Transcripts For CSPAN2 Kathryn Sullivan Handprints On Hubble 20240713

Welcome to all of our regulars, for anyone who is a first timer, this is an event series. We bring signs of all disciplines out of the labs and onto the public stages. The tries of new york city and people like you and me and come and be informed, energized and y engaged by scientific ideas and discoveries and interact directly alsoed with some of the scientists. Our regular hangout means they are in brooklyn but north, were back here tonight in manhattan as partners are with miniseries here. We would like to thank all the people at symphony space, the staff particularly kathy, johanna thompson, rebecca white, mary, james lasko and zack and wiki for helping us expand our universe. And yours also. Ty [applause] [cheering and applauding] a very big special thank you, we have the barr to the back and left if you havent visited yet. Theyve concocted our cocktail disorder, however you say it, its called atlantis, fabulous blue growing drink. Ed its named for the Space Shuttle in which our speaker was a crewmember. Its very tasty. We highly recommend it. To expand your universe for the. Also thanks to cspan was covering us here tonight, we went to give a shout out to them. If you like to find out more about secret science club and Upcoming Events in brooklyn or anywhere in the universe, sometimes up there, please visit our charmingly retro website, people secret science club. Com from sign up for mailing list and we love having members. You are a member despite being here. You can sign up and you will know about all of it. Onto the evenings event. Tonight, we are thrilled to present astronaut, scientist and author, catherine sullivan. Nasa astronaut, catherine spent over 500 hours in space. Before that, she trained as a scientist, receiving a phd in angeology and she went from studying the ocean floor onto nasa and became the First American woman to walk in space. Shes a pattern of three Nasa Space Missions and she was on the crew of thehr discovery shuttle thought watched the amazing Hubble Space Telescope which had radically revolutionized our views of the universe. She does not stop when she left the Astronaut Corps. Afterwards, kathryn served as the atmospheric demonstration, overseeing network of satellites shift in airplanes that looked back at earth, monitoring the health of our atmosphere and now, after 2017, she has written a book. Called handprints on hubble, astronaut story of adventure and thats the subject of her talk tonight. The lovely folks at books on call nyc booksellers tonight. Kathryn will be signing copies after her talk and after the q a. We will have, she will come and talk, talk you and i with you, our wonderful audience. Then we will have the book signing. Av please welcome doctor kathryn sullivan. [applause] april 24, 1990 congress where we had been 14 days earlier, suited up, strapped in and ready to go with the countdown clock stopped at d 31 seconds. Again. This time from the Launch Control Center Computers all the countdown because an indication that a valve on one of the pipes used to fill the fuel tanks had failed to close. The indicator was correct, that only one valve was left to prevent the fuel in the tank from leaking over instead of into the bay shuttles three main engines. If that happened, we could end up with the Hubble Telescope, a port landing site on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean or splashed into the ocean it would be scrubbed if the indicator was wrong however, think about the tire pressure system on your car. The system was fine and it was no reason to scratch. So which was it . Serious problem or faulty indicator . Go for loss or scrub . This launch team controller responsible for the shuttles three and compression system. Someone i still felt only by his call sign is mps. Time was not on this guys side. The shuttle bus set a strict limit on how much longer we could hold. R just 12 minutes more. The carpet, we listen intently as the Launch Controller worked out the problem. Whats your status . They talked probably to the data on his display. The temperature and pressure readings in the lines surrounding the valve were not consistent with it being open. From physics, they said it was closed, he proposed to send a manual command, hoping it would read correctly. That way. The control Center Computer still had a lock on the countdown clock. What is your car . The lunch director crushed. Im prepared to manually override the software and proceed, he replied. The best soldier and it, he told the others to get ready to reason for content. Heum advised the nasa technical director of the launch team was a call. The call we had been waiting for came a split second later. All controllers, the countdown will resume on my mark. Three, two, one. K mark. The entire episode had taken less than three minutes. Thirtyone seconds later, discoveries roared off the launch pad. The moment in which my Hubble Telescope adventures launched into the phase matters but the early stages of the story go back several years before that. In fact, they start here in 19 1978, february 1978, nasa introduced to the world their newest class of astronauts chosen specifically to fly aboard the Space Shuttle, brain no space truck and research vessel, the group of 35 people quickly became known as the tf energies 35 new guys, but coming from military, he would know theres another phrase with the f doesnt stand for five but for something else. That was a double entendre on the military base. The other interesting thing about our group is, we had strange people amongst us, 25 military test pilot, every other group of nasa astronaut had had. We also had six women, you see physics of us here in three africanamerican men and one asianamerican man. By the end of our first day, right after we had been introduced to the public, it became clear to all of us that the simple way to describe our group was ten interesting people and 25 standard white guys. [laughter] the white guys were out of the building and off to the gym or the beach or whatever they wanted to do, about half an hour after the introduction ceremony ended and the six of us and for other strange people were besieged and barraged with interviews all the way through east coast news hour and beyond. It was a kind of life that none of us had ever expected, two of us in this picture here on the middle left and the far right, we had only kind of just turned 26 chemical history out of graduate school, we just finished our phds, interview was our first ever nearest Job Interview and astronaut was our first ever fulltime job. If they think about it, its beyond crazy. [cheering and applauding] so what happens when you are a baby astronaut . What happens when youre a baby astronaut, electrical and start learning more things. We spent about a year going through highly compressed graduate school astronaut, think of any aspect science or engineering,ss physiology, space physics, system design, anything that might faintly touch on spaceflight, we got a crash course in from the nations best experts about equivalent to the first year of graduate school work. When i was done, we were entitled to with the insignia of the Astronaut Corps, he hadnt flown cap but still, and we started getting plugged into supporters roles should be helping others come in to being helping the preparations, the planning or operation of Shuttle Missions that would happen before our turn in line came along. Be a little bit like siding your career at a company in the mailroom and learning by rotating around from one part of the company to another from learning all the bits and pieces of how the enterprise works. We did that for a number of years before we started getting slotted in. For me, my first Flight Opportunity came about october 1984. My colleague and classmate earned the distinction of being the First American woman to fly in space the year before. Late 83, they announced a new patient with a fancy acronym, i wont bother you with, it meant cooler science thing, thats all you need to know. And i think that she would make her second spaceflight, Kathy Sullivan would be aboard her first spaceflight in a spacewalk. I got to tell you, there is a delightful wave of excitement and congratulations that swept across the space center. Holly came up to us and said this is soquel, you will be the first woman to ever fly twice. To me, youll be the first woman to ever do a spacewalk. So we looked at each other inside these people have not been paying attention to history. Our flight was announced late 83 for october 84 lunch date and we had been paying attention to the soviet Space Program, we knew 10 pounds was plenty of time the soviet program to put on another mission and let her do a spacewalk. If you ask Kathy Sullivan, they owe us the second flight and her spacewalk. So what you think is happening here . This is on the launchpad october 5, 1984, we are getting ready to board the Space Shuttle challenger are fancier Science Missions that i told you about and guess whats happening here. Let me tell you whats really happening here. The seating arrangement in the cabin dictated that sally and i would board the shuttle last. We waited our turn in the Small Chamber just outside the hatch known as the white room. Ra were keenly aware of the cameras above our heads meant our every move was being monitored by the Launch Control center and perhaps podcast on National Television as well. For a few minutes of idle chitchat, we decided we probably ought to be do something more important than just waiting around. [laughter] watches are always synchronized before big missions in the movies. [laughter] we decided to pretend they were synchronized. [laughter] halfway, there were no microphones in the rooms, hear us saying what youre think the news anchors are saying about us right now . I dont know, do you think we stretched it out enough . Im delighted to say when we landed, this photo featured prominently in all of the articles and they synchronized, stupid astronaut joke number one. Thats a great eightday mission, we stuck outside on the second to last. Day for several hours on the shuttles payroll to do a simple engineer demonstration to prove specialized tools would allow nasa to refuel satellites on orbit. It still to this day, has never been done. Extension for valuable satellites in orbit. It landed in this like skits for next thing that happens when you fly in space, you go through several weeks of being the center off the universe. Your primee through, next in line, everything need is at your disposal soon as you need it. If i summer and youve got it. You need to see the doctor, got it. You need another are in the simulator . Got it. Cut in line in front of everybody else forever resources needed to get you ready for flight. Then you have a magical crazy indescribable eightday experience that the thing you dont know is a moment your Space Shuttle clears the lunch power on your way out into over leaving the earth, the first four seconds of your mission, theres this other one in houston that stands up and says flight crew, we are not first in the line. You land your nobody. Not the back of lung. Of people waiting to get back in the cycle and fly again. Its really disappointing and lonely wandering around with a deer in headlights look trying to remind yourself did stuff, you can see yourself in the photograph. Youre trying to remember you did it. I wasfmb fortunate that it did t last too long for me after my first flight. By early next year, my boss helped me into his office and said i was going to fly a mission coming up soon with this here. The Hubble Space Telescope. What he said to me . , you know the big large space telescope that manifests, ive seen that. Its supposed to be maintainable spaceflight astronaut. It last 15 years. But that wasnt any of the equipment, the tools and equipment that it will take to do that. So you get in the middle of all that now is make sure by the time you take it into orbit, we have all the stuff we need to fulfillo that promise of maintaining in space at 500 miles an hour for 15 years. So for time i was assigned to that, this is all i had ever seen, is an artist concept of around 1982 or three vintage telescope have not yet even been named, coastal called just the space telescope. See the shuttle with it off, that was all we knew about it for a while. I was also working on a president ial commission, assessing the future of the United States Space Program. To sort of capture the vision the past and prospect of the future and that report, our boss, tom payne went back to an illustration had made many years earlier, this illustration appeared in a magazine in 1952 and i encountered it middle 1985 at the age of 33. I looked at it and i read the paragraph into the article from this is described as a space station, People Living there, tourists visiting there, scientists working there, its a jumping off. For destinations beyond this the craft that takes people back and forth to the station, it specialized in tailored for just that 200 miles back and forth. Its the hardest step off our planet, cap first 200mile step. This is a purpose built vehicle that will just do that and do it repeatedly. Its described as a telescope is put into orbit above the atmosphere, starts never bothered by clouds or by turbulence. That guy there is obviously an astronaut fixing it, upgrading it. He sketch this out and made this illustration in the year ion was born. In my early 30s, i looked at this picture and it turned out to be right had a different shape of link but there is one it is a shuttle it does what his vision was when it was created. Putting this into orbit, it doesnt look like that. The details came out different. The idea is, the visual thought back to the mid 40s and 1950s to a time when engineers almost didnt yet have the skills to do it has become a reality and im going to take it to orbit in a year or two. The space station also not ending up looking like clark and the space station, looks like a tinker tour or curtis but that was on the drawing boards in the engineering room returning from sketch into reality and the four room house larger than a football field space station over our heads right now. It had People Living on it continually since almost 20 years. I was stunned by this picture and how rapidly, how long it takes to make the engineering matchup with division. Also how to vivid and powerful the vision was the year i was born when i have no inkling, nor did my parents of where my life would go. Since hubble started and came from and as i did the research for this book, the timelines between my life and hubbles started to jump out at me. It almost became like we were born at essentially the same time. By five years, my older brother and the different doctors in high school and college or grad school first time was mind when hubble began to win a Political Support and Financial Support that it took the next week and began to become reality. 1978, when nasa went toan the ce and set you on the road to space, that was the Year Congress finally supported a budget that hubble was built and put hubble on the road to space as well. Not many months after being assigned to that mission and sink the illustration, i found myself in california meeting the real telescope, there is on the left. Its being taken up to package up and ship down to florida for its lunch. These are human beings down he here, these Little Things you can see, the size of school bus roughly, about 15 feet diameter. Something that fits very snugly into the Space Shuttle. If you want to hubble it was bolted and you try to put your fist between the telescope and the side of the shuttle from theres not a whole lot more room, thats how tightly squeezed it was. One of thehe remark all things o me about hubble as i dug into the history, he hinted at in the sketch on the right, exploded diagram that shows you all of the equipment, all the little doors are open that gives you access to the scientific instruments, big boxes on the bottom and the operating electronics that say here in the middle, all the stuff that makes hubble work, it wraps around in front the data that processes the observations from the science instruments, care must and spectrometers. The architecture public was given back in the late 60s an early 70s in the infancy of the space age, hubbles engineers had the foresight drawn largely from the experience onn cars, think about how to make architecture that would let astronaut work on it at 17500 miles an hour. Does that mean . Imagine putting on to snowmobile suit, putting a bucket on your head, hefty gloves intermittent and change plugs in your car. If you put a twist on, it will flow away from you. Its an incredibly different working environment to do things like picking up flying screws so you have to think about how do i make a ranch that someone with big klutzy hands can hold onto. This is not found on home depot. A few things i found that you can modify, you can get a ratchet wrench on aisle four and have a handle that a space suit left can hold in a big mushroom at the pivot. So you dont have to make a fine gift, you cant close your hand this type. A lot of other stuff doesnt exist in the universe and needed to be invented. The choreography getting all this repair work done also had to be invented. That worked out largely underwater, he teeth two different water tanksr here and stimulation sessions, this water tank is not deep enough to let the telescope stand altogether so we would break the model and have the back and over here as if it was mounted in the shuttle and the front and off to the side. Thats me on the last month thats me again movingon aroundn mockup. West model, one of the scientific estimates. For this choreographing of the space walk, walk thisra box to e exact, the right set, the right dimension in shape and size. You dont want to have to move a real fox through the water. Think about how hard it is to pull your hand through the water. If you look closely, you can see through this box. Theres a screen mesh, gives you a sense of the shape, remind you that think this around. Can i hold it . Or have a place to grab . Can i see erotic . Draining a partner helping me where its at . When i precisely insert took spot, the choreography took dozens and dozens of lung tests like this with bruce and me and a dozen other astronaut to be sure that more than just the two of us had good familiarity with the telescope we had good strength on working on hubble and another discovery i made working on the book, i thought because of what my boss said to me, i thought it was always the plan that anything that needs to be repaired on hubble was done by spacewalking astronauts. I learned as i was researching this book that was not true. The original idea was these big boxes, the big scientific instruments and batteries, a short list of things that you knew you wanted to keep in technology are you knew would fail earlier, thats short list of things designed for spacewalking astronauts to work on. All the other electronics were never done with that might evolve. The first idea was, well bring it back to earth every fivee years or so. Well design these jobs to be sort of easy, that is only doable in a spacesuit. The other stuff, the really hard stuff well just bring it home. Will let folks in short sleeves and maintenance area. That idea did not die until late 1984. When it died, the engineers took a whole list of other electronics boxes and realized that can fail, too. We have to find a way to modify that stuff. Telescope built, exist, you cant take apart and redo this somehow, we have to make those pieces maintainable in space as well. So that was another wave of innovation. First thing you have to deal with if you go prepare something in orbit, how i hold my seek stuff . Its easy here, have gravity, i can move this podium, the gravity reading friction between my feet and the stage. You dont have to in outer space. You need one of these. A foot restraint, slip your toes through here, slip your here heal through here, if you touch your toque to this pedal, you can get back, you can touch thid pivot left right and all these places here, you can tweak this thing around so it can be just where you need to be to do some work. This did not exist when we started on hubble. We had to create it through choreography into the water tank and engineers figured out, what happens inside this gizmo here that makes it possible for this pedal to tilt with foot restraint . It worked but lately, it still in use on the space station but we had a particular problem for the fight we were going to do in 1990. This think when olcott said and done came in at 35 pounds, it is junk. Its almost 3 feet from over here on the telescope out here. Whats the problem with that . If we had to go outside its fixed it on the mission, we sometimes use like a cherry picker to use an astronaut, it would be busy just holding the telescope above our heads. We were going to have to move hand over hand, like moving across a jungle gym, would have to move hand over hand and somehow drag it along with us. Every time i move my body, the 30 found the 35pound drifts around and bangs into the ttelescope. Its thinner than a beer can. 35 pounds of it banging around like that is a sure way to end your career by destroying the telescope. We need tether, we have to attach it to ourselves, we have to get it behind me because i need office space here to use my hands to maneuver but i need a tether thats stiff, kind of rigid but i can also make it bendable so i can get off we created a gadget called the semi rigid tether, anybody work with those on keep tripods for your camera or your go broke that you can bend around and that principal but larger . We created one to use with this foot restraint. Like the foot restraint, it is still in use. The seniorll senior from the opn moflock like jessica did a coupe weeks ago, i will draw your attention here, this year, she had to transport repair and also needed it to stay out of her way. Its that same tether being used on the International Space station today. The boxes that sudden we realize we have to work on, they were a problem in their own life, you can see the electrical connectors, no one put those on the box thinking they would ever have to get after them. They were imagining nimble fingers from a ground technician so this is an odd set of players withdraws like oak this way and reach down around these connectors and undo them without damaging the cable for the box they are attached to it. Your qc me this is bruce with one of our british engineers, this is that crazy modified budget rent we had to create, we are testing it on the telescope on the solar array and this is the solar array jammed on the day we were deploying hubble but i almost ended up, i was in my spacesuit, was bummed out and i was going to have to go out and crank it open but sadly an engineer on the ground figured out a way to solve it without it. I was conflicted. I thought i was ready for this and you know you know your stuff but suddenly, the life of the hubble scope is in your hands before it even starts. No pressure. On the other hand, it is a spacewalk so youre pretty much the worlds attention. So we come finally to where hubble is in the bank, we are all trained up, weve created a toolkit, weve taken every single tool, every single one of the tools weve taken to hubble, proven by checking this one that it works in all the settings and it needs to work on, theres no way they will get the repair mission and have to call home and say it doesnt fit. Thats never going to happen. We have that now. Go down for our countdown dress rehearsal. It happens about three weeks before liftoff. We created to signify our mission and our tradition is that you get a batch nicely done and full color made with the crew emblem and they go around and visit all the engineers who spent months getting the Space Shuttle and its cargo ready for the next flight. You take pockets full of these with you and you think the folks for working just as long as you have, they been working with just the same skill and professionalism have you spent bringing to the work. They dont get the white suit, they dont get the ride, they dont get the few, they dont get any of the core things of being an astronaut but they are doing just as much of a job in just a m much commitment. We got the better part of 1000 lovely pins to give to guys and someone had the good idea of putting a little extra barr down here for the launch team so they could wear it with pride and the crew gave this, it was just one small problem. [laughter] these are the most positive coveted collector item at the space center. En they attempted a recall, you guys get those back. Not a chance. [laughter] how do you do spellcheck . And its just a long word. Autocorrect fails again. Here we are april 241990, this is april 24. April 24, we watched. We lifted them up,of held it ovr our heads, the team on the ground committed these antennas to unfold and solar rays control, this is the one i almost had to crank out. Look at this cap right here. Let me remind youwh whats happening. All the stuff down here in this short stroke, that is a 200,000pound multibilliondollar craft called a Space Shuttle. Its currently doing 17500 miles an hour. This thing here is a 55000pound multibilliondollar telescope. Its doing 17500 miles an hour. So if you have to multibilliondollar spacecraft flying 10 inches apart in very close formation. A moment after this was taken from lauren shriver, our commander fired the engine from the shuttle in fact the Space Shuttle away from the telescope medical off to its remarkable mission. They only worked five years on the telescope to this day, he would imagine we are up here teasing gazing out and taking pictures. No. Ing uber inside right behind that round circle here. We were in the airlock, in our suit, pressurized, we dont have of the air out so we cant go out or in without a whole next series of steps. We were trapped in the airlock hubbles batteries are training. It quickly became more important to get off on its own and get the solar rays charging the battery and to get kathy and bruce out so they could watch the deployment. We understood that but five years, dont get to watch this . So what happened next . High hopes for spectacular hubble came crashing to earth a few weeks later when the world learned multibilliondollar space telescope had just put into orbit had blurry vision. Charlie and steve spent many long weeks bring might have caused this by bumping the telescope out. It must have been the only two people on earth who were relieved to learn hubbles 94inch diameter was the wrong shape. It was to flat at the perimeter by. 0001inch. Which is about one 50th, 50, the diameter of a human hair or one 40th the thickness of a typical hardcover book page. This was unbelievable news. Error, a tidal wave of shock and english looked over the science community. Congress and media erupted in our it was a trend in the october popular sites. The pain was written on their faces who broke the news to the telescope quickly became the newest metaphor for incompetence and technological humor. Ridiculed by virtually every latenight talkshow and on the silver screen. They went into the mix takes what caused the lost of challenger and cost the long since lost its way. Congress followed hot on the heels of the comedians, public hearings at which they grow here mercilessly. As you all know, is because part of the hubble story thats more familiar, the hubble team hold itself together and discovered one really helpful fact had a clever idea. The helpful fact was you did screw up what you screwed up precisely. That meant just like your eye doctor can precisely calculate what optical formula will make your eyes see more clearly, it was possible to get it precisely what adjustment would be restoring the hubble. The clever idea was, now i know what objects i need but how i get them into the light path of the telescope thats arty in orbit . 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 s and hubble, we search the galaxy with hubble, its all of the upgrades, the instruments that had been made with thefive Service Lights , the grant from 2009, it will be hundreds of times better because new detectors, new optics were put into place each time a shuttle crew went back and serviced ac hubble and thats what hubble is able to bring us images like this. This is what you get if you point a hubble in a very fine focus mode and a patch of the sky that based on ground telescopes you were positive was empty. And then stare at it for a while and all these dots of light, that one might be a star but all the other dots you u see here, every one of them is agalaxy. Like our galaxy, hundreds and hundreds of galaxies in a small quadrant of the sky as we look at it with a telescope we would say its blank, its empty and of course exquisite structural detail of spiral galaxies, galaxies rolling together, black holes revealed in a way we never seen them before are really a revolution inhow we understand our universe. And hubble has done another thing thats pretty remarkable. Thanks to its coming of age and going into service, just as the internet era and personal computer era really blossomed, hubble has entered our consciousness, our pop culture, popular imagination in a way that no scientific instrument i think ever has done. From cats to socks to cell phone covers two lunchboxes to tshirts to hats, uhaul trucks, its remarkable how far this has spread in part because we know each can propagate it further anytime we are intrigued with an image or we can make a scan. Please dont do more tattoos but put it right there on your arm. It is the first and only scientific spacecraft that s has evil and improved in orbit through the course of its lifetime and that has entered the popular imagination globally i would add not just in the United States. Its quite extraordinary in that way as well and then scientifically and has radically transformed our understanding of the universe that we live in. So back to that crew that went up in 1993 and installed the unit that fixed hubble. The first of many honors that the Service Mission teamwould receive was awarded in the middle of the night on december 13, 1993. And never touched down on the Kennedy Space Center Runway before 2 30 a. M. Eastern standard time. About an hour later the seven astronauts crew was disembarking, shuttle control in houston past responsibility for the spacecraft back to ground operations at kennedy. Flight controllers from each of the three roundtheclock shifts reported the mission, crowdedinto the main control room to witness the traditional ceremony that marked the end of the Successful Mission at johnson. Hanging the plaque, adding the emblem of the just completed flight to the array of missionplaques lining the wall to the control room is the highlight of this celebration. The flight director awards the honor of climbing the ladder to do this to the team whose work was most essential to the missions success. Theres also some sis suspicion around who would get that honor but there wasnt any that morning. Everybody knew it belonged to the eva team. Important eva johnson would climb the ladder alone that evening but he would be climbing for everyone on the Satellite Service team at goddard, for Ron Sheffield crew from lockheed as well as the largesupporting cast of designers , suit technicians, machinists andmaintainability engineers whose work reached back 20 years. Ill close with this image. This is an actual picturefrom the final Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission. This is from one of the footrestraint sockets and these are scuff marks, these are handprints. These are places where some of the state outside with ewtheir glove, to the outside of telescope and just enough that this bombardment of article in outer space made it whether a little differently and the otherwise shiny silver skin so there are no handprints on hubble in orbit. But the Ron Sheffields, those machinists, those maintainability engineers that i referred to in that last excerpt, that handprints on hubble two, metaphorical rather than physical in every y way the same kind of vital contribution to the success in the life of hubble that my spacewalkingcolleagues made between 1993 and 2009. And now id be happy to take your questions. [applause] and i think weve got someone out there running around with a microphone. There you go. How about a hand for karen sullivan, bighand. Handprints on hubble. Were going to do a q and a right now and unfortunately we have some technological problems. We have one microphone for rtthat, we could have used some engineering expertise to get this fixed so we will be manning both sides so whenyou ask your question justgive the microphone back to us so we can scurry around to the other side because we want to cover everybody. There we go. And young folks first. How was the air on the Hubble Telescope made . Hubble does not have any air. Its basically an open cylinder. Oh error, mistake. I misheard you. There were two ways to measure the shape of the mirror while you were forming it and check if you were getting it right. In a nutshell, one was an oldfashioned way and one was a new way. The new slick way was they should be bouncing a laser beam off of it and measuring the time difference between sending out the laser beam and getting it back and the oldfashioned way was it was more of a physical device so there late, they are behind schedule, their overbudget. Everyone is annoyed with the guys making the mirror. They thinktheyre done and they measureit with both gadgets and the old gadget says you are wrong. Buy a little bit but you are wrong. The new gadget says its right. Now if youre a good engineer what you do at that point is you disassemble both instruments and give them to entirely Different Group of people and you make everything get done independently so they ought to agree but if youre over budget and behind schedule and people are mad at you, there is a temp tatian to talk yourself into the answer you like so they essentially talked themselves into the newfangled answer and the reason the new gadget gave them the wrong information is it was misassembled. There was a place where a washer should have been inserted and it was inserted in a different place so the measurement was off and as they deconstructed this after the fact they found out where and figured it all out so it was byexactly that bit that the mirror was wrong. We didnt want it back because we thought it was funny and the people we gave it to, the engineers who had been working on it on our behalf, everyone loves a good joke so they thought it was cool. Only people that wanted it. Back where the administrative people who were responsible for ordering it dated check it carefully enough so they were embarrassed. The guys who were embarrassed because they felt like it was their mistake, it wasnt really their mistake but they were embarrassed and they wanted them all gone but both of us getting them out, we thought it was fun. None of them wanted to get it back. Are we going to get an adult in here . Ask them if you were ever nervous or scared and how you dealt with that . I think every astronaut says a certain prayer career which is dont let me screwup and this is a very individual thing. Some people have much more anxiety and fear before they launch whatever my wiring is, i grew up around airplanes. I know in airplane crashes, your writing bombs for a living and youve got to be career minded but if the purpose and the benefits to science of humanity in whatever way you equate that is worth it and if you have basic confidence in the good intentions and competency of the team youre working with because you cant be everywhere. Youcant be personally checking everything. To me that past the bother to worse test and if youre on the crew youve got to be all in. Youre the people that have to do it, youve got to execute and do things that dont go the right way, someoneslinking off in the corner because they got scared, weneed all the brains and hands weve got. Back here. Did you ever get scared that you would mess up and everybody would be mad atyou . You have a lot of responsibility in your hands when youre an astronaut. Nasa and the United States ol has invested billions of dollars in the telescope and give it to us and say carry it up there please and dont bang it against this the side of the orbiter and you have to do a spacewalk please dont kick a hole in it so you practice a lot, you study ic a lot and you train a lot and you also count on each other so no one on the shuttle crew ever did something completely alone. If i was doing steps of the e spacewalk or a checklist, one of microwave mates would be right there. Reading the checklist with me or watching as i get it and if they saw me about to do something incorrectly or if i made a suggestion to try this and it was not the best suggestion we could come up with they would step in and we would Work Together to make it work but i think we all took thatresponsibility really very seriously and like i said , you will hear almost any astronaut will tell you more than once in n their life and sometimes more than once on a flight you said yourself please dont let me screw this up. We have a question on your left. Hello. I saw your Wikipedia Page and it says your ranking was captain at nasa. Ill refer to you as captain sullivan. I did not have that rank at nasa but i did have that rank in the navy. Bu so captain sullivan, what was one of your favorite moments while traveling to the low earth orbit using the spaceship . My favorite moment was every moment between when it started and when it ended. Thank you for sharing your stories tonight. Im interested in your vision of where we should go in space now, the future of space flight. My answer is mars and my rationale is through a parallel argument to what apollo did for technology and for the country. You set a goal big, very bold goal deliberately beyond what you know you can do at the moment and then dont blink. Actually pursue it but bigger and if i look at apollo i see a cascade of benefits. The range of problems that had to be solved from human health and physiology to lifesupport systems, how do you monitor human health from 250,000 miles away area computers, a lot of people dont appreciate apollo, the Apollo Program marks the changeover from the era when people bragged about how big their computers were too when they began to brag about how small they were so it was the cost of digital circuitry and apollo was the first really demanding driver of reliability and computational power in a small lightweight package. You could have evolved computers in a room is big and it would be different so apollo triggered that first wave in microelectronicsm. It was nasas need delivered out to private industry and private industries innovative response to it but that synergy was really huge so i believe if we said no to mars and if we meant itand stuck with it , the range of problems we would have to solve and the task cascade of benefits that would throw back to life on earth, all of our lives would behugely rich. I was wondering how your body felt when you initially came back to earth and what thatl recovery was like and how lilong. Flights were five, eight and 10 days which was not all that long. Youre aware of the differences. You sort of feel like your body is made of wet sand. You dont think about the weight of your arm until you havent felt it for 10 days and you fall down a sleep on your bed and look at your arm inking why is that so hard to move. And you forget, there are a lot of adaptations you make ra when youre living in zero gravity. Your vocabulary changes, you dont say please pass me the camera, you quickly start to say please send me the camera and it floats across the t room. You have to remembernot to do that anymore when you get back. Im going to ask a question that Prince Philip was trying to ask, i dont know if anybodys gotten to that episode yet. Youre up there, maybe i dont know for the first time , did you have a moment where you sort of reflected on our own humanity and the second part of that is you think theres life out there . I think its inconceivable that theres not life elsewhere in the universe. Its not likely to have a bmw and a business card, is more likely to be bacterial or virus but we understand how rudimentary the ingredients of life can be and the crazy range of exotic and harsh environments, in existence that we wouldnt have thought we discovered life on this planet in an environment that would never havebelieved toast life when i was in college on this planet in the deepsea. I dont think you can have this experience without having some expansion and shift in your frame of reference you see your home planet, you can see your hometown and you see places you come from you never seen in the context before and at the same time you are in this place that feels very much normal to you. Its this odd schizophrenia to be floating over the earth looking down at seas lit up at night and the bright sun still shining on the spacecraft and realizing somewhere, someone might be looking up saying there goes a satellite and theyre pointing at me. And yet we know how to get there and we know how to do this and it felt completely at home to be in a craft like that at far above the earth so i think it does make everybody think a little differently about our place on earth. You hear the optimistic statements of no borders, all one planet, thats true but there are also many places where you can see the hand of man and you can see places where weve drawn lines between each other , you can see the boundaries from space. You can see canada us so it came through to me that when human beings decideto direct their intention and energy towards making divisions we can make divisions that are visible from space. The planetdoesnt have those but we managed to do them. Is there another one here . Kind of on that note as one of the first women in space and as an astronaut did you feel any of this sexism just even with the size of the suits that you war or the height of the tables. Ive seen a lot about that recently in social media so i wantedto ask you about that. A comment on the spacesuits. It is not the case nasa made male spacesuits and expected we would wear the mail spacesuits. For the shuttle era they intended to make a spacesuit that would fit any human being from 5th percentile size to 95th. Its a good concept and it was going to be mister potato head, assembled by the pieces kind of approach but the problem was you need to make finer size divisions, have enough versatility to sit at different size people well. And you need to have enough inventory to cover a range of sizes so it was a well intended agnostic design that failed in implementation and the failure mode, preferentially affects small people which happens tobe predominantly disproportionately the women in the Astronaut Corps some of his basic physics. We remember from middle school we have a longer prybar, its easier to lift something up in a shorter one and youre working in a spacesuit it takes extra effort to move every limb on your body. More effort than moving your limb and the longer your limit is, the lower proportion of that energy is taxing your muscles. The shorter when its more muscle exertion to do that so there are ways to all those physics, i would fall nasa for anything it would be under supporting the first and spending 40 years before they moved to a second suit. I think all six of us would say we got a really remarkably good lane when we walked into nasa. We didnt walk in as buck privates, we walked in with the status and standing of astronauts and ive never seen an astronaut that look like me but they had always treated astronauts, that was a title, a standing that was accorded a certain kind of respect and treatment and we got that very much in the first round and you have to earn your ownstripes. Show your own track record but i cant think of anyone that through all those at us weretrying to assert that we belong there. We have a question than in the. I know one of the bigger threat during space travel is fired. What kind of firefighting and training andprotection did you guys . Pretty thorough firefighting training. There are models in the freon system to suppress fire on the station and the shuttleas you would imagine. Mainly use all the fire rest stop by careful Material Selection and preparation to design the spacecraft. And no open flame and a lot of things like that so youre vulnerable to a shortcircuit or it has happened on mere the soviet system is an oxygen generator was basically a combustion system to produce the oxygen for breathing and one of those went wild and started the fire on mere. We have another one downon your left. Im really curious about your transition to an underwater explorer. Im just wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about what it was like to go from exploring to exploring underwater. Its kind of a full circle story for me because i did my undergraduate work as a marine biologist. If i had not been selected by nasa i had in my hand a fellowship in both diving and the submersibles exploring the e mid ocean ridges of the Atlantic Ocean and later my nasa career as i was leaving nola in 1996 i had a couple of opportunities to die in the summer civil for the ocean ridge so i started as my railroads are a fascination with the planet and how it works and a desire to explore every facet of that i can. My real motivation, deepest personal motivation is filling out the apps do not application was that it by some miracle i beat the odds and selected i would get to see the earth with my own eyes so it was a natural completion of the circle after my several flights to come back down to earth and try and figure what was, the point in space is about powerful understand this planet and produce information that can help us make better decisions about how we live on this planet and what attracted me and i like about noah is that exactly know is, to keep the pulse of the planet, measure and monitor the things and help us make those decisions and broker, package, transmit the information to us as a Weather Forecast or two heads of state orfisherman. And there are a number in front here, probably feeling neglected. You mentioned briefly about the design of the telescope and there was only room for a fit between the shuttle, where a causeandeffect or a correlation to the design of the shuttle telescope or did they just managed to make telescope . There was a call correlation an evolution between the design of the telescope and shuttle and in various ways , i would say the 66 to 68 or 69 timeframe, essentially a codependency. But also can be as big as this because there will be a shovel and it would be very expensive but we can promise it willlive a long time and we will promise it can keep up with technology. Prior to hubble there was space Astronomy Missions but the ateam was an instrument on a satellite closer to the size of that podium and that team would do that observation and you would be in line for the next one and the next one. This idea was we were going to make one big telescope like you would put a telescope on a mountaintop and multiple teams would be able to use it. Because we would be able to get back to it now that your instrument on and we came up with a better more powerful detector or computer, ill add that so you would be able to get a long life out of it and it wont be stuck in a technological rot. We can keep advancing so the ade telescope thats out there now is probably about 1000 times better telescope than the one that we put intoorbit in 1990. The only things that are the same are the outer silver skin, the grid work that holds the 2 mirrors and the 2 mirrors and essentially Everything Else we put up in 1990 has been taken out and replaced with a more reliable or higher power or higher resolution components so it got better with age. Wildly better with age and that was part of how they argued its worth this big icinvestment because it will pay all these dividends and keep abreast of new scientific questions and new technology because were going to make it maintainable and because a shovel as the capacity to keep going back leand forth and doing that. I know you talked about how you went from first studying things on her like geology and college and then you moved to studying space and joining nasa and so on. Im currently a junior at high school and looking to study what im going to study in college and looking towards stem i was wondering if you could talk about how you made that transition from more Earth Science to space and how you ended up joining nasa. I think the short answer is by having more curiosity than common sensean. And when i was your age in high school i was actually studying languages and believed my path would be best set i learning a lot of languages and somehow that would turn winto a life where people bought the Airline Tickets to go explore all these places that i wanted to explore and i got to college and my college said its lovely that youre an arts and language major but youre going to take three science courses during her freshman year. I thought this was a terrible idea and i argued against it and i lost all arguments and two of the science classes i was forced to take introduced me to Earth Sciences and oceanography and more importantly to young, energetic, passionate paprofessors. I could see a lifestyle in them that was exactly that inquisitive adventurous lifestyle i had been hungry for and people were always buying them Airline Tickets to fly off to interesting places so i changed majors at the end of my freshman year. It certainly all of my calculus and physics backwards to what you should do so dont look to me for thecalculus. But some of it is just try. Try. Reach beyond what you think, have 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. Getknocked back sometimes and d stuff your knees and it sometimes will work. Take what lessons come from that and try again. We have one more in the back and we will work around tothe front again. We have some young ones down here. I want to have you speak about your transition from nasa to noah and just the politics of it all. L. If nasa is getting criticism and budgetary constraints, did you encounter hostility regarding budgets and ippolitical activity while you were at noaa . Nasa is a bipartisan treasure gem has a standing unlike i think any other civilian agency and it has occasionally taken a haircut in its budget or requested ask were not fully granted and its budget level is well below, vastly below the level it was in the apollo era but ithas pretty consistently grown. Noaa has long enjoyed a bipartisan support. Theres not a partisan way to measure the weather or tied but budget politics are more complicated than nasas because theres not one single law. There is a law in the United States called the space at passed in 1958 and lays out comprehensively what a nasa is, why it exists and what its supposed to do so it has ordered a unified, this is what you are about. Noaa came into existence in 1970 and when they started the environmental era it was about making people realize we need to get these bits and pieces, scientific bits and pieces scattered about , understanding your understanding between systems so you can have all theseguys over here doing oceans and the others doing atmosphere and someone over here. Its got to be connected and integrated and brought together as a system of nn systems so it had been around since the 1800s, looking at fisheries was one part of the Weather Bureau had been around since the 1800s, several other pieces so it came, its a growth, not a single or design and so its politics on capitol hill are more attuned to particular programs that different states or different members historically liked rather than a unified vision of what a noaa is supposed to do so youve got to be o more convincing to more people in a sense, to succeed at moving noaas budget forward. I have someone down in the front area. What was the hardest part to getting where you are today. The coolest part was i just completely get to continually 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 disappointed and maybe you feel embarrassed and maybe somebody is criticizing you for it didnt work out or keeping you for that and youve got kind of path for a moment and get yourself back to where youre willingto try again. I write in the book toabout my absolutely super biggest nest worst ever mistake. You can read about it inthe book. Going to take two more questions and catherine will be signing the book and you might want to ask for g questions to. [inaudible] of all the constellations that youve seen or hubble, which one is your favorite one . It seriously hard to pick a favorite star. Im really fond of the pleiades and this gentleman here, lets get two more. This gentleman as well. And im really fond of the catseye galaxy. I remember reading that report with your Committee Work about the Space Program and being really excited by it and really angry when nothing happened. What were your expectations when you were working on it and how did you and your colleagues respond when it ended up on a shelf . If youre ever on a president ial mission you know you will definitely be a doorstop and you might have an impact so its just the way of the world. The dodge for the scheme i would say that our leader tom paine said was instead of publishing it through the Government Printing office, we went and published it made it glossier, use the nd sculpting and the hope was going to put it directly, were going to make it possible to be in all of your hands because the way our system is supposed to work is you guys are talking to your members of congress and calling them. I know we have this problem and that problem but i still support and we do ask. And if you just leave any group of people through their ceiling at all their own juices, they will groupthink way into the couple of things that need to be done and they wont be mindful of broader, longerrange things in the benefit of the country. The problem with base goals is there very longrange so im a member of congress or a president i have to make a commitment now to put some on the end, this instead ofthat. And if i put here you might get a benefit tomorrow or in a week or a couple months and if i put here there will be a benefit thats a little hard to describe mike mainly benefit your kids or your grandkids and that is a hard thing for human nature to do both for politicians and voters. Thats a lot of pressure. I think we all love looking atstates. Weve looked at space from space, you talked about looking back to earth. Does that change your perspective when youre looking at the start from outside earths atmosphere mark. Are not measurably closer. You are reliably in a different place with respect to the earth and only when we look at the shuttle window it looks like when youre in an airliner and its supposed to be looking differently since were so much higher but because of this perspective across continents and mountains, thats radically different sense of the earth and youve ever had and if you try to look outward even something is close by as the moon itsjust not measurably closer. If you think of a school kid globe at about 12 inches diameter, a shovel flew half an inch above that so carl sagan writes about the pale blue dot. My experience, i did big blue, this big blue beach ball. Thats it for the questions so catherine sullivan, handprints on hubble. She will be signing copies of the book tand just so you know she will only be signing copies of the book, no memorabilia so dont bring your jar of 10 oranything up p there. Back to the left ear , if youre looking that way you can find someone who will direct you and also no selfie sleaze you can do candid photos. If you so much for coming and we hope you will join us again for secret science club. Tonight on book tv highlights from our indepth programs. We begin with and money perry, author of a number of books, among them the history of the blacknational anthem and brief. I followed by novelist jody pickle including her novel a spark of life and then journalist and Science Fiction novelist Cory Doctorow discusses his books and activism. After aday of social distancing , get close to a good book book tv on cspan2. Good afternoon everybody. Ethanks for coming, thanks for coming out