“Ride, Boldly Ride”: Why human space exploration is important!

William Atkins
Saturday, 26 July 2008 22:11

Opinion and Analysis

We at NASA deal with the issues surrounding man-machine interfaces every day, in flying the International Space Station, controlling over fifty Earth and space science missions in operation today, developing new flight control algorithms and avionics for future aircraft, or building the next generation of space vehicles to return Americans to the Moon and, later, journey even deeper into our solar system. To carry out our mission of space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research, we must understand the conditions our machines will face and how they will behave under those conditions, because mission success and, indeed, the lives of our astronauts depend upon our machines and the technical acumen of the scientists and engineers who develop and operate them.

I thought it appropriate to speak tonight about the Hubble Space Telescope, one of the greatest machines NASA has ever built, and about our relationship with that machine and what it has taught us about our universe and, more importantly, ourselves. In October, astronauts on Space Shuttle Atlantis will rendezvous with Hubble to repair and upgrade it for the fifth time in its nearly two decades of service. When they leave, it will be better than ever. It will be better than anyone ever imagined that it might be, back when I was working on the project some twenty-five years ago.

The story of this scientific and engineering marvel is one of bold vision, imagination, and audacious risk-taking, but also perseverance and ingenuity when, as sometimes happens, not all risks are successfully negotiated. It is a story that transcends science, with Hubble images on display today in art museums, or in homes where no scientist lives. But we all know that these images are far more than a just a bunch of pretty pictures. Hubble has observed the birth and death of stars not unlike our own solar system. It has shown the collision of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with the planet Jupiter, not unlike the asteroid collision sixty- five million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs then roaming the Earth. It has peered through a tiny knothole in the night sky, deep into the early universe, finding thousands of galaxies where our own human eyes would see only a patch of darkness. It has found the galaxies in our universe to be accelerating away from each other at a rate faster than any astrophysicist, including Edwin Hubble, ever predicted, allowing new insights into the birth and eventual fate of our universe, while raising new mysteries about dark matter and dark energy, constituents of a universe that astrophysicists, in all humility, must admit we barely understand today. Hubble has become a cultural icon while remaining an instrument of fundamental scientific discovery. It is unique in human history in its ability to occupy a place of prominence in both art museums and scientific journals.

The birth of the Hubble Space Telescope, with its launch in April 1990, would not have caused anyone to envision this outcome. Hubble's first images were unaccountably blurry, and analysis of its optical system revealed that a 2.3 micron error had been introduced in the grinding of its 2.4-meter primary mirror. The width of an average human hair is eighty microns, so the error was almost unimaginably small. But as this audience will understand, it is a huge error in terms of the optical wavelengths that a telescope must manipulate if it is to function. This mistake was devastating to the astronomical community. It was equally devastating to NASA's credibility. NASA was the brunt of jokes on late night talk shows, with the Hubble being compared to the Titanic, the Hindenberg, and the Edsel.

I have said that in the space business we live by a creed of excellence, or die without it. With Hubble, we faced a situation where this small error, left unchecked, called into question our ability to live by that creed. The jokes were cruel, leveling charges that NASA no longer had "The Right Stuff", in Tom Wolfe's elegant phrase. While such talk unfairly denigrates the many dedicated engineers, scientists, and technicians who work late into the night to maintain the high standard of most of our endeavors, even the slightest error on such a highly visible project calls into question what happened and, above all else, who was to blame.

Maybe this institute should study this peculiarly human trait - the predilection to "kick those who are down". For me, it always calls to mind President Theodore Roosevelt's great speech, "Citizenship in a Republic", with its famous excerpt about "the man in the arena". Few of those offering criticism of the Hubble mistake were capable of understanding its nature or origin, or indeed anything else of how Hubble was designed, or of the exacting tolerances to which it had to be built, or of the tradeoffs that engineers face when deciding how to allocate scarce resources to multiple, competing concerns. As someone who has served on numerous failure boards, and has had to lead teams out of despair, I can only say that criticism from those who are both inept and uninvolved serves no useful function. It cannot even make us feel worse about ourselves than we already do, when we have failed. But it does seem to be a constant companion of bold endeavors, the dark side of human progress. A long career in the space business, with too many opportunities to observe this behavior, has caused me to come to the belief that there is, or at least should be, such a thing as earning the right to hold an opinion.

But I digress. In the aftermath of the Hubble debacle, some Washington policymakers called for an end to NASA altogether. But we don't cast aside human frailty when we venture into space, and wiser heads understood that reaching for the unknown requires the fortitude to deal with adversity. As President John F. Kennedy warned the Congress and our nation in May, 1961, when - with fifteen minutes of human spaceflight to our credit - he set forth the challenge to go to the Moon, "If we are to go only halfway, or reduce our sights in the face of difficulty, in my judgment it would be better not to go at all."

Thus, the Hubble scientists and engineers set their sights on fixing the telescope. The first step was to characterize precisely the observed error in the primary mirror, and then craft a corrective lens for the aberration. The crew of the first servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope trained intensively for one of the most complex Shuttle missions ever undertaken, with five spacewalks and over a hundred specialized tools to correct the optics, while also installing new solar arrays, gyroscopes, and other electrical components. They also upgraded the telescope with a new wide field and planetary camera.

You all know today that this first Shuttle mission to service the Hubble, as well as the three which followed, were huge successes. The Hubble dazzles us with the splendor of our universe, but during those grim years between 1990 and '93, its awe-inspiring success was far from certain. If you didn't know the core strength of the NASA team when the chips are down, you might have bet against us. You would have lost.

And that is why, to me, the most meaningful lesson from the Hubble Space Telescope has more to do with our human nature than with any of the secrets of our universe. That is, in the face of adversity, we must resolve to persevere. To that end, I know, because I see it every day, that NASA still has "The Right Stuff".

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