He set off in search of the smallest possible bolt that had the necessary high-tensile strength and a reasonable breakaway torque. That’s like working on your car while wearing an inflatable sumo wrestler suit and boxing gloves, with the added twist that your tools float away if you let go of them.ĭesigner Henry Ford (no relation to the automotive family) decided to tackle the first of these by limiting the variety of fasteners used on the telescope. What makes Hubble radically different from anything built before or since is that it was designed to be maintainable by two people in bulky space suits while orbiting hundreds of miles above the Earth. Hubble is an amazing piece of engineering. By delightful coincidence, the two of us began the final stretch of our journeys to space at almost the same time, with my astronaut selection and Hubble’s congressional approval both occurring in 1978. As I grew through my childhood and teen years, Hubble languished in a state of arrested development, while the technologies of the new space age matured enough to bring Spitzer’s vision into the realm of the possible. I was born in Paterson, New Jersey, on October 3, 1951. Most people trace Hubble’s start to a report written in 1946 by Princeton astronomer Lyman Spitzer. You could say we grew up together, Hubble and I.
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