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Biography & Autobiography. History. Science. Nonfiction. The first American woman to walk in space recounts her experience as part of the team that launched, rescued, repaired, and maintained the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope has revolutionized our understanding of the universe. It has, among many other achievements, revealed thousands of galaxies in what seemed to be empty patches of sky; transformed our knowledge of black holes; found dwarf planets with moons orbiting other stars; and measured precisely how fast the universe is expanding. In Handprints on Hubble, retired astronaut Kathryn Sullivan describes her work on the NASA team that made all of this possible. Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space, recounts how she and other astronauts, engineers, and scientists launched, rescued, repaired, and maintained Hubble, the most productive observatory ever built. Along the way, Sullivan chronicles her early life as a "Sputnik Baby," her path to NASA through oceanography, and her initiation into the space program as one of "thirty-five new guys." (She was also one of the first six women to join NASA's storied astronaut corps.) She describes in vivid detail what liftoff feels like inside a spacecraft (it's like "being in an earthquake and a fighter jet at the same time"), shows us the view from a spacewalk, and recounts the temporary grounding of the shuttle program after the Challenger disaster. Sullivan explains that "maintainability" was designed into Hubble, and she describes the work of inventing the tools and processes that made on-orbit maintenance possible. Because in-flight repair and upgrade was part of the plan, NASA was able to fix a serious defect in Hubble's mirrors?leaving literal and metaphorical "handprints on Hubble.".… (more)
User reviews
This is a clear, but somewhat detached, telling of this story, written by one of the astronauts that originally deployed it in orbit. Unlike some of the other astronaut books, there is only a little of her personality in this narrative. She specifically chose to remove a lot of the acronyms and specialty terms that those in the aerospace business use routinely, to make it more readable to a wider audience.
I worked on software for the Hubble’s science operations ground system in the mid-1980s. So as I read, I compared what was going on in the process of developing the hardware and operational questions to what I remember happening in our related project, at that same time. There was some internal translation happening as I read, to put back in some of those technical terms. I smiled when she referred to a “critical design review” – a milestone I know as a CDR. Or when she mentioned that so and so was working on requirements and specifications for this theoretical astronomy satellite – clearly that person was the lead systems engineer, though she never called him that. After the discussion of the Challenger disaster, it seemed that it took forever for her to mention that the Challenger's payload, a tracking and data relay satellite system (TDRSS, in my life), was part of the means used by the Hubble to communicate with the ground. So Hubble could not be launched until after a replacement TDRSS was successfully put in orbit.
Loved the discussions of things I’d never considered – like what variables affect such things as choosing the altitude for deploying the Hubble, or how on-orbit maintenance needs affect various hardware designs (from astronaut foot restraints to bolts).
This book was fascinating from the perspectives of design, engineering, and maintenance of a hugely important scientific instrument and its deployment, but somewhat less engaging as a tale of an astronaut’s journey.