Transcripts For CSPAN2 Kathryn Sullivan Handprints On Hubble 20240713

For anyone who is a first timer, its an about terrys and we bring signs of discipline out of their labs and onto the public stages. They are part of the cultural life of new york city and people like you and me can come and be informed, energized and engaged by scientific ideas discoveries contract directly with scientists. Secret science club, regular hangout, our main one is important. The north when, where back here tonight in manhattan, part of us make series here, so we would like to thank all the people that symphony space, darren, rebecca, mary, james and zach and ricky for helping us expand our university. Big hand for them. [applause] very big thank you, we have the barr to the back left if you havent visited yet. Theyve concocted our cocktail, its called the atlantis, fabulous blue glowing drink its name from the Space Shuttle and its very tasty. We highlyen recommend it. To expand your universe brother. Also thanks to cspan, i want to give a shout out to them. If you like to find out more about the secret science club here in brooklyn or anywhere please visit our charmingly retro side, secret science clu club. Com, also sign up for our having list and we love new members. You are a member just by being here. We are thrilled to present astronaut, scientist and author, catherine sullivan. She spent over 500 hours in space before effect, trained as a scientist, receiving a phd in geology and she went from starting the ocean floor onto nasa and became the First American woman to fly in space. Shes a veteran of three Nasa Space Missions entries on book group of the discovery shuttle that watched the amazing hubble, Hubble Space Telescope which has radically revolutionized our views of the universe. When she left the Astronaut Corps, afterwards, Kathryn Sullivan served as the administrator of the u. S. National oceanic ministration, overseeing a network of satellites and airplanes that looked back from afar oceans and atmosphere. Ri now, after 2017, shes written a book called three of invention and theft the subject of her talk tonight. Lovely folks on call our our toast in it. Kathryn sullivan will sign copies after her talk and after the q a. She went to come and talk, its all about your day with you, our wonderful audience. Then we will have the book signing. Please welcome doctor Kathryn Sullivan. [applause] april 24, 1990 strike back where we had been 14 days earlier. Suited up, dressed in and ready to go the countdown clock stopped at 18 minus 31 seconds. Again. This time from a large Regional Center computers the content because of an indication that a valve on one of them used to fuel tanks failed to close. One was to prevent the fuel tank leaking into engine. If that happened we could end up landing site on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean splashed into the ocean. Would be scrubbed rather than taking risk. If it was wrong however, think about the tire Pressure Sensor on your car, if it was fine, no reason to scratch so which was it . Euros problem or faulty indicator . Go for lunch or scrub . The launch team shuttles, hisone i dont know only by call sign as mps. Time is not on this guys side. He set a strict limit on how much longer we can hold. Just 12 minutes more. The carpet, we listened intently as the Launch Controller worked out the problem. Ly what your status . The engineer calmly through the data on his display. The temperature and pressure in the lines surrounding it was not consistent with it being open. Fundamental physics that it was closed. He proposed that it would read correctly, that work. The control Center Computer still had a lot onk the countdon clock. Mps, what your call . Im prepared to manually override there software and proceed with the count, he replied. The best soldier would then be the launch director to do that and told the other Launch Controllers to get ready to resume countdown. And he advised the technical director that the launch team was ago. We had been waiting for came a split second later. Ill controllers, the countdown clock will resume on high marks. Three, two, one. Mark. The entire episode had taken less than three minutes. Thirtyone seconds later they came off the launch pad at the moment at which mike Hubble Telescope adventure really launched into the phase that matters early stages of the story go back several years before that. They start here in 1970, february 1978, nasa the world their newest class of astronaut, chosen specifically to find out what the Space Shuttle, her brandnew research vessel. The group of 35 people quickly became known as the tf energies, 35 new guys, if you come from the military, theres another phrase ready f doesnt stand for vice. It was something else. As a double entendre on but military phrase. The other interesting thing, we had strange people amongst us. We had 25 military test pilot, every other group of nasa astronaut had had. We also had six women from you see them here, three africanamerican men and one asianamerican man. By the end of our first day but after 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 25 standard white guys. [laughter] the 25 white guys were out of the building and off to the gym or the beach or whatever they want to to do about after the introduction ceremony ended six of us for other strange people besieged and barraged with interviews all the way through east coast news are and beyond. It was kind of life, a new phase of life that are expected to us in the picture here, left and on the far right we had only kind of just turned 26, straight out of graduate school, we finished our phd astronaut interview was our first serious Job Interview . Was our first ever fulltime job. Thinking about it, its beyond crazy. What happens when your baby astronaut . What happens when youre a baby you practical and one for things. We spent about an here going through the compressed graduate school restaurant, thelyie aspet science, engineering, science, physiology, physics, system design, anything that might touch on spaceflight, without a crash course in the expert, about equivalent to the first year when that was done from britains title to work after not so far, one yet but still. Then we started getting plump helping of light, tubing, helping preparations, planning for Operational Missions happen to turn in line came on. Its like starting your career mail morning by going around the company learning all the bits and pieces having works. We did that for a number of years before we started Getting Group slotted in my first Flight Opportunity came about october 1984, i probably cost me sally, the First American to fly in space in june the year before. 883, a press release was put for this information bother you with, it will sign something, you need to know. Announcing that she would be on macro again, making her second spaceflight, cap sullivan would be aboard her first spaceflight. I got to tell you, is a delightful wave of excitement and congratulations crept across space and the first woman ever to fight and you will be the space walk. A i looked at each other and said, these people have not been paying attention to history. Onsite was announced. 83 for october 84 lunch date and we had been paying attention to the Space Program was plenty of time that a soviet to another question into a spacewalk. If you asked t them to comply wt you think is happening here . This is on the launchpad, october 5, 1984 getting ready to board the counter are fancier Science Missions i told you about and guess what happening here. Tell you what here. Seating arrangements are mccallie dictated that sally and i would want shuttle bus. We waited our turnur just outsie the hatch known as the white room. We were keenly aware of the cameras above our heads our every move is being monitored by the Launch Control center all caps on as well. After a few minutes of idle chitchat, we decided we would do something waiting there always a big mission to the movies. So we decided to pretend synchronizing hours. There were no microphones in the white room what you think about us right now . Went from no, you think weve retched this out enough . Im delighted to say when we landed, this photo featured prominently on all the articles and the caption from solon synchronizes on the launchpad. [laughter] stupid astronaut joke number one. More followed. So thats a great eightday mission from the populace days, we were outside on the second to last day for several hours out in the shuttles back. You can cut in line in front of everybody else for every resource to get you ready for flight. Then you dont know the moment youryo Space Shuttle clears a tower leaving the earth into orbit the first four seconds of your mission there is another crew in a Conference Room that stands up and says new crew now when you land your nobody you are them back of the line and to get back in the cycle so it is disappointing and lonely you Wander Around with the deer in the headlights look and actually try and remind yourself that you did the stuff in the photograph. I was fortunate enough that this period did not last too long for me after my first flight and by early the next year my boss called me into the office to say we have a mission coming up soon with the Hubble Space Telescope but he said you know that big large telescope in the manifest it is supposed to be maintainable in space by astronauts. And at last 15 years but the tools and equipment that it would take to doe that so go get in the middle of all of that now to make sure that by the time you take it into orbit we have all the stuff that we need to fulfill that promise at 500 miles an hour for 15 years. So the time i was assigned to the flight with the Hubble Space Telescope the hardest concept of 1982 or three vintage that was not even yet named for Edward Hubble but the shuttle and we only knew about it for a fair while some is also working on a president ial commission for the United States Space Program and to capture the future of the report tom paine went back to an illustration made many years earlier. This illustration appeared in an issue of colliers magazineea in 1952 and i encountered it middle 1985 at the age of 33. I looked at it and this of course describes the space station People Living there scientist working there and a jumping off point for iodestinations this is the craft that takes people back and forth from the earth to the station to specialize in taylor just for the 200mile hop back and forth thats the hardest step there is a purpose built vehicle and this is described as a telescope put into orbit never bothered by turbulence and those that are intent on fixing it or upgrading it to sketch this out to make this illustration the year i was born so in my early thirties i look at this picture that turned out to be white but there is one and it is a shuttle and is just what the vision was when it was created. And to put this into orbit it doesnt look like that the details came out different but the version that goes back to the forties and fifties to a time when engineers didnt have the skills to do it, has become ado reality. I will take it to orbit in a year or two. And the space station also did not look like Arthur C Clarke but more like the erector set but that too was on the drawingt board and to turn it from that conceptual sketch and into the four room house larger than a football field space station over our heads right now. So i was just stand by this picture and how rapidly no longer how long it takes to make that division but how powerful it was in the year i was born with no inkling, nor did my parents, where my life would go. So this is where hubble really started and came from. The timelines between my life and hubble started to jump out at me. Wemust like we were born at the same time. And at the different junctures with the college or grad school and then to in the support and the enduring definition. And in 1978 with the Astronaut Corps on the road to space that is when Congress Finally supported the budget that led hubble start to be built and putting it on as well. Not many months after to be assigned and to see that illustration i found myself reading the real Hubble Space Telescopebb and that is taken out and shipped down to florida for the launch. These are human beings. The size of the school bu bus, 15 feet diameter, it fits very snugly. If he went to hubble and they tried to put the fist between the fist and the telescope theres not a whole lot more room that is how tightly squeezed it was. One of the remarkable things to me was we cant do that sketch on the right it is a diagram that shows you all the equipment with the doors are open and giving access into operating the electronics all the stuff that makes hubble work that runs the data and the onboard observations and the spectrometers the architecture hubble was given in the late sixties, early seventies in the infancy of the spaceage they had the foresight to draw largely from their experience to think about spacesuited astronauts to work on it 17500 Miles Per Hour what does that mean . To fullbody snowmobile suits with a bucket on your head and then go to change spark plugs. By the way if you put down a tool it floats away. It is incredibly difficult working environment so you have to think about how do i make a wrench somebody can hold onto . This isnt found and home depot. [laughter] now you can go get our ratchet wrench on aisle for and modify it with a fat enough handle so the suit and gloves can hold it and the big mushroom at the pivot point so you dont have to make a fine grip because you cant hold your hand this tight with the spacesuit glove but a lot of other stuff doesnt exist in the universe and needed to be invented but the choreography of getting the repair work also had to be invented and that works out largely underwater you see two different water tanks and simulation sessions. This is not deep enough to hold the whole telescope to stand altogether sweet break the model the back and over here in the front and off to the side. So this is me again moving around in the markup with one of the scientific instrument so for this choreographed you want the box to be as closely as exact the right to mention in shape and size but you dont want to have to move a real box through the water just think how hard it is to move your hand through the water. Is just like screen door mesh to see through it and then to remind you you cannot see around it so you learn can i see around it why have a place to grab do i need a partner to spot me to put it back into the spot that took dozens and dozens of long test for that choreography 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 good bench strength and then another discovery that i made working on the book, i thought is what my boss said it was always the plan that anything on hubble is done by spacewalking astronauts but i learned that was not true. The original idea the big boxes and the batteries that you knew you wanted to keep the best technology, that was a short list designed for spacewalking astronauts to work on all other electronics did not have that in mind at all because first they thought they would bring it back to earth every five years so the job was to be easy and doable but the other really hard stuff we will just bring it home. And then have a specialized Maintenance Facility do it. That idea didnd not die until late 1984. It when it died the engineers had a whole list of electronics boxes and realized that stuff can fail. We have to find a way to modify that stuff. The telescope is exist and it is built you cannot take it apart somehow we have to make those pieces as well so that drove another wave of innovation but first if youre going to repair something in orbit its easy here because i have gravity i can move the podium, gravity creating friction but we dont have that in outer space a portable foot restraint to put your toes through here and if you touch it to the pedal you can go forward or back or left to right and all these other places and then they stick you just where you need to be to do some work. Then we had to create it through that choreography through that water taken in the engineers to figure out why it happens that makes it possible to tilt and pivot the foot restraints still in use on the International Space station but we had a particular problem for a flight in 1990 when it was all said and done coming in at 35 pounds. Its a chunk and almost 3 feet from over here. Whats the problem with that . Bruce and i had to go outside to fix the telescope sometimes we used a cherry picker to move the astronaut around they are busy holding the telescope above her head. So we would have to move hand over hand like going across the jungle gym up to whatever point on the telescope we needed to work and then drag us with us and just tell her you say. Sure. Every time i move my body it goes drifting around and bangs into the telescope. The skin of the telescope is thinner than a beer can thats a sure way to and your career by damaging the Hubble Space Telescope so we need a tether. To attach it to ourselves because all this space here to maneuver but its stiff and rigid that i can make bendable so we created a gadget called the semi rigid tether you know those tripod for the camera or the go pro . That is the principle but larger, we created one to use and like the foot restraint itself, its still in use so what you see here are from the opening moments of the spacewalk and i will draw your attention to this right here she also had to transport this new unit to get out of her way and be controllable but to that package to her is that same rigid tether thats on the iss today boxes suddenly we realized we have to work on were a problem in their own right with the electrical connectors nobody goes thinking everybody would have to get at them and then from the ground technician so this is an odd set of pliers so you can reach down and around the connectors without damaging the cable or the box they are attached to and then you can see the british engineer the crazy modified and testing it on the actual telescope and this is actually the solar array that jammed on the day we were flying hubble i was in the airlock and in the space suit half the air was dumped out i was going to have to crank it except that sadly some snarky engineer on the ground figure out how to do it without letting us go outside. I was conflicted i was really ready you know your stuff but then suddenly the life is in your hands no pressure. On the other hand it is a spacewalk so we come to where we are all trained up and to have every single two oh one tool we have proven that it checks and works on all the things it needs to work on no way we could ever get to the Hubble Repair Mission to say oops the ranch does not fit. That will not happen. Go down to the cape for the countdown dress rehearsal this is what the emblem we created to signify the mission and the tradition is you get a batch of the nicely and enamel tie tacks with the crew emblem they visit all the engineers whoth spent months getting the Space Shuttle ready for the next flight you take pockets full of these with you and you think the folks they have been working just as long as you have, which is the same skill and professionalism as you, they dont get the flight suit or the ride or the view. They dont get the cool things with being an astronaut. But they are doing just as fine of a job. So we got bags, the better part of 1000 lovely pins and someone had a good idea to put an extra bar down here that says launch team so they can wear it with great pride. There was just one small problem. [laughter] these are now the most coveted collector times on items at the Kennedy Space center. They attempted a recall give those back. Not a chance. [laughter] how do you do spellcheck . And it is spelled correctly is just the wrong word. Autocorrect failed them. So here we are april 24th 1990 this is the day after we launched, steve holly lifting hubble up out of the payload bay and then command the zen tenants to unfold this is the one i almost had to crank out. Look at this gap right here. Let me remind you what is happening this is a 200,000 craft call the Space Shuttle currently doing 17500 Miles Per Hour this is a 55000pound telescope theyre doing 15000 Miles Per Hour then flying 10 inches apart in very close formation moment after it was taken the commander fires the engines and then backslid away from the telescope and let it go off to do with remarkable mission only working five years ondl the telescope you can imagine were gazing taking pictures but set roughly the size of two men in closets we are in the airlock were pressurized we dont half of the air out of the airlock without a whole next series of steps so we are trapped in the airlock and hubbles batteries are draining so became more important to get its off on its own then to get kathy and bruce out of the airlock. And we understood that so we dont get to watch this . So what u happened next. Our high hopes for a spectacular hope came crashing to earth a few weeks later when the world learned the multibillion dollars put into orbit had blurry vision. We spent weeks that they may have caused this lifting it gingerly. There must have been the only two people on earth relieved to learn the 94inch mere was the wrong shape. To flat. 0001inch that is one 5h the diameter of a human hair or one 40th of a hardcover book page. Unbelievable news and the tidaler wave over the hubble Science Community it was if the eagle in the act tober issue of Popular Science it was clearly written on the ashen faces of those who broke the news to the public the telescope quickly became the metaphor for technological hubris by virtually every late night talk show and on the Silver Screen those that cause the loss of challenger and a deathknell that have long since lost its way. Congress fell hot on the heelsre of pundits with public hearings so as you all know the story that is more familiar, the hubble team pull liitself togethe together, and discovered one helpful fact and then had a clever idea. You did screw up, but you screwed up very precisely. Just like your eye doctor can calculate the formula will see your eyes more clearly its able to calculate precisely what adjustmentsrrs would reste ntll eyesight to hubble. The idea was now i know what optics i need but how do i get those into a telescope already in orbit . That inspiration came from a shower in holland like the engineer named jim crocker all these issues to come up with the small corrective mirrors into theei telescope from his hotel room in holland he loosens the showerhead to my high and then adjust that the mechanism that could extend with small arms in just the right place could be exactly the way to get those corrective optics and that became a device the costar optical device and then to install that correctly device and the galaxy and 100 with the first stage of life and then immediately after that correction because all of the upgrades through 2009 and hundreds of times better and those new optics put into place each time a shuttle crew went back to service the hubble. This is what you get if you put hubble and a fine focused way that you were positive was empty and then stare at it for a while. That might be a star but every one of these dots is a galaxy. Its our galaxy. Hundreds and hundreds that if we look at it that is empty and exquisite detail with the galaxies interacting in scrolling together and the way weve never seen before really a revolution of how we understand our universe. And hubble has done another thing, thanks to the comingofage and going into service with a personal computer era really blossoming our pop culture in the way that no scientific instrument ever has done to lunchboxes and tshirt tshirts, you name it, uhaul trucks, its remarkable how far this has spread because we can propagate it further or we can say please dont do more tattoos so it is the first and only scientific spacecraft in orbit through the course of his lifetime with that imagination and globally, it is quite extraordinary in that way as well and to radically transform the understanding of the universe. So back to that in 1993 the first of many honors the middle of the night december 19h 1993, to touch down on the Kennedy Space center just before 2 30 a. M. And about one hour later Shuttle Missions pass that possibility back to the Ground Operations Team on kennedy flight controllers supported the Mission Witness the traditional ceremony to mark the successful mission. Hanging the plaque in the emblem of the just completed flight with the walls of the control room is the highlight of the celebration. The flight director to the team whose work was most essentia essential, also some suspense over who gets the coveted honor but everybody knew it belonged to the team. Jim thorton would climb the ladder to be climbing for everyone at goddard and the chef fields crew as well as a large supporting cast the technicians and machinist whose work reach back fully 20 years so this is an actual picture from the Servicing Mission with those full restraint sockets and these are not scuff marks but handprints where an astronaut touched the outside with their gloves and scuffed it just enough with those particles in outer space made it whether a little differently than the leshiny skin so there are now handprints on hubble in orbit but with that maintainability in that last excerpt metaphorically but in every way the vital constitution that my spacewalking colleagues may between 2001 1993 and 2009. Im happy to take your questions. [applause] [applause] we will do q a now we have one microphoneun so we will be manning both sides. Just give the microphone back to us so we can scurry around to the other side. How is the air on the telescope made . Its not pressurized it does not have air it is an open. O the error . I misheard you. There were two ways to shape the mayor if you got it right. The first way was to bounce a laser beam off of it to set up a laser beam. So they are behind schedule and late and over budget. We think they are done in the old gadget says a little bit one says its wrong one says its right. To disassemble both instruments because they ought to agree if you are over budget and behind schedule , there is the temptation to talk yourself into the answer that youte like so they talk themselves into that answer and the reason the new gadget gave them the wrong information is because it was mis assembled a washer should have been inserted and it was in a different place so as they deconstructed this after the fact they found out exactly where by exactly that the mirror was wrong. Why didnt you give back the badge when it said lunch team instead of launch team. [laughter] we thought it was funny. In the people we gave it to come the engineers working on i it, Everybody Loves a good joke they thought it was cool. The only people that wanted it back were the administrative people they were responsible for ordering and did not check it carefully enough so they were embarrassed they felt it was their mistake it wasnt really but they were embarrassed that the people that had them thought it was fun. Nobody wanted to give f them back. We were ever nervous or scared or how you dealt with that quick. I think every astronaut says a prayer in their career please god dont let me screw up. This is a very individual thing. People feel more fear and anxiety before they launch, i grew up around airplanes and seen crashes you have to be clear minded about this but if the purpose and the benefit that you requite that is worth it if you have confidence and good intentions of the team because you cannot be everywhere you cannot checkkco everything. To me that is the test and you have to be all in you have to execute the mission. If someone is sneaking off in the corner because they got scared we need all the hands of the brains that weve got. Did you ever get scared you would mess up and everyone would be mad at you . [laughter] you have a lot of responsibility in your hands when you are a not on astronaut so they give it to us and say carry it up there please and dont bang it against the side. If you have to do a spacewalk please dont kick a hole in it. So you practice a lot and study and train a lot and count on each other. If i had a checklist one of my crewmates would be right there. If they saw me about to do something incorrectly or if i made a suggestion lets try this maybe not the best suggestion step in and then we Work Together to make it work. But yes we took that responsibility seriously in almost any astronaut will say more than once in their life or more than once on a flight say please dont let me screw this up. On your page is is your ranking was captain at nasa. I did not have that ranking in nasa but i did in the navy. Captain sullivan, what was one of your most favored while traveling . 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 with the future of space for us. My answer is mars. My rationale is parallel to what apollo did for technology for the country. And set a goal deliberately beyond what you know you can do and then to pursue that with vigor but then i see a cascade o of benefits from human health and physiology from 250,000 miles away computers people dont appreciate the Apollo Program that marked to the changeover about how big their computers were to how small they were. So the digital circuitry and apollo was the first demanding computational power in a small package. You can put all the computers and room this big it would be very different but that was the first wave of microelectronics and then with masses lead to figure out private industry in that response so that synergy was huge so i would say go to mars if we stuck with it the range of problems we would have to solve but the cascade of benefits to life on earth i think would be hugely rich. I was wondering how your body felt when you initially came back to earth . My flights were five, five, eight, and ten days. Long. L that you feel like your body is made of wet sand you dont think about the weight of your arm until you havent felt it for ten days. Or fall down and sleep on the bed and look at your arm and think why is that so hard to move . There are a lot of adaptations you make it an zero gravity you dont pass the camera you say please send me the camera. And it flows across the room. We have to remember not to do that when you get back. [laughter] i will ask the question but Prince Philip was trying to ask. When you are up there, maybe the first time did you have a moment when you reflected on our own humanity and is there life out there . I think its inconceivable theres not life elsewhere its not like it could have a Business Card is bacterial or virus but to understand how rudimentary the ingredients can be and the crazy range of those environments and then to discover life on this planet but it never would have been believed right here in this i planet. I dont think you can have this experience without having the expansion or shift. You can see your home plane planet, you can see your hometown and the places that you come from so at the same time its very much normal. And to float over the earth and the sun should still shines on the spacecraft but yet we know how to get there. And im completely at home to be in a craft like that it does make everybody think a little differently about our place on earth. Those optimistic statements that we are all one planet , thats true but also many places b you can see the hand of man where we have drawn the lines. You can see the treaty boundaries from space canada and us border also when they decide to direct their energy to make those divisions that are visible from space the planet doesnt have those but we managed to do that. On that note is one of the first women in space as an astronaut, did you feel sexism just with the size of the suits or the height of the tables ive seen that recently on social media. On the spacesuits, its not the case that nasa made them and just expected we would wear them. And the shuttle era they intended to make a spacesuit to fit any human being from fifth percentile to 95th it was a good concept with mr. Potato head type of approach but the problem was with those finer size divisions to have enough versatility to fit different size people well and not enough inventory so it was well intended agnostic design but the failure of the implementation that preferentially affected smaller people which predominantly is disproportionately women in the Astronaut Corps. If you have longer bar than a shorter one with a spacesuit it takes extra effort to move every limb and the longer it is the lower proportion that energy taxes the muscle so more muscle exertion. There are ways to solve those physics if for anything its under supporting the first two ander then 40 years before second suit. Ayl six of us would say we got remarkably good clear feedback we didnt walk in with buck privates but the status they always treated the astronauts that was the standing with a certain respect and treatment and we got that very much in the first round. But i really cant think of anyone that through elbows at us or didnt want us there. I know one of the bigger threats of space travel is fire so what protection did you have . Fire extinguisher bottles and the system to suppress fire on the shuttle mainly we solved the fire risk by careful Material Selection and preparation of the spacecraft so you are vulnerable to was shortcircuit or to use the oxygen generator that was a combustion system is what the soviets used that went wild to start the fire on mere. I am curious about your transition to the underwater explorer. Can you tell us more what it was like to go exploring underwater . It is a full circle story because undergraduate and graduate work above doing expeditions of not selected by nasa i had in my hand a fellowship to go explore the midocean ridges of the Atlantic Ocean and as i was leaving and i a a i had a couple of opportunities to dive. So my real fascination with the planet and how it works my real motivation was the astronaut application and with my m own eyes and then to come back to earth and then to understand to produce information to help us make better decisions how to live on this planet and what we really like that is exactly the niche to measure the things to make those better decisions to transmit the information to the weather forecast. You mentioned briefly about the design of the y telescope. Was there a cause and effect between the design of the channel or the telescope. It is a correlation between the telescope and the various ways in particular to say the 66 or 68 timeframe is a codependency. Because there will be a shuttle we can promise that will be a long time and prior to hubble and then closer to the side of the podium so then to make one big telescope on our mountaintop because we can get back to it. Meant to commit the new better so we can get a long life out of it and then keep advancing so its probably 1000 times better telescope and the only thing that is the same as the grid work that holds the two mirrors and the two mayors. Everything else we had put up we have taken out andbe replaced with more reliable or higher power or highresolution component. That is how they argued. Because we will make that maintainable and then to go back and forth. So how to study things like geology and how to join nasa and what we study in college and can you talk about and with her science. The short answer is by having more curiosity to have more than common sense so in your age so somehow with the Airline Tickets and to explore and then i got to college and mine said thats lovely with an artsar and language major real take three science courses i thought it would be a terrible idea i argued against it and then introduced me and with those professors and that is exactly that inquisitive and then people are always buying them Airline Tickets so i change majors at the end of my freshman year and then i did those exactly backwards from what you should do. So then just to try so have the courage to reach beyond and see what you can do and be curious about what you can do and to take what lessons come from that. We have one more in the back and we come around to the front. Just want to speak about your transition from nasa and the politics of nasa gets criticism and budgetary constraints did you encounter hostility with budgets and political activity . Nasa is a bipartisan gem unlike any other civilian agency and then it was not fully granted and then it was well below and it has consistently grown. And with thated bipartisan support and then a way to measure the tied but the politics are more complicated because theres not one single law called the space act passed in 1958 with comprehensively what nasa is what it is supposed to do and why it exist. And then to come into existence in the seventies that we need to get thes bits and places scattered apart. And then to be integrated so thats been around since the 1818 hundreds and several other pieces so a singular design and the politics on capitol hill to those programs of different states of different members to be more convincing to move that budget forward. What was the hardest part getting where you are today . Just that i get to continue to learn all these things and then it doesnt turn out as well as you thought. And then somebodys criticizing you and then you pause for a moment and then get past that. And then try again. Actually the super biggest burst one biggest ever worst mistake you can read about it in the book. [laughter] tumor questions. Out of all the constellations you have seen from hubble which is your favorite . It seriously hard to pick a favorite star i am a fan of the pleiades. , two more. And im really fond of the cats i. And with the Space Program and then when Nothing Happened so how do they end up on the shelf . If you ever on the president ial commission you are definitely a doorstop and you might have some impact. But the scheme instead of publishing that did the government tend to on Printing Office through valentineve books and the hope was to put it directly to make it possible directly in all of your hands in the way it is supposed to work and that this problem with that problem but we do ask. I could make a commitment now, this instead of that and if i put here, you might prevent aetna week or in a couple mont months, here, there will be, its a littlewi hard to describe and it may benefit your kids or grandkids. Thats a hard thing for human nature to duplicate politicians and four quarters. Thats a lot of pressure. I think we all love looking at states, he looked at thehe state from space, you talked about looking back at the change of perspective when you are looking at the stars from outside the atmosphere. You are not measurably closer. [laughter] you are in a widely different place in respect to you, when you look up a shuttle window, looks like when youre in airliner, looking quite differently because of the perspective across continents and mountains, its radically different than what weve ever had. Even if something is close of the moon, its not measurably closer. If you think about School Kids Club about 12 inches diameter, a shuttle flew about half an inch above that. The pale blue dot,pe not my experience. Theres like a blue beachbody last month. [applause] she will be signing copies of the book, she only signed copies of the book, no memorabilia so dont bring your jar of change or anything up there. [laughter] back to the left ear, you can find someone who will direct you and also, no selfies, please but you can do candid photos. Thank you so much for coming and we hope you will join us again for secret signs club. This weekend on book tv satellite 6 00 p. M. Eastern, frigid, former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Its about consumers and the problems they face, Consumer Finance and how it changed, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the role of the important work engages in to protect people across america. Sunday 12 30 p. M. A free and open society. Ill do everything we can to protect ourselves against the Chinese Communist party. Three economic market systems and democratic form of government. And 6 20 p. M. , ruth, author in City University of new york professor on mass incarceration and request. The fact that most people leave prison do a little bit of analysis to see that we could be closing prisons already and jails already if we just cut by two weeks in three weeks and four weeks, much less years in convincing people are starving. March book to be this weekend on cspan2. This. Mitch mcconnell announced the senate will return for legislative work this monday. Theyll vote on executive nomination and later in the week, could work on coronavirus related legislation, addressing lawsuits. House majority leader said after consulting with members and the attending physician, the house will not return for legislative wo