Transcripts For CSPAN2 Kathryn Sullivan Handprints On Hubble 20240713

We are happy to be back here at symphony space. Welcome to all of our regulars. Anyone who is a first timer, this is an event series and we bring scientists of all discipline 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 engaged by scientific ideas and discoveries. And interact directly also with some of the scientists. Secret science club regular hangout in brooklyn in the gowanus part of brooklyn but secret science club north we are back here tonight in manhattan as part of our fifth miniseries here at symphony space. We like to thank all the people at symphony space, the staff, particularly kathy landau, johanna thompson, rebecca white, mary mead, james lutz on zach and ricky for helping us to expand our university and we hope yours also. [applause] a very big special thank you to the park dahlia, we have the bar to the back and left if you havent visited yet. Theyve concocted our cocktail individual or however you say it. Its called the atlantis. Its a fabulous blue glowing drink. Its named for the Space Shuttles on which our speaker was a crewmember. And its very tasty. We highly recommend it. To expand your universe further. [laughter] i also thanks to cspan who is covering us here tonight we 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 a blogspot. Secret sign club. Com we can sign up for the remaining mailing list and we love having new members. You are a member just by being here. You can sign up and youll know about all our goingson. Onto the evenings event b tonight we are thrilled to present astronaut, scientist, and author Kathryn Sullivan. As nasa austin not Kathryn Sullivan spent over 500 hours in space but before that she trained as a scientist receiving a phd in geology and actually went from studying the ocean floor on nasa to train more and become the First American woman to walk in space. She is a veteran of three Nasa Space Missions and she was on the crew of the discovery shuttle that locks the amazing Hubble Space Telescope which has radically revolutionized our views. She did not stop when she left the Astronaut Corps. Afterwards Kathryn Sullivan served as the administrator of the u. S. National oceanic and atmospheric administration, noaa overseeing satellite ships and airplanes that look back to earth, monitoring the health of our oceans and adversary. Now after 2017 shes written a book its called handprints on hubble and astronaut story of invention and that is the subject of her talk tonight. The lovely folks at books on call nyc are our booksellers tonight. Kathryn sullivan will be signing copies after her talk and after the key when day. We are going to have shes 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] [applause] april 24, 1990, follows right back where we had been 14 days earlier. Suited up, strapped in, and ready to go with the countdown clock stopped at t 31 seconds. 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 car it could be fine and there is no reason to scratch. Which was it . Serious problem or faulty indicator. Go for launch or 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 need a tether. Because we need all this space to use my hand to maneuver so we need tether so then we created a gadget anybody work with the tripod for your camera or your go pro it is that principle the larger to use with the foot restraint and it is still in use so what you see here is from the opening moments of the spacewalk now i will draw your attention to this right here and says also needed it to stay out of her way and this package to her is that same semi rigid tether still in use on the iss today. Suddenly we realized we would have to work on the electrical connectors, nobody put those on the box thinking that anybody would ever have to get at them. So this is the odd set of pliers to reach down and around these connectors without damaging the cable or the box they are attached to. So this is the crazy modified ratchet wrench for the actual telescope and this is what jammed on the day we deployed hubble i was in the airlock in my space and half of the air was dumped out i was going to have to go out and crank it open except some snarky Software Engineer figure out how to do that without me going outside. I was conflicted. I thought i was really ready for this but suddenly the lights one the life is in your hand before it ever starts. So there was some tension. So finally hubble is in the payload bay we have taken every single tool we for all those there is no way ill ever get to the repair mission. We have that nailed and then for the countdown dress rehearsal and then then you get it back nicely done with the crew emblem they visit all the engineers who spent months giving the Space Shuttle and its cargo ready for the next flight and you take pockets full of these with you and you think the folks working just as long as you have just the same as skill and professionalism they dont get the flight suit or the ride or the view or any of the cool things that come with being an astronaut but they are doing justice find a job with just as much commitment so we got bags the better part of 1000 pins. Someone had the good idea to put the extra bar down here to say launch team so they could wear it with great pride but there was just one small problem. [laughter] these are now the most coveted Collector Items at the Kennedy Space center. They attempted a recall. Give them back. Not a chance. How do you do spellcheck . Autocorrect fails again. So here we are april 24, 1990. This is the day after we launched and up out of the payload bay then they commanded these antennas this is the one i had to go crank out and look at this gap right here. Let me remind you what is happening this little soda straw is a 200,000pound multibilliondollar clustering 17500 Miles Per Hour shuttle. This right here 55000pound multibilliondollar telescope doing 17500 Miles Per Hour. Now they are flying 10 inches apart and very very close formation a moment after this picture was taken we fire the engines on the shuttle and backed away from the telescope and let it go off to do with remarkable mission. And sullivan and mccandless it only worked five years you could imagine we are gazing out and taking pictures. No. It is the size of two linen closets right behind that circl circle. We were in the airlock and in our suits and pressurize so we cannot go out were in one or in. We were trapped and hubbles batteries are draining. Is more important to get it off on his own to get the solar array to charge the battery then get kathy and bruce out. Five years we dont get to watch this . But we understood. So what happened next . Our high hopes for the first images of hubble came to earth crashing a few weeks later that the multibilliondollar space telescope we just put into orbit had blurry vision. They thought they had caused this by bumping the telescope out of the cargo bay. The only two people on earth who were relieved to know the primary mirror was the wrong shape. It was too flat by. 001inch but is about one 50th the diameter of a human hair or one 40th the thickness of our hard cover book page the unthinkable error the tidal wave of shock and language one English Congress erupted in outrage it was an eagle turned into a bat. It was clearly written on nasa officials it was the newest metaphor for the technological hubris by every latenight talkshow and on the Silver Screen some links it to the mistakes of challenger and was the death knell. Congress following hot on the heels for the senior nasa leaders. And as you all know as part of the story that is more familiar the hubble team pulls itself together and discovered one fact and then had a clever idea you did screw up. But you screwed up very precisely. Which meant just like your eye doctor can calculate the formula will make your eyes less blurry its possible to calculate very precisely what adjustment would restore full eyesight to hubble. The clever idea is now i know what optics i need but how do we get those into the right path of a telescope already in orbit . The inspiration for that believe it or not came from a shower and holland one engineer had his head rolling of all these problems how to get the small corrective weirs into the telescope. He is really tall so he loosens the showerhead to move it up the pole and adjusts it and it dawns on him a mechanism that could extend with small arms to put it just in the right place could be the way to get the corrective optics that was called the costar device. That was carried by the crew previously they install that corrective device and now its the way hubble sought here is the way it looked immediately after that correction. And if you image this galaxy today with hubble with all the upgrades to the instruments made over the five servicing flights through 2009 that image would be hundreds of times better because do optics were put into place each time the shuttle crew went back and service to the hubble and that is why it can bring us images like this. This is what you get if you point hubble in a very fine focus mode to the sky and areas that you are positive was empty and then stare at it for a while all of those lights could be a star but every single one is a galaxy like our galaxy. Hundreds and hundreds of galaxies in the small quadrant of the sky with a telescope we would say is blank of course of that exquisite structure role detail, galaxies swirling together, black holes it is really a revolution how we understand our universe. And hubble has done another thing thats pretty remarkable thanks to the comingofage in the personal computer era has blossomed it has entered our consciousness and pop culture and ways that no instrument has ever done two hats a lunchbox it is remarkable because we can propagate it further please dont do any more tattoos but you can do a scan. That is the first and only scientific spacecraft that has improved over the course and has entered the popular imagination globally. It is really quite extraordinary and has radically transformed our understanding of the universe. So back to the crew that went up in 1983 the first of many honors the Servicing Team would receive two touchdown just before 2 30 a. M. Eastern standard time and then passing back to the Ground Operations Team at kennedy crowded into the main control room to witness the traditional ceremony hanging the plaque to the array of mission plaques is the highlight of this celebration for flight director awards this to the team there is also wondering who would get this coveted honor but everybody knew who it belonged to jim thorton would climb the ladder alone that evening for everyone on the satellite Servicing Team as well as the large supporting cast in the maintain the engineers to reach back fully 20 years. This is an actual picture from the Servicing Mission with the full restraint sockets and these are handprints places where the spacewalking astronauts touched the outside of the telescope with their gloves and scuffed it just enough the bombardment of particles had it whether just a little differently than the shiny skin so now there are handprints on hubble in orbit for those that we refer to have handprints on hubble also maybe not physical but in every way to the same that my colleagues made between 1893 and 2009 and now ill be happy to take your questions. [applause]. Now a hand for catherine sullivan. He will do q a unfortunately we had some technological problems now we only have one microphone we could use your engineering expertise. So please just give the microphone back to us so we can scurry to the other side. How was the air . Hubble does not have any air it is not pressurized it is an open cylinder. I mean the error rate to. Im sorry i misheard you. There were two ways to measure the shape of the mirror. And in a nutshell one was oldfashioned basically to balance a laser beam off of it between setting up a laser beam. And the oldfashioned way was more of a physical device. They are late and behind budget one behind budget and over time and the gadgets as you are wrong. The new gadget says it is right. If you are a good engineer you disassemble both to make everything get done independently and they ought to agree. If you are over budget and behind schedule and people are mad at you there is that temptation to talk yourself into the answer that you like so they talk themselves into the newfangled answer and the reason it gave them the wrong information it was disassembled where it should have been inserted in a different place so the measurement was off and it was that the mayor was wrong. One mirror was wrong. Why didnt you give back the badge when it said lunch team . [laughter] we didnt want to give it back because we thought it was funny and the people we gave it to come the engineers , Everybody Loves a good joke. They thought it was cool the only people that wanted it back were the administrative people who were responsible for ordering it and i did not check it carefully. They were embarrassed. They felt it was their mistake. They wanted them all gone but the people that had them and we thought it was fun. Nobody wanted to give them back. Were you scared and how did you deal with that quick. And astronaut faces fear what if we screw up . This is a very individual thing. People have much more anxiety and fear before they launch. I grew up around airplanes and airplane crashes you have to be clear minded about this. But if the purpose or the benefit of science or humanity is worth it and if you have basic confidence and competency and the team you cannot be everywhere checking everything so to me if you are on the crew you have to be all in. You have to deal with the things that dont go the right way we need all the hands and brains we have got. Did you ever get scared he would mess up and they would get mad at you . You do have a lot of responsibility in your hands when you are in astronaut to invest billions of dollars and they give it to us and they say carry it up there please and if you have to do a space walk please dont kick a hole in it. You practice a lot and study and train a lot and count on each other nobody on the shuttle crew ever does anything alone. One of my crewmates would be right there reading the checklist with me but if they saw me about to do something incorrectly if the suggestion was try this if it wasnt the best, then they would step then we would try to make it work. But yes, we took that responsibility very seriously almost any astronaut will tell you more than once in their life you have said to yourself dont let me screw this up. I saw you that your ranking what is captain at nasa. I did not have it and nasa but i did in the navy. Captain sullivan what is one of your more favorite moments . May favorite moment every moment between when it started and ended. [laughter] thank you so much for sharing your story tonight. Im interested in your vision of where we should go in space now. My answer is mars. My rationale is a parallel argument for what apollo did be said a very big goal to deliberately know what you can do at the moment and then if i worked at apollo i see a cascade of benefits a range of problems that have to be solved to lifesupport monitor human health, the computers the Apollo Program marked the changeover when people brag about how big their computers were and now how small they were it was the digital circuitry and apollo was the first demanding driver on that computational power in that small package you can put them in a room this big it would be very different and then with private industry and that synergy was huge so if we meant and stuck with it the range of problems we would have to solve in a cascade of benefits that would be hugely rich. How did your body feel when you initially came back to earth and what that recovery was like . My flights were five and eight and ten days. Not that long. It feels like your body is wet sand you dont know your way into you have insulted ten days. He fall asleep on the bed looking at your arm why is that so hard to move . And you forget the adaptations you make an zero gravity. Your vocabulary changes well say please pass me the camera you say please send me the camera and it floats across the room. You have to remember not to do that down here. [laughter] i will ask the question Prince Philip tried when you are up there, did you have a moment when you reflected on our own humanity and do you think there is life out there . I think its inconceivable theres not life elsewhere is not likely to have a bmw to understand how rudimentary the crazy range of this environment to discover life on this planet in the environment it wouldnt have believed even when i was in college. Yes, i dont thank you can have that experience about an expansion without your frame of reference you can see your hometown and see places you come from and never in that context at the same time in this place that feels very much normal to you. To be floating over the earth and looking down at the bright sun still shining on the spacecraft but yet we know how to get there and feel completely at home in a craft like that so it does make everybody think a little differently about our place on earth there is all one planet that is true but also places to see the hand of man in the arab israeli treaty border and canada and us so when human beings decide to direct that energy we can make those that are visible from space. The planet doesnt have those. On that note as one of the first women in space as an astronaut did you feel any sexism with the suits that you wore for the height of the tables weve seen a lot about that recently on social media. So on the spacesuit it is not the case they made males spacesuits and expected we would wear them but in the shuttle era they intended to make a space to that would for any human being from a certain percentile up through 95 and that was a good concept like the mr. Potato head assemble approach to make to fit those different size people and have enough inventory to cover a range of sizes it was well intended agnostic design but not in implementation and those preferentially affect small people some of that is basic physics that we learn from middle school its easier to lift up a longer bar than a shorter one it takes extra effort to move on your body and the longer it is it is taxing your muscles with more muscle exertion to do that if i fault nasa is for under supporting the first two and waiting 40 years to move to the second suit. We would say we got remarkably clear we walked in with the status but they had always treated astronauts as a title with a certain respect and treatment and we thought that very much in the first round and show your own track record but nobody really threw elbows out as i tried to assert. One of the bigger threats was fire so what protection did you have . The freon system to suppress fire on the station as you can imagine mainly we saw the fire risk for careful Material Selection so as the shortcircuit or the oxygen generator for breathing and one of those went wild and started the fire on the russian. And with that transition to the underwater explorer tell us what it was like to explore underwater. That is full circle because i did my undergraduate and graduate work with the expeditions if i had not been selected by nasa i had the fellowship to go diving in the deep submersible in the Atlantic Ocean and through my nasa career i had a couple of opportunities to do the submersible semi real roots are the fascination with every facet that i can the deepest personal motivation on the application of by some miracle that i could see it with my own eyes so those flights to come back down to earth the Vantage Point is to help understand the planet and produce information to help us make better decisions and that is exactly the niche of an oaa to measure and monitor the things and then broker a package to us to heads of state or to the fishermen. You mentioned briefly about the design of the telescope was there a cause and effect or correlation . The telescope can be as big as this because there will be a shadow and it would be very expensive but we can promise it will live a long time and we will promise it can keep up with technology. Prior to hubble there were space Strong Missions but at was an instrument on a satellite closer to the side of the podium. The team will do their observation and then you would be in line but then for the next one. This idea was we will make one big telescope like you would put a big telescope on a mountaintop and multiple teams will be able to use it because we will be able to get back to it and replace all put your instrument on and then your instrument on and we need to come up with a better more powerful detector i will add that so we can get long life out of it and it wont be stuck in a technological and Old Technology rest we can keep in advancing the telescope up there now is probably about thousand times better telescope than the one we put into orbit in 1990. The only things that are the same or the outer silver skin, the grid work that holds the two mirrors and the two mirrors. Essentially Everything Else we put up in 1990 has been taken out and replaced with more reliable or higher power or higher resolution component. It got better with age. Wildly better with age. That was part of how they argued its worth this big investment because it will pay all of these dividends and will keep abreast of new scientific questions and new technology. Because we will make it maintainable and because the shuttle has the capacity to keep going back and forth and doing that. I know how you talked about how you went from first putting things on earthlike geology and collagen and moved to joining nasa. Im currently a junior in high school and looking to study what im going to study in college and looking toward stem so i was wondering if you could talk about how you made that transition for more 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 the best set by learning a lot of languages and somehow that would turn into a life where people bought me Airline Tickets to explore these places but i wanted to explore and i got to college and my college said, its lovely you are an arts in language major but you are going to take three science courses during your first freshman year. I thought it was a terrible idea i argued against it and i lost all the arguments. Two of the science classes i was forced to take introduce me to Earth Sciences and oceanography and more importantly to really young energetic passionate professors so i could see a lifestyle in them that was exactly the inquisitive Adventure Lifestyle that had been hungering for. People were always buying them Airline Tickets to fly off to interesting places. I changed majors at the end of my freshman year, did certainly all my calculus and physics exactly backwards what you should do. Dont look to me for the calculus wizard stuff. But some of it is just try. Try. Reach beyond what you think you abhave 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, you will get knocked back sometimes. Youll stuff your knees sometimes it sometimes wont work. Take what lessons come from that, try again. We have one more in the back and then we will work around to the front again. We have some young ones down here. I just want to have you speak about your transition from nasa to noaa. The politics of it all. If nasa is getting criticism and budgetary constraints, did you encounter hostility regarding budgets and political activity while you are in noaa . Nasa is a bipartisan treasured jam unlike, has a standing unlike any other civilian agency. It has occasionally taken a haircut in its budget or the requested asked for not fully granted. Budget is well below vastly below the level it was in the apollo era but it pretty consistently grown. Noaa has long enjoyed a bipartisan support. Noaa politics, budget politics more complicated than nasa because there is not one single law. There is a law in the United States called the space act, it was passed in 1958 and lays out cooperatively what nasa is what it exists and what is supposed to do. It had a unified this is what you are about. Noaa came into existence in 1970 one the start of the environmental era was helping maybe people realize we need to get these bits and pieces scientific bits and pieces scattered apart understanding you are really requiring understanding interaction between systems because we can have guys over here doing ocean some of the guys over here doing atmosphere and someone over here, its gotta be connected and integrated and brought together as a system of systems. Outfitted that had been around since the 1800s looking at fisheries was one part of it. To quilt on a singular design so its politics on capitol hill are more attuned to particular programs in different states or different members historically like rather than a unified vision of what a noaa is supposed to do. Youve got to be more convincing to more people to succeed at moving noaa budget forward. We have someone down in the front area. What was the hardest part to getting where you are today . The coolest part was abi get to continue to learn all these cool things. I think the hardest part is sometimes you try something and it doesnt turn out as well as you thought and you feel really disappointed. Maybe you feel embarrassed and maybe somebody is criticizing you for it didnt work out or teasing you for that. You got to kind of 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 absolutely super biggest best worst ever mistake, you can read about it in the book. [laughter] we are going to take two more questions and then Kathryn Sullivan will be signing the book. If youre getting one you might be able to ask a question. Out of all of the constellations you seen from hubble, which is your favorite one . Its seriously hard to pick a favorite star. Im really fond of the aband this gentleman here. This gentleman here. I really fond of the cats i galaxy. I remember reading the report your Committee Work is i remember reading a report about the future of the Space Program and being excited about it and nothing happened. What were your expectations when you are working on it and how to you and your colleagues respond . If you are ever on a president ial commission you know you will be a doorstop and you might have some impact. The scheme our leader was instead of publishing it through the government pershing office we published it to Ballantine Books and the hope was we are going to put it directly, make it possible to be directly in all of your hands because that is the way our system is supposed to work, you guys talk to your members of congress and tell them i know we have this problem. You have your support, you do x in space, a group of people, they will think their way into a couple things and then blur other longerrange things might benefit the country. The problem with space goals is they are very long range. I have to make a commitment to put some money on this instead of that. If i put it here, you might put it up tomorrow or in a couple weeks. I put it here there will be a benefit that a little hard to describe and it might mainly benefit your kids or grandkids and that is a hard thing for human nature to do especially for politicians and voters. Thats a lot of pressure. I think we all love looking at space. Youve looked at space from space, does it change your perspective when looking at the stars from outside the earths atmosphere . You are not miserably closer. You are in a wildly different place with respect to be with but when you look at the shuttle window it looks like when your airliner, isnt it supposed to look way different since we are so much higher but because of the perspectives across continents and mountains, a radically different sense that you ever had it if you try to look outward even if something is close by as the moon, it is not miserably closer. If you think of a schoolkids globe is 12 inches diameter, a shuttle flew about half an inch above that. Carl sagan writes about the pale blue dot. In my experience, a big blue beach ball. That is it for the questions for Kathryn Sullivan, handprints on hubble. She will be signing copies of the book and she will only be signing copies of the book, no memorabilia so dont bring your jar of tang or anything up there. Back to the left here looking that way, you can find someone who will direct you and no selfys please but you can do can did photos. Thank you for coming coming and we hope you will buy the book. It is about consumers of the problems they face, Consumer Finance and how it has changed and the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the role it engages in particular people across america. Sunday 12 30 p. M. Eastern, hr mcmaster, former National Security adviser. We are to do everything we can to protect ourselves against the efforts of the Chinese Communist party to