Sadness and Celebrations for the Hubble Space Telescope

Nancy Grace Roman in 2017. NASA Goddard Photo.

On prominent display in my office is one part of the Lego Women of NASA set showing astronomer Nancy Grace Roman and the Hubble Space Telescope. On Christmas Day, Roman passed away at age 93. The loss of the woman widely acclaimed as the Mother of HST marks the end of a remarkable month of celebration and sadness for the Hubble Telescope team, now well into its 29th year of operating the great space telescope.

Roman studied astronomy despite being strongly discouraged from doing so, and university astronomy departments actively discriminated against women when Roman completed her graduate work in the 1950s. She took a job at NASA in 1959 a few months after the space agency began operations as its first Chief of Astronomy. During her career at NASA, Roman played an important role in fostering space-based astronomy through small scale space telescopes starting with the Orbiting Solar Observatory and building up to the formal start of work on HST not long before her retirement in 1979. 

Much of her work on HST involved getting astronomers, engineers and contractors to work together, an often difficult task. Her early research work in astronomy showed great promise, but she sacrificed that for the administrative work that helped much great science get off the ground, literally and figuratively. 

Although I didn’t have the opportunity to interview Roman while working on my history book on HST operations (which I hope will soon move to the publication process), I did meet her at a NASA history conference a decade ago. In her recent interviews, Roman expressed her pleasure that there are now many women astronomers in senior positions at NASA and elsewhere, but added there is still much room for improvement.

Many of those women have been or are involved with the Hubble Telescope, and earlier in December, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which has responsibility for Hubble's scientific operations, announced that their most recent process for awarding research time on HST had succeeded in eliminating gender bias. With support from NASA, STScI has worked for several years to eliminate gender bias from the telescope time allocation process, but the measures from previous years had always fallen short. For the telescope time awarded in 2018, consultants helped ensure that the identities of proposing scientists were not raised in any way during the allocation process. As a result, STScI succeeded in eliminating the gender bias from their process.

This news would doubtless have pleased Roman and also Riccardo Giacconi, the first director of STScI, who died earlier in December at age 87. STScI held a landmark conference on the place of women in astronomy in 1992 with Giacconi’s full support, a conference that helped open many doors to women astronomers at the Institute and around the United States and elsewhere.

Giacconi’s contributions to astronomy went far beyond HST -- he is credited for creating the field of X-ray astronomy and won the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work in that field. In the dozen years he led STScI, Giacconi often caused controversy but made sure that the voices of scientists were always heard in decisions about the space telescope. He hired a top-flight staff for the institute and saw it create an astronomical data archive that will long outlive the Hubble Telescope. By ensuring that all HST data are made available in calibrated form, he has opened it to large numbers of astronomers and other experts who might not otherwise be able to use it.

Riccardo Giacconi in 2006. STScI photo.

NASA and STScI also celebrated the 25th anniversary this month of the historic first shuttle servicing mission of HST. The seven astronauts on the STS-61 mission restored HST’s vision, which was afflicted by an incorrectly ground main mirror, by installing two new instruments and by making other needed repairs. Their work turned Hubble from a national embarrassment to a symbol of America’s technological power, and STS-61 was followed by four more servicing missions that upgraded HST and extended its life to the present day and beyond.

I was able to attend part of this celebration, catching up with many friends from STScI and NASA. There I saw the friendships that were forged by the teamwork between the shuttle astronauts, the people who trained them, and the satellite servicing experts from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center who worked with others from STScI and other NASA contractors to design the ingenious repairs for HST. 

The last shuttle servicing mission flew to HST nearly a decade ago, and no more missions are possible because the shuttle was grounded in 2011. That means HST is slowly breaking down as parts wear out. In October, HST went into safe mode while experts at Goddard dealt with problems with the gyroscopes that measure HST’s motion and are a crucial part of its pointing system. The success of their work and Hubble’s return to service in November no doubt added to the mood of celebration at the party I attended.

Also in December, STScI and NASA issued their 1000th news release on HST’s scientific work since its launch in 1990. "The combination of Hubble’s longevity due to the astronaut servicing missions, the enthusiasm of the astronomer community to trust us to translate and publicize their results, and the skills, hard work and dedication of our news team has brought us to this record-breaking pinnacle,” explained Ray Villard, STScI’s longtime Public Affairs Manager. "The public never tires of our news stories, which chronicle Hubble's extraordinary science history for future generations.”

We won’t have to wait long for new stories of discoveries related to HST. On New Year’s Day, for example, the New Horizons spacecraft will fly by a Kuiper Belt object known informally as Ultima Thule, which was discovered in 2014 by HST. A week later, a major gathering of astronomers in Seattle will see the release of more science from HST.

The people behind the Hubble Telescope hope and believe that it will still be functioning when its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, undergoes its scheduled launch in 2021. In any case, the legacies of people like Nancy Roman and Riccardo Giacconi will continue to enrich our knowledge of the universe for some time.

Astronauts John Grunsfeld, Mike Massimino and Scott Altman address the HST Servicing Mission Celebration, December 7, 2018, College Park MD. Chris Gainor photo.

Historians Reconsider Apollo 50 Years Later

Opening session of Apollo Dialogues Workshop from the back of the room. Chris Gainor photo.

On December 7, the NASA History Division and the National Air and Space Museum’s Space History Department held the Apollo Dialogues workshop to discuss spaceflight history today and act as an “incubator” for new work in the field. The workshop took place ahead of celebrations for next year's 50th anniversary of the first human footsteps on the Moon on Apollo 11.

There are not many serious historians and writers who specialize in spaceflight history, and so the 70 participants, including me, who came to the workshop at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. constituted one of the larger recent gatherings of people working in this area.

 The one-day event was divided into four parts, each starting with a speaker followed by discussions around tables organized by topics such as science, international questions, innovation, society, myths, culture, race, gender, and business. Based on their choice of topic tables, every workshop participant had a unique experience.

In opening the workshop, NASA Chief Historian Bill Barry said he is regularly reminded of the public demand for new views of space history when filmmakers call him asking if historians have produced “the next" Hidden Figures, the book and the 2016 hit movie that told the story of the African American women mathematicians who worked for NASA at the dawn of the space age.

Barry and the other organizers promised “provocative” speakers, and Asif Siddiqi of Fordham University, who is renowned for his work on the Soviet and Russian space program, fulfilled that promise with his opening talk.

Apollo, Siddiqi said, has been “overwritten,” particularly in the form of positivist narratives that isolate Apollo from other events of the time. Apollo was an integral part of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, yet this reality is often ignored in histories of Apollo, both by spaceflight historians who concentrate on the Apollo program itself, and by historians writing on the Cold War who often ignore or marginalize the space race in their accounts.

The history of the race to the Moon needs to move beyond the traditional astronaut- and leader-centred accounts to new and broader perspectives, such as those of the women in Hidden Figures who overcame discrimination to help put NASA's first astronauts into space, Siddiqi said. The history of spaceflight must take more account of power relationships in society and the world.

Finally, he spoke about the impact of Apollo on succeeding space programs that have suffered in comparison because Apollo had set the bar of success so high.

The second speaker, Emily Margolis, a Johns Hopkins University postdoctoral fellow at the National Air and Space Museum, discussed the uses of social media in spaceflight history. While social media can be used to trace popular discourse on space and to obtain historical data, its dynamic nature means that it is far from a permanent record.

Washington Post reporter Christian Davenport, the author of The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos, spoke about the challenges of getting information on private space companies such as Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’ Blue Origin that are taking a larger role in space exploration than in the past when governments dominated this area. Bezos has been very secretive about Blue Origin, Davenport said, and Musk has become famous for his thin skin, and these realities affect what we are allowed to know about their work.

The fourth speaker was Johnson Space Center historian Jennifer Ross-Nazai, who addressed the need to give more prominence to the large numbers of women who made Apollo possible. We now know about the small groups of women who worked to join the ranks of the early astronauts or used their special skills in the space program such as the women of Hidden Figures. But these accounts miss much larger numbers of women who worked in clerical and other traditional female occupations to make Apollo a success, Ross-Nazai said. Another forgotten group is women married to men employed in the space program who supported their work by taking on enlarged family responsibilities.

Many interesting discussions took place at the individual tables during the day. In my case, I joined a discussion of the international aspects of Apollo. I have written about the role of Canadian and British experts in Apollo, and others have covered the German and Soviet aspects of early space programs. But Apollo also benefited from scientific work done in other parts of the world, and the first lunar landing expeditions were followed with great interest around the world and even played a role in the diplomacy of the time.

I also took part in a sometimes contentious discussion about Apollo’s impact on science. Almost all historians agree that Apollo was motivated by a desire to establish dominance in the Cold War rather than to advance science, but the limited scientific work on Apollo led to major findings about the development of the Moon and our solar system, including the Earth. Because much of the knowledge gained from Apollo was subject to scientific dispute for several years, Apollo’s scientific legacy is not as well known as it should be.

The fact that Apollo will soon be half a century in the past means that it is already moving out of living memory. Younger people who were born long after the astronauts returned home from the Moon look at Apollo in different ways from the people who made Apollo happen or followed the news coverage in real time on television.

Back in 1969, many people saw Apollo as a part of humankind’s inevitable march of progress. Today the concepts of progress and exploration are looked at with more skepticism than they were at the time of Apollo. The success of Apollo doesn’t appear as inevitable as it once did. Instead, some scholars suggest that Apollo was a fluke or even a stunt. As we know, many people refuse to believe it actually happened at all. Or was Apollo a twenty-first century event that took place prematurely in the 1960s?

These questions and many others raised at the Apollo Dialogues workshop will provide some new perspectives for historians and writers talking about Apollo in the coming anniversary year and beyond.

The Apollo Dialogues workshop will stimulate our historical work in this area, and it may even generate new and thought provoking historical works about our first steps on another celestial body.