Standing by now for a go for auto sequence start. T minus 33. Hold at t minus 31 seconds. The ground launch sequencer would not hand off to the orbiters computers to complete the count because the liquid oxygen was showing off when it should be on. T minus 10. Go for main engine start. Were go for main engine start. T minus six, five, four, three, two, one, liftoff of Space Shuttle discovery with the hubble space telescope. Our window on the universe. Susan dr. Kathryn sullivan, youve written a book about the hubble and were going to talk a lot about it today. Watching that video all these years later what was it like for you, knowing you are on board . Dr. Sullivan it was one of my favorite moments. You just saw the skill, professionalism and calm of that Exceptional Team on full display. We all sat in the cockpit. We had no role in this at all. It was the guys on the screen but we just sat and listened, not to the commentator but to the technical communications, followed the discussion through. It was just a marvel. I had the Launch Control center get me the audiotape of the technical control loops because i wanted to be able to have that souvenir. These were my guys, the team im a part of. Susan you tell this story as your book opens about the 32nd hold. What happened there . Dr. Sullivan so there is a set of fuel lines, you saw that big orange tank through which one of them fills the oxygen tank within it. And because you want all the oxygen to stay in the tank there are two valves that you close to make sure nothing leaks out and one of the final checks before the big computer hands over to the shuttle Onboard Computers is that all of those valves are closed, everything is cool, and the indicator on one of the two valves for the oxygen tank read open. It didnt show the right reading, so, you know, that could be really bad. You are one failure away from propellant leaking out. It should be taking you to orbit. It may not get you high enough to deploy hubble, only with enough to get across the atlantic. It landed in an emergency runway. In the worst case you could end up splashing into the Atlantic Ocean so the engineers needed to stop and look at that and determine if the second valve was really not closed or is it just a flaky indicator and thats what we heard the engineer talking through, and he was doing physics 101 as he was talking it through. Its super cold oxygen. If that valve is really open the temperatures should be like this in the area around there and they arent. They are warmer than that so it cant be true that the valve was really open. So he ran through all of that in his mind and sent a repeat command to the valve and that sort of made the indicator flip to the correct state. And then its been his call, the bosses in the control center, are you prepared to go now or not . On you, and he was confident about it. He said we go and you heard the pickup then, countdown resumed and we flipped over to the automatic sequencer and 31 seconds later left the earth. Susan what is it like for the astronauts sitting in the seat knowing all those decisions are really out of your control . You cant say stop at this point, i dont want to go. Dr. Sullivan if the commander onboard was really dissatisfied with what he or she is hearing they could in principle do that but the team of engineers in the Launch Control center have countless more indicators and readouts than we have so they have the better picture in front of them. At the end of the day youve got to count on the competency, skill, and composure, you dont apply to sit on that console, im be that control engineer, console and be that control engineer, its a multiyear process of demonstrating your skills, backing up somebody else in apprentice mode. Its a very elaborate and very formal certification process to have the authority to sit there and make that call. And for obvious reasons, the entire Space Shuttle program is going to stop or go based on your word. Susan i looked up for this conversation, with all the years of Space Programs in several countries, there are still fewer than six hundred people who have been in space. So for all of us earthbound humans, whats the experience like . Dr. Sullivan yeah, its a very small club. Well, launch, at least on Something Like a Space Shuttle, is kind of like being in an earthquake. There is a lot of shaking, the back of your chair is being pushed skyward at a pretty impressive rate. For the shuttle we only got pressed into our seats three times the force of gravity. Some other rockets expose you to twice that amount. So youre squeezed into your seat. Its loud, youre rattling, youve got to break through the atmosphere and get up into the noatmosphere area. Thats where you can accelerate. You use all that rocket power. Now you start going fast. Getting into orbit means going 17,500 miles per hour. Thats really hard to do in the thick atmosphere near the earth. So, you know, the liftoff is an amazing experience, embedded in that ball of energy for 8. 5 minutes and then it flips to this other completely magical experience, being able to float anywhere in a room. Of course, were really familiar with the cockpit of the shuttle from all of our training. Its like this room here. That is a floor and that is a ceiling and you need a table to put something on and all of those rules change once you get to zero gravity. You can move massive objects with the tip of a finger. You can flip it anyway you want, its just a delight. Susan was it different from your zero gravity training actually being there . Dr. Sullivan the zero gravity training i always found completely worthless. Its never really sustained zero gravity. Its twice the force of gravity and then for 20 seconds its none and then back and forth but the training we did for space walks where you put on a spacesuit, its a real spacesuit thats just never going to get used in orbit and you put yourself in a large tank of water, neutrally buoyant. If the scuba divers let go of you you wont pop to the surface or sink to the bottom. That gives you a feel for gravity. Just put your body where you need it to be to access without worrying about what is conventionally up and down and left and right. Susan as we heard that 1990 mission, was the launch of the hubble, youve had a career filled with scientific achievements. Where does the hubble project fall for you . Dr. Sullivan being part of the hubble project falls at the top for me. Its the most amazing machine weve put into orbit, the most amazing scientific instrument. Its transformed how we understand the universe, our universe, our solar system. How stars form, and, you know, to have any little part in something so transformative and something that seeped out so pervasively in the popular imagination, thats always been the pinnacle. One thing that you asked me that im proudest about is that i was on team hubble. Susan who was the hubble named for . Dr. Sullivan edwin p. Hubble, an astronomer from princeton, i believe, if i remember correctly. He was a guy back in the 1920s and 1930s who figured out the universe must be expanding and you can figure out how fast its expanding by looking at the red shift of stars, lightwave equivalent of what we all experience when a train comes toward us and goes past us. You hear the train whistle. Light will do that as well. If the star is moving toward you, the Natural Light will be pushed towards blue, higher frequency and moving away it shifts towards red. If you could very carefully measure how much towards the red the light has shifted you can get an indicator of how quickly the universe is expanding. They named this telescope after hubble because being above the atmosphere with long duration, ability to see, not blocked by the atmosphere, and with the instruments it had, it was going to be able to make it a much more precise measurement of that constant, more tightly on how the universe is actually functioning. Susan its been 30 years since that mission took off. Why are you writing a book about it now . Dr. Sullivan im writing a book about it for a couple of reasons. One is the promise that the engineers made when they were designing hubble is that it would run for 15 years and that would have been a complete success. Its going to turn 30 next year. Not only that, but its not the same telescope anymore the outer skin is the same. The structure that holds the two big mirrors is the same and the antennas that beam the data back and forth is the same. Virtually Everything Else on the telescope is different from the pieces that we put up in 1990. That comes down to the foresight that engineers had starting in the mid 1960s actually to think about actually building a telescope that you could repair and upgrade while it was in orbit. They reasoned, they really drew a parallel to a mountaintop observatory. The mirrors will last hundreds of years. You bring an instrument up every time the Technology Changes or when the mirror on the mountaintop is a constant. They wanted to go in that direction with hubble and it was an amazing amount of foresight in the earliest days of the Space Program, and then the years that i worked on hubble before we took it to orbit the task then was to hypothetically maintain it in orbit but you guys dont have tools and equipment yet. You have to equip the shuttle to be able to do that, and i dont think youll be surprised to hear you dont go to home depot and look on aisle four for Hubble Telescope tools. They had to be modified or created from more common tools. Susan what are the biggest engineering challenges that have to be solved . Dr. Sullivan really the biggest one, a telescope has to do three things to succeed. It has to see clearly, point precisely, and hold really still. So getting the mirror fashioned correctly and shaped correctly, which, of course, we later learned they didnt quite do. That was a huge demanding technical undertaking. The whole control system that points hubble and then holds it very still gave them fits for years and years and years. In comparison to those problems, setting an architecture, layout of boxes and units on the hubble, setting that so you could get at things easily to replace them, if this breaks i want to be able to reach in and get it out, that architecture was set very early on in the design history. And then the challenge in 1985 to 1990 was to go look at all of those boxes and be sure that astronauts really did have tools that could do those jobs, you know, could reach that fastener, could open that latch. Could do the repair or the replacement of all the different boxes. So how important was it that the European Space agency was involved in this project . Dr. Sullivan politically and budgetary it was important to have the space agency involved. They took something on the order of 20 of the cost. They shared that and in return they got observing time. So it expanded the Scientific Community using hubble. Probably the reality is it was kind of a gonogo thing with congress. Were not going to do this all by ourselves. If this is a compelling enough scientific endeavor surely some other partner countries will join in. Nasa, go get some other people to join in. Susan was there competition . Was russian wanting to build a competitors telescope . Not that im aware of. The start of this story beyond the time we put into orbit was still the cold war era. Certainly at my level, being privy to what the russians was planning was pretty low but you never caught anything about russia planning to build a telescope. The diplomatic relations at that time would have prohibited a direct partnership with them. Susan if you could explain because you want to tell the story and inform people but what was the role of nasa in this project and what was the role of private industry . Dr. Sullivan the role of nasa was to talk to the Scientific Community, astronomical community, determine what the science objectives should be, and do some of the first order calculations about what kind of telescope would it take to deliver that science program. And then the role of industry was, design and build that. One of the things that really surprised me, as i did my research for the book, i started asking myself, when nasa put the bid out to private industry, we got permission to do this telescope, when youre going to build it, tell me how and show me the mathematics that will convince me that it will do the things i need it to do. I started to wonder what did nasa say to those companies about maintenance at that time . That would have been 1976, 1977, 1978. Did they have a list of things you will need to provide . I found some of the bid documents in the archives at the air and space museum and it boiled down to nasa said it shall be maintainable. You guys figure it out. You tell me how you will do that. I am not giving you a whole about it. Susan because they didnt know . Dr. Sullivan nobody knew. I mean, you think where that was in time, the Skylab Missions had only just happened. Those were arguably the first really complicated space walks that anyone had done. It was clearly the most complex thing at that time. No one had a basic experience in space walk to draw on and the engineers that were designing hubble all the way through, they were motorcycle guys, they were car guys, train guys, they were taking that kind of practical experience from a very groundbased enterprise and good engineering principles and their imagination and applying that to the telescope. Susan what company won the largest portion of the contract . Dr. Sullivan lockheedmartin. Lockheed missiles and Space Corporation was the prime contractor and the integrator. Susan based where . Dr. Sullivan in sunnyvale, california, and they had a contractor to make the big mirror and with other universities to do the scientific instruments and gyros came from another company. It was quite a cascade to get the pieces together but setting the architecture was lockheeds responsibility. Verifying that their maintenance would work starting with choreography and getting more refined as time went forward. That was oh really led by lockheed martin. Susan so do you want to give credit to some of the players, who are some of the most important people that the rest of the public should know about . Dr. Sullivan yeah, i think anyone who works close on hubble would tell you that the primary name is Ron Sheffield. He was in a second career. He finished his illustrious 30year army career, was hired by lockheed and plunked on to the Hubble Program on day one. He and a small team stayed with hubble and the repair missions to the final repair mission. They are the unifying thread. They were the continuity. They were the memory. They had all the detailed data of every tool and every fastener and everything. Once hubble got into orbit the nasa responsibility for planning and Services Missions shifted to the Goddard Space Flight Center in maryland and a key figure there was a guy named frank cepollina, widely nicknamed the father of satellite servicing. And i know and adore and respect him tremendously but i could argue that sheffield was more the father of satellite servicing, because he designed and built it all. So ron, certainly his two lieutenants were peter leon and brian woodford, and we had a couple of spectacular tool designers in houston. Michael and robert and the folks that would talk with us on console, our engineering interface for space walks, but all of those people i named after Ron Sheffield they would all say, no, no, sheffield deserves the credit. Susan does someone know the exact number or close to the number of people that were involved completely on the hubble project and how much the entire thing cost . What are the estimates for this effort . Dr. Sullivan the cost estimates was in the 3 billion to 4 billion range. To build or the whole project . Dr. Sullivan just to build, launch and what was each Servicing Mission over the ensuing years, 2009, i dont know those numbers. Very safe estimate for the number of people is thousands. Susan but you would argue the American Public got their moneys worth . Dr. Sullivan i absolutely i think mankind got their moneys worth and the American Public more than got their moneys worth. The inspiration, everywhere you go in schools, hubble images are everywhere. We all have the stars over our head and the moon over our head. Were all fascinated by it in different ways and to have this super crazy clear magical Looking Glass to show us more of what they are really like, it just seems to entrance everybody. Susan your book also gives a real sense of the engineering and the science involved in this one. One story that immediately pops to mind thinking about reading it, was the clean room and the enormity of the clean room. Can you talk about the importance of not even particle of dust going into the room. Dr. Sullivan that was really crazy. Lockheed was, at that time, building lots of satellites for the Defense Department and intelligence world and i think this big facility was probably built for them. But it was perfect for hubble. Hubbles mirror, the technical term is hubbles mirror was supposed to be refraction limited, which means it will operate right at the limit of the optics and the physics given its size and even a tiny bit of dust would start lowering the amount of signal. It wanted to look at very distant, very dim stars so you dont want any little bit of film at all on this gigantic mirror so this room that it was assembled in, the sidewall of the room was a Basketball Court ends and the whole wall was an array of huge large fans that pulled air from the outside and pushed the air through high precision, better than hospital filters, better than operating room filters. They pushed it through with enough velocity that if any little bit of dust got past the filters it would stay suspended the whole 120 foot length of the building before it could possibly fall. You would happily have cooked your meals on the floor. Everything came into the building downstream of hubble. So if were going to come in and