ways in particular, 666869 timeframe, a codependency. The telescope could be as big as this because there will be a shuttle. It was expensive but it will live a long time and we will promise it can keep up with technology. Prior to the hubble there were space Astronomy Missions but the a team was on the size of that podium, that team would do their exploration and you could be in line for the next one. The idea to make one big telescope like you would put a big telescope on a mountaintop and multiple teams would be able to use it because you get back to it and your instrument on. Then you have a powerful detector or computer, we get along life out of it and wont be stuck in technological or old technology, we can keep it advancing. The telescope that is up there now is 1000 times better telescope than the one we put into orbit in 1990. The only things that are the same are the outer silver skin, the work that holds the two mirrors and the two mirrors. Everything else we put up has been taken out and replaced with more reliable, higher power, higher resolution. It got better with age, wildly better with age. That is how they argue it is worth the big investment because it will pay all of these dividends and keep abreast of scientific questions and new technology because we will make it maintain and because the shuttle has the capacity to keep going back and forth and doing that. You talked how you went from studying things on earth like geology in college and moved to joining nasa. I am a junior in high school looking to what im going to study in college, looking towards stem. I wonder if you could talk about how you made the transition from Earth Science to space and how you ended up joining nasa. The short answer is by having more curiosity than common sense. When i was your age in high school i was studying languages and believed my path would be best set by learning a lot of languages, that would turn into a life where people bought Airline Tickets so explore all the places i wanted to explore. I got to college and my college says it is lovely you are an arts and language major but you can take three science classes in your freshman year. I thought this was a terrible idea and argued against and lost all the arguments. Two of the science classes i was forced to take introduced me to Earth Science and oceanography and more importantly to young energetic passionate professors. I could see a lifestyle in them that was exactly that inquisitive adventurous lifestyle, people were always buying Airline Tickets to interesting places. So i changed majors at the end of my freshman year. On my calculus and physics exactly backwards to what you should do. Some just try. Just try. Reach beyond, have the courage to reach beyond what you know you can do, see what you can do, be curious about what you can do, give it a try. He will scuff your knees sometimes, it sometimes wont work, take what lessons come from that and try again. One more in the back and work around to the front again. We have some young ones down here. I wanted you to speak about your transition from nasa to noah, the politics of it all. Budgetary constraints, did you encounter hostility regarding budgets . Nasa is a bipartisan treasure, has a standard unlike any other civilian agency. It has occasionally taken a haircut in its budget or the request and asked for was not fully granted. Its budget level is well below, fastly below the level it was in the apollo era but has consistently grown. Noah has also long enjoyed bipartisan support, partisan way to measure the weather and the tides but nos politics, budget politics are more complicated than nasas because there is not one single law. There is the space act passed in 1958 that lays out what nasa is, why it exists and what it is supposed to do. This is what you are about. Noah came into existence in 1970 when they started the environmental era, people realize we need to get these bits and pieces that are scattered apart. And understanding the interaction between systems. We cant guys over here doing emotions and guys over here doing guys over here it has to be connected and integrated as a system of systems. The outfit that has been around since the 1800s, the Weather Bureau has been around since the 1800s and several other pieces. Its a quilt, not a singular design. Politics on capitol hill are more attuned towards particular programs, rather than a unified vision of what noah is supposed to do. You have to be more convincing to more people in that sense, to succeed in moving the budget forward. We have someone in the front here. What was the hardest part to getting where you are today . The coolest part, i completely get to continue to learn all these things. The hardest part, you try something that doesnt turn out as well as you thought and you get disappointed or maybe embarrassed. Maybe somebody is criticizing you or it didnt work out and you have to pause for a moment and get yourself past that and back to where you are willing to try again. I write in the book about my super biggest best worst ever mistake. You can read about it in the book. [applause] we will take two more questions and then Kathryn Sullivan will be signing the book. Out of all the constellations you have seen which what is your favorite one . It is hard to pick a favorite star. I am fond of the pleiades and this gentleman here, two more. I am really fond of the catseye galaxy. Thank you. I remember reading that report your committee worked on about the future of the Space Program and being excited by it and angry when nothing happened. What were your expectations when you were working on it and how did your colleagues respond when it ended up on the shelf . If youre ever on a president ial commission you will definitely be a doorstop and might have some impact. The scheme that our leader, tom paine, had, instead of publishing it through the Government Printing office we published it through ballantine books. The hope was to put it directly, make it possible to put it directly in your hands. The way our system is supposed to work is you guys talk to members of congress and tell them i know we have this problem or that problem, it is important we do x in space. If you leave people stewing in their own juices, they think their way into what they have done and wont go for the broader longerrange things. The problem with space goals is they are very longrange. Of congress are a president has to make a commitment now to do this rather than that and you get an investment from the tomorrow and put it here. A benefit that is hard to describe and might mainly benefit kids and grandkids. That is a hard thing for human nature to do. Here we go. We all love looking at space. You look at space from space. You talked about looking back at earth. Did you enjoy looking at stars from outsider that hemisphere . You are not measurably closer. [laughter] you are in a wildly different place with respect to the earth but when we look out the shuttle window it looks just like in airliners. Because of the perspective across continents and mountains, that is a radically different sense of the earth than you ever had. If you try to look outward even at the moon it is not measurably closer. If you think of earth, 12 inches diameter, the shuttle flew have an image above that. Carl sagan writes about the pale blue dot, not my experience. It is a big blue beach ball. That is it for the questions from Kathryn Sullivan, handprints on hubble an astronauts story of invention. She will be signing copies of the book. She will only be signing copies of the book, no memorabilia, dont bring your jar of tang or anything. Back to the left looking that way, you can find someone who will direct you, no selfys but you can do candid photos. Thank you, join us again. Tonight on booktv, highlights from our in depth program. We begin with a history of the