NASA’s Incredible Discovery Machine: The Story of the Hubble Space Telescope

It has this direct window to the rest of the universe. There's nothing in between the rest of the universe and Hubble. There's not a single astronomer in the world whose life hasn't been touched by Hubble. Hubble will be one of the great stories of all time. We will remember it with reverence, with the legacy, with the foundation. It gave us the optimism and the hope to reach for bigger things. The world's most brilliant astronomers do miracles with this observatory. And it just keeps going on and on and on, and my jaw keeps dropping lower and lower with each new discovery. Scientists around the world, together with science enthusiasts, the public, science supporters, came together to see here's an opportunity where if we put our wits together and our support together, we could build a platform that opens new eyes to the universe. Let's go for it. From Galileo's simple instrument to modern mountain top atmosphere, the best place for an observer is in the heavens. Now the space shuttle, created by NASA, America's space agency, has the ability to put one there. The periodic revisit of the shuttle will allow for the replacement of components and routine maintenance. This ability to service the telescope through human care will extend its lifespan up to 20 years. Scopes on brief rockets brought us hints of a new existence, to take some of the clearest photographs of the sun ever obtained. Another group of astronomers told a recent meeting of the American Rocket Society in San Diego, California, that they are designing a satellite that will carry a bank of telescopes into an orbit 500 miles or 800 kilometers high. By thus sending a telescope up above the Earth's atmosphere, they hope to pierce a blanketing ocean of air that has, for the most part, obscured man's detailed view of the universe. Well, astronomers have wanted for generations, actually, to get us a telescope above the atmosphere. The first reference I'm aware of is back in 1925, that it was suggested that we needed a telescope in space. I've read that one of the astronomers at Princeton, this was probably in the 30s or 40s, said that when he died, he wanted to go to heaven and take a telescope with him. And so when the possibility of a telescope in space opened up, astronomers jumped on the idea. I certainly remember the very first time I went into the enormous clean room where Hubble was being built. I mean, it's 90 feet tall and 120 feet long and hyper-clean, hyper-clean air. And the telescope just, I mean, it just looked like something Tiffany's had built. We're going to look for the label somewhere that's a telescope by Tiffany's. Just glistening silver, fabulous, gorgeous piece of work, huge. So that's one real favorite memory. First sights always leave a deeper impression. It was mind-boggling. I envisioned Hubble being big. I did not envision Hubble being huge. And Hubble was huge. Since I had already flown a shuttle mission, I knew how big the shuttle was, and I knew how big the shuttle's payload bay was. Hubble was too big. And I mean, the first impression was, how the hell are they going to fit that in the payload bay? That is a monstrous payload. What was happening in the context of science here? We were building an Earth observing system to study our planet. Very evocative. Ozone holes being measured. Studying the sun. We had had a couple of missions to Mars that showed us it's not the way we thought it was. Tough. Soviets had landed probes on Venus for about an hour. Pretty hellish. We had the Voyagers going out of the solar system, and that's it. That was our view. A few little points of light flying around, but they were narrow. And the big picture's always fun. It has something for everyone. Some people call these great missions of exploration, they're kind of like the cathedrals of the 21st century. And in the Renaissance, people built cathedrals, they were multi-generational, they were great architectural renderings that reached to the heavens. Now we go to the heavens, and we follow the light. I remember sitting around the dinner table the night before, and we had talked off and on about what was Hubble going to, what was going to be the significance of Hubble. Talking about what we thought Hubble's legacy was going to be and stuff. I mean, things you can't imagine. None of us could definitively say what we thought it was going to be, but all of us agreed Hubble was going to be something absolutely spectacular that was going to revolutionize the worlds of astronomy and astrophysics. We just didn't know how. And I think we underestimated the scientific and technological significance of Hubble, because it has dwarfed what any of us imagined it would ever do. Sound suppression water system has started. T-minus 13 seconds. T-minus 10, go for main engine start. We are go for main engine start. T-minus 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and liftoff of the Space Shuttle Discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope, our window on the universe. Discovery, Houston. Houston, just wanted to let you know that the ground is currently configured for HST main bus activation, so we're ready when you are. Houston, Discovery. The transfer to internal power is complete. The umbilical is dead fast and we'll be standing by for your go for umbilical release. Roger, Discovery. Discovery, you're go for umbilical disconnect. The Hubble deploy day did not go well. In the end, we successfully deployed Hubble and Hubble went on to greater things. Deploy day was long and arduous and nothing at all the way it was planned. From the moment Steve Hawley attached the RMS mechanical arm, things went wrong. Steve was supposed to be able to just pull out on the translational hand controller and have the arm lift Hubble straight out of the payload bay. That's not what happened. I mean, Hubble's 25,000 pounds of mass. Granted, it's weightless in space, but it's still a 25,000-pound mass. And as he began to lift, it began to twist and turn, and we saw it immediately. And so I said, Steve, stop. Something's not right. And so that necessitated Steve now going to a downgraded mode, which was moving joint by joint. So for the next couple of hours, Steve Hawley literally had to lift a little bit, readjust a joint, get it straight again, lift a little bit, readjust a joint, or roll it or do whatever was necessary to keep it as much in its orientation as it was in the bay as possible. But that took hours instead of minutes the way it was supposed to work. The thing about Hubble was we launched it cradled in the payload bay with electrical power umbilicals attached to the back. And once you pulled the plug on that umbilical, Hubble was on its batteries. And there was a fixed period of time, a maximum period of time, that you could run it on its batteries without the solar rays being unfolded to sustain and recharge the batteries. If you got to the end of that time, the batteries would reach a point where they were not recoverable. So that set a, I forget now how long it was, something on the order of four hours. Well, if anything needs an EVA backup, and we could backup all that stuff, we could crank open the solar rays. And as the crew just confirmed, we're seeing both blankets beginning to unfurl on the port side solar array. So far we see good smooth motion on both sides. So the first solar ray went out both sides. No problem. It took a few minutes. Everything was just like it should be. Second solar array sent the command. It got about, I don't know, 16 inches and quit. Houston, Discovery, it looks like motion stopped with just about one panel showing. And we see that too, Lorne. The DCE is off. And as it turned out, of course, the second solar array did not unfurl correctly. It jammed partway out. And then Bruce and I left the flight deck and dove down into the middeck with Charlie Bolden and suited up and we were all buttoned up. The airlock was sealed. In fact, we had dumped half the air out of the airlock. We were about to get the go for EVA and proceed on outside. The other thing I need an answer to is if I can go ahead and commit to EVA with a thought of going out and cranking it out. If whatever they're about to do fails, they want us to just press on to back them up. We need to get on with it. Okay, flight, I'll come back with the answers. I need answers now. Flight, I failed. Go ahead. Yeah, I don't feel comfortable waiting until after 620. I don't either. That's why I want the answers now. Yeah, 620 is my drop-dead time from adding up all the times. Okay, I'm going to have them press on. All right, CAPCOM, tell the crew we want them to press on into EVA and we'll stop them whenever we have to. As quickly, we've got four minutes on this pass. Discovery, Houston. Discovery, go ahead. Okay, with the panels that you've got out there right now, it's not satisfactory to stay overnight, so we're going to have to move out on the EVA. I was scared. I had never suited anybody who was going to go out in space. And I knew that if I missed something, if I missed a glove, you know, if I didn't get it fastened right or something on the helmet, they were going to die and it was going to be my fault. So even though this guy has come out of combat and all other kinds of stuff, I was scared because I had never done this before. And so I knew my crew members were dependent on me. And we were getting ready to let them open the outer hatch when the ground said, hey, stop. And we said, okay. They said, we've got an idea. We think there may be some problem with the tension monitoring software. We've got the DCE back on. We're going to disable the tension monitoring and resend the proc to deploy the minus SDM. Okay. Get it. And the irony, this is the day of ironies. Early in the morning when the solar array first stopped, Bruce came up with this crazy, Bruce McCandless said, I don't think there's anything mechanically wrong. I think it's the tension monitoring module. And we all looked at Bruce and went, the what? Everybody went, Kathy, Kathy had heard of the tension monitoring module. And so Bruce said, ah, it's this software module that we put in to protect the solar array. And in case we got a mechanical jam or something, we didn't want to rip it and destroy the telescope. So we have this software module that would stop it until we could diagnose the problem and then correct it and then let it go out. This young man down here at Goddard, and I say young man because as I understand it, he was a very young flight controller on console, said, hey, I don't think we've got a mechanical problem. I really think it's the tension monitoring module. And if you give me permission, I can no op the tension monitoring module. I can turn it off. I'll make a one a zero, and I think everything will be okay. So between Houston and Goddard and I think Bristol, England, and everywhere else in the world that had anything to do with Hubble, they meshed on this thing for hours. And they said, okay, try to deploy it again. Hit the deploy switch, and solar array went out. It's fully deployed. The microswitch is confirming. Okay. And for Bruce and Kathy, we'd like you to stop the airlock depress at five, please. We're go. Go. Eagle. Go. Inco. We're go. FAO. Go. Max. Go. PRS. Go flight. EVA. We're go. Sergeant, you're still go? Go. Capcom, we have a go for release. Discovery, go for Hubble release. Okay, we have a go for release, and we're going to be a minute late. Okay, Charlie. And all Steve had to do was pull a trigger that opened the grapples that held the grapple fixture. And it was, I mean, it was breathtaking. And it was beautiful as it got farther and farther away. But it never went out of sight because it was so bright and shiny. So the irony of all of this is that after five years working together on the Hubble telescope, longer than any other person on the crew had worked on the Hubble telescope, the view that Bruce and I had at the time that Hubble was deployed was the blank white wall inside of the airlock. Never saw it. Kathy has never forgiven me. She blames me for leaving her in the airlock. So, I mean, you know, a couple hours later I go down there. They've got a lot of vacuum time but no space time, no spacewalk time. And so I repressurized the airlock, get them out, put them back on the wall, get them unsuited and everything, and they're just... But we had a lot of images. Engineering things that have never been done sometimes have issues. Designing the preeminent viewpoint of the heavens, the Hubble Space Telescope, was not without, you know, sort of new inventions that were never done before. The first images from Hubble were, frankly, a little disappointing. They were not as sharp and crisp as we had hoped. It turns out that the mirrors had a slightly misshapen form. This special mirror, 2.4 meters of specially ground glass designed to capture the light of the universe, back in time, you know, billions of years, had an aberration, the way my eyes have an aberration, and I wear glasses. And so there was an initial, oh my goodness, what can we do? This icon of exploration that took 50 years to think about to fly has a problem. And I'm positive that if we all had written down the 100 most likely problems with the Hubble Space Telescope, if everybody involved with Hubble had written down those top 100, not one of them, not one of them would have listed the mirrors the wrong shape. We feel that we can characterize the problem, the spherical aberration problem, well enough that we can take advantage of an insurance policy that we haven't talked much about, and it hasn't been in the press much, and that is we started a long time ago to plan a maintenance program. That is, every three years we plan to go up with the space shuttle, change out instruments, change out things that broke, the gyros or something might break. We have gyros in stock. In fact, we have in stock, in storage, most of the critical components on space telescopes. We promised that we had a way to fix it, and we put a new camera in with corrective optics in it that would cure the optical problem. Right as we talk now, we are building a second wide-field camera, and it's not too late to put a corrective optic. You can almost think of it, if you've got bad myopia, which you can say our telescope has now, and you put your glasses on, you can correct totally and get 20-20 vision. That's what we would do in the wide-field camera, the second wide-field camera. We would change one little mirror, relay mirror in there, take out the aberration that the primary mirror causes. That is, if it's a positive aberration, we put in a negative aberration and basically cancel it out. We feel the analysis is only preliminary, but we're pretty optimistic that we can take out all the aberration with the second wide-field camera and get us back to the original specification. Nobody believed us, but we promised that we'd do it, and we'd do it by December 93. Let me conclude by saying HST was and is a difficult challenge for a tremendous payoff. Hubble became, it was in the press all the time with the problems. It was a billion-dollar mistake. People in the press called it a technological disaster, a national disgrace. Late-night comedy hosts were making jokes about Hubble. Well, have you been reading about the problems of the Hubble Telescope? The Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble Telescope. See, since there's no longer a Soviet threat, a lot of people feel we don't need the Star Wars defense system anymore. Hey, I think we should keep it, you know, if only to shoot down that Hubble spacecraft and put this thing out of its misery. Boy, that's what I say. The teams at NASA, combinations with Johnson Space Center, Goddard Space Center, Space Flight Center, great astronauts, the will of the people, great members of Congress who supported it, said, let's fix it. We fixed other things, you know, and they still work. Old cars still run. Let's make Hubble the better version. We were all disappointed but all hopeful that something might be done to save this spectacular space observatory. And, in fact, something was done. We had already planned to be doing servicing missions on Hubble over the years. And so the first servicing mission to send astronauts back to Hubble was designed to repair this problem with Hubble. And this big mirror really was the dominant driver. We worked very, very hard to develop, first of all, you know, how distorted was it? How mispolished was it? And then to find a company in the United States, preferably, that could polish corrective lenses that would take care of the problem. Those two challenges were really immense. And those challenges, when they finally got solved, led to something that was an extremely important payoff to the U.S. and world citizenry. To fly what you test and test what you fly would be easier if the telescope were back on Earth. But landing and relaunching could contaminate the telescope or damage it through vibration. NASA couldn't test the new corrective optics in the actual telescope. So to make sure the optics will work, the team had to determine the condition of Hubble in space and replicate that on the ground. One independent review panel used Hubble images to determine the precise shape of the flawed primary mirror and the prescription to fix it. Another team had to verify that the corrective optics will work. Teams had to test two optical packages, the replacement wide-field planetary camera and the corrective optics for the other instruments, called COSTAR. Engineers built several independent analyzers to test that they had replicated what the Hubble telescope does to light. For mechanical testing, engineers built a simulator at Goddard Space Flight Center using the same precision equipment that built Hubble originally. To replicate Hubble during electrical tests of the corrective optics package and the new camera, an electrical test facility was built with the same schematics as the original telescope. Hardware has been thoroughly tested on the ground. The Hubble servicing team is preparing for contingencies. But this mission is a first, so no one can predict everything that could happen. The real test will be in space. Five, four, three, two, one. And we have liftoff. Liftoff of the space shuttle Endeavour on an ambitious mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. Houston, Endeavour has a firm handshake with Mr. Hubble's telescope. Copy that, Covey. Fantastic. I think if the arrays are straight, we also have an equal chance that there's no such thing as spherical aberration. The universe is aberrated. And we're going to be correcting for it. Okay, then you're seeing what would be the upper outboard bi-stem on the plus V2 array. There's a definite kink right at the edge of the second panel there, as you can see, in the max part of the bin. And it looks like, as the bi-stems, of course one is inside the other, it looks like the outer bi-stem has a kink in it. And it is also twisted approximately 90-plus degrees clockwise there at the kink. Then it looks like it all comes back together within a few feet there of the kink. There's also, probably hard for you all to see, we have to look at it with binoculars, a second kink a couple of feet below the obvious one that is on the backside there of that section of the bi-stem. Foot restraint will be occupied by Mission Specialist Kathy Thornton. She will be working from the end of the mechanical arm. This television shows Thornton at the array, the array to be jettisoned. Look how stable you left that. There it goes. We can have another EVA day like we did the first. And it looks like we're halfway there. We'll be well on our way. Very, very successfully completed mission. In fact, I remember after the first day saying that if we could just have two more like today, we'd be sure of great signs. So, it looks great. The mirror, this is like the mirror in the light field camera that's used to correct for the spherical aberration in Hubble. And it's done by putting the same error on this mirror that exists on the Hubble mirror only with the opposite sign. So the result is that after having the optical image distorted by the primary mirror, the distortion is removed by the secondary mirror. And the result is that you get a good clear image at the end. Time on it. Okay. All right, stop the alarm. Stop the alarm. Stop. Is the mirror clear? Yes, we're totally clear. We're ready to start in. Okay. All right, let's come on in. Okay. Nobody really believed they could do all of this work and they did it and did it in fine fashion. You know, even with some problems along the way. So that was, that brought Hubble back to life. And it kind of took away some of the criticism of NASA because they had now demonstrated that they could do something that had never been done before. We had never serviced a telescope. So, when people talk about the legacy of Hubble, I think among its greatest legacies will be helping humanity understand that, yeah, when things go to space, we can in fact. They're not, it's not hopeless if there's something wrong. We can service them in many cases if we make some preparation to do that. Stop. Okay, here we go. I'm going to get the P.A. Put it on, the light comes on. With the camera now installed, Claude Nicollier will reposition Jeff Hoffman so that he can now completely latch the new instrument into the telescope. Right now it's looking very, very good that we've accomplished all we needed to accomplish for the optical correction of HST. And that's good news for astronomy. And it's good news for NASA to get over this little episode in our history. And after five EVAs, spacewalks, the astronauts came home and about two weeks later we took off the bandages from our eyes and suddenly Hubble was fixed. It was totally fixed. Hey! Right there. Yeah, yeah, let's get started. Bring it up. Come on, come on. Oh. Come on. Not bad. Well, can you, can you get a sense for which is the brightest pixel? Yeah, just on the cursor around there. Oh, there, there, there. Oh. Ah! Whoa. Not bad at all. I chair the subcommittee that financed the manufacture of the most significant contact lens in American history. The fix on the Hubble Space Telescope. And then bankrolled this extraordinary space HMO that went out and gave Hubble Telescope a new contact lens. And I'm happy to announce today that after its launch now in 1990, some of its earlier disappointments, the trouble with Hubble is over. We have here a picture taken of the image of a star with the new faint object camera. Here we have the picture taken prior to the servicing mission without the co-star. Over here on my left is the new picture taken of the same star configuration after co-star. This is the picture of the same galaxy. And then here is the picture taken of the same galaxy through the new wide field planetary camera that was installed by our gallant and brave astronauts. The pictures are remarkable. The science that will come from the pictures are of historical significance. We will now, because of the Hubble fix, be able to do 21st century science that will enable us to look back on the universe. And this is only the beginning. Three, two, one, ignition and liftoff. Discovery now on its way to service NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope is a magnificent achievement because it involves so many aspects of expertise and support, everything from engineering, technology, cultural support, scientific motivation, political support. It was also very innovative because it involved building on the technology developed through the Apollo program of NASA and then advancing that to the point of having the space shuttle being able to carry satellites like Hubble into low Earth orbit and then creating an infrastructure where you can bring astronauts repeatedly back up to an orbiting satellite, connecting with that satellite and having those astronauts go out in extravehicular activity to repair, service, upgrade that telescope, that satellite, and then let it go again to continue doing its science, inspiring future missions and future ways that astronauts and science and engineering can all work together to produce new advances in human space exploration. Hubble was pretty much the pioneer in this kind of sustained effort and we should be grateful for it. We have booster ignition and liftoff of the space shuttle Discovery on a mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope as we venture into the 21st century. I hope that it helps us understand what humans are capable of, period. Hubble represents so many different pieces of this planet working together in harmony. We've got the European Space Agency, NASA, all the universities and science organizations all around this planet that have a vested interest and have reaped the benefit of Hubble. Yeah, I certainly hope it's shown us what we are capable of. Liftoff of space shuttle Columbia to broaden our view of the universe through the Hubble Space Telescope. It took about three years of training before we were ready to go fly. The Hubble missions are some of the most complicated space missions we've ever attempted and the repairs were difficult and involved developing new tools and procedures. And so that's why it takes longer for a Hubble Space Telescope mission than it did, say, for an International Space Station assembly mission. Those you could turn around much more quickly. The loss of this valiant crew is something we will never be able to get over and certainly the families of all of them, we have assured we will do everything, everything we can possibly do to guarantee that they work their way through this horrific tragedy. The final Hubble servicing mission that left Hubble as the observatory that it is today almost didn't happen because after Columbia, Sean O'Keefe was the NASA administrator and he made the decision that Hubble was too risky. I think we all respected the administrator at the time who actually came out in person to tell us. We didn't like what he was telling us, but at least he didn't just send an email. He came out and tried to explain his rationale, which was simply that he thought it was too dangerous for the astronauts since there was no safety net if something went wrong. Hubble was in an orbit that the crew couldn't use the International Space Station as a safe haven if something went wrong. For all of the station missions, our plan was if we could just get the crew somewhere to orbit, we could get them to the International Space Station and put them aboard station until we could get another flight to come up and rescue them. Fortunately, we were able to keep people occupied while this was churning through the system and we did some very good work on the possibility of robotic servicing of Hubble. After a year's worth of work, we actually decided that it would be possible in the future, but we didn't think we could develop it in time to actually be useful for Hubble before it lost control or wasn't able to observe. Fortunately, about the time we had decided that is when the new administrator came in and said, let's find a way to make the final servicing mission happen. Just under three years ago, NASA had to announce a very troubling decision, that decision being to cancel shuttle servicing mission four for the Hubble Space Telescope. Today, I'm here to announce a much more pleasant decision on behalf of the agency. We are going to add a shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope to the shuttle's manifest to be flown before it retires. We anticipate... The public response was probably as important, if not more so, than the professional astronomical community's response. They both wanted to see Hubble serviced, both wanted to continue, but the public, in some ways, was our savior. I mean, they went and they talked to their congresspeople, they wrote editorials for newspapers and everything. There are a lot of people on the Earth, the youngsters, have never known a time without Hubble in the sky. And they just didn't want to see it go away. So I think their investment in it, their connection to it, coupled with the way they were able to describe that to the media, to Congress, whatever, it really got through to people and to the administrator and said, you know, this is important for more than the science. So let's find a way to make it work. And we did. Liftoff of space shuttle Atlantis, final visit. I'm the witness on this. You actually were the last guy to pat it goodbye. What were you thinking when you patted Hubble goodbye? What was going through your mind? Happy voyages. I hope everything that we did worked. It's hard not to think of Hubble as something alive. I really was thinking of Hubble as a friend. This is a really tremendous adventure that we've been on, a very challenging mission. Hubble isn't just a satellite. It's about humanity's quest for knowledge. As Arthur C. Clarke says, the only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible. And on this mission, we tried some things that many people said was impossible, fixing stiff, repairing ACS, achieving all the content that we have in this mission. We've achieved that, and we wish Hubble the very best. I want to wish Hubble its own set of adventures, and with the new instruments we've installed, that it may unlock further mysteries of the universe. Repaired the two failing instruments, put in two new ones, replaced gyros, a whole bunch of things, a really massive mission, and did such an excellent job that we're here more than 10 years later now, and we're as capable as we've ever been. Things are still working. We've lost a few gyros, but we still have enough to operate on. All four of the instruments that were alive after the servicing mission are still going strong. We are supremely grateful for getting that last servicing mission in because we would not still be operating at this point if we hadn't done that. That allowed us to get the telescope in a configuration for maximum following lifetime. It's about newness. It's about challenge. It's about going out there in the forefront of technology and breaking through. And Hubble represents that to the greatest degree that I can think of because it allows us to do it in a big way and in a small way. It allows us to do it in detectors. It allows us to do it in computer technology, in optical fabrication, in optical polishing. But it also gives us this big picture. It also gives us this great challenge of making things better. A lot of people say they feel very insignificant when they look at these images that show thousands of galaxies and tell us that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies beyond the Milky Way, and that's a certain understandable response. But I also feel a sense of gratitude and even significance myself. Now, these are philosophical issues, not science issues, right? But I feel a sense of significance that we, as humans, have developed or been granted the ability to develop instruments that enable us to see far beyond what the human eye alone could ever see and to think about what it means, to think about how we, on this planet, relate to star systems far beyond our own. I think that's wonderful. It should make us all feel a sense of gratitude and humility and also connectedness. You know, we're on different sides of a planet, but we're all connected as human beings on planet Earth as part of this magnificent universe. I think it should and does have a unifying effect for humanity, and I'm grateful for that. Imagination is great, but execution is everything. So, okay, we can imagine being able to see the cosmos, and that's great. And great astronomers, great thinkers wrote the governing equations. They imagined it. But what did it take to be able to do it in a way that responds to what we learn in a way that allows us to go beyond just the framing questions, you know? And so the Hubble Space Telescope is the consummation of a masterpiece of engineering because many of the things Hubble did and continues to do were miracles of engineering that did not exist before. Hubble expanded our horizons of thinking with an engineering solution to something that changed the way we viewed space. Space all of a sudden was beautiful. It wasn't just equations that say, well, there's something on the event horizon like a black hole. Look, it's Hawking's work and, you know, and Einstein's and, you know, others. It's more than that. It's beautiful. It's elegant. It's populated. It's not just light from stars. It's connecting glue. It's the, you know, it's grand challenges. It connects other galaxies to suns, to planetary systems that we can indirectly sense. All that took a space telescope to do, and it had to be a good one. Hubble discovered things that are now fundamental in the astrophysics of our universe. Oh, my God. But the millions of engineering solutions that let it work, it's, you know, they're beyond words. They're magic. I think that's why it was so transformative in space science. It brought space science to the people because it talked about all space. And it stared at key places in all space to tell us what could be. And that is brilliant, you know. Space is a tapestry. It's a mosaicism of stuff. Some wish we can't see. Hubble saw a lot of it and showed us how to look at it differently. And that, I think, is its legacy. Humans are very good at kind of putting our hearts and souls into things that are made of just metal and wiring. I mean, think about perhaps the connection you might have to your car. You know, your car is something that is used by you every day, is touched by you. It may have a personality to you. It may feel very secure or it may be very contentious. It's always breaking down. It's natural for us to sort of put ourselves out into the world in things that might not really be conscious, that are just machines. And when you hear the Hubble Space Telescope, you think of something, well, okay, it's a telescope. It's a big metal tube. We launched it up into space. It's very far away. They're seeing things that are very esoteric that I wouldn't understand. The thing I would ask you to do is just take a little time and look at some of these pictures because the artistic merit of what a giant cloud forming hundreds of stars looks like, even if you don't really understand what that is, start by just looking at these beautiful pictures and then start reading. We go through a lot of trouble. Our wonderful science writers are trying to describe what you're really seeing, the drama of it, the scale of it, and also the connection. You know, you're looking at a place where our sun, our solar system, and your body literally come from these places that Hubble's taking a picture of, these giant clouds making every chemical element that there is in the universe. You are part of this story, and I know that can seem hard. Scientists can seem like very distant people, very different from the rest of the world, and we're completely not. You know, scientists are you. Scientists are your neighbors and your friends, and if you've ever asked a question, you know, or if you've ever looked up into the night sky with wonder, you know, you're one of us. You know, you get to be included along with the scientists. Hubble is to us a piece of machinery that we have put our hopes and our dreams and our Ph.D. dissertations and our arguments and our frustrations into, and 30 years on, you know, this one metal cylinder up in space carries the souls of tens of thousands of people, and, you know, that's something that just, it's a wonderful part of being human. What we touch begins to carry part of our humanity with it. Congress wasn't at all sure that it wanted to pay for the Hubble, and it took really a major effort on the part of the astronomical community to lobby Congress to get the final funding approved. Now, Proxmire, who was a, you may not want to use this story, but I think it's a good story. I'd love to hear it. Proxmire was noted for the fact that he, laughing at the ways government wasted money, and he sent a question to NASA headquarters saying, why should the American taxpayer pay for something like the Hubble? And I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and my answer was that for the cost of a night at the movies, every American taxpayer would have 15 years of exciting discoveries. And I may have been off by a factor of three or four, depending on how you figure launch costs and the servicing missions and some other things, but even if it ended up being one night at the movies every year, I think Hubble has been worth it.