Joe: Alright Lewis, I'm going to say a name: The Hubble Space Telescope. What's the first thing that comes to mind? Lewis: Blurry pictures. And then, I guess, really, really not-blurry pictures. The ultimate glow-up story. Joe: Exactly! A glorious failure turned into one of humanity's greatest triumphs. It’s this incredible symbol of both human fallibility and our capacity to fix our own mistakes. Lewis: It’s the poster child for “Did you try turning it off and on again?” but for a multi-billion-dollar space camera. Joe: And that's exactly what we're diving into today with Kathryn D. Sullivan's memoir, Handprints on Hubble: An Astronaut's Story of Invention. Lewis: And what a person to tell this story! Sullivan wasn't just on the mission that deployed Hubble; she was the first American woman to walk in space. And get this—she's also the first woman to dive to the Challenger Deep, the deepest point in the ocean. Talk about an explorer. Joe: She has literally been to the highest highs and the lowest lows accessible to humankind. Her perspective is completely unique. And her book argues that the most important part of the Hubble story is the one we almost never talk about. It’s not the launch, not even the famous repair. It’s the philosophy baked into it from the very beginning. Lewis: Okay, I’m intrigued. Because for most of us, the story begins and ends with that famous “contact lens” mission. Joe: Well, let's start even before that. Let's go to launch day. April 24, 1990. The shuttle Discovery is on the pad. The whole world is watching. This is the second launch attempt in two weeks, so the pressure is immense. And the clock stops. At T-minus 31 seconds.

Lewis: Wait, 31 seconds? That's nothing. That’s the moment everyone is holding their breath, the rocket is rumbling… what could possibly go wrong that late in the game? Joe: Everything. The launch control computers detected an anomaly. An indicator suggested that a critical valve, one used to fill the external fuel tank, hadn't closed properly. Lewis: And that’s bad. Very bad? Joe: Catastrophically bad. If that valve is truly open, it means fuel isn't going to the engines. It could mean they don't get enough thrust, they can't reach the right orbit to deploy Hubble, or even worse, they have to attempt an emergency landing in the Atlantic. The mission is over before it begins. Lewis: So the computer, the automated system designed to prevent disaster, is screaming 'STOP!' Joe: It’s screaming stop. The countdown is frozen. The launch director gets on the comms and asks the one person who can make the call: the Main Propulsion System controller, the 'MPS' engineer. "MPS, what’s your status?" Lewis: I can't even imagine the pressure on that one person. The entire mission, billions of dollars, the careers of the astronauts on board… it's all on their shoulders. Joe: And this is the moment the book captures so brilliantly. The MPS engineer, with what Sullivan describes as a completely calm and professional voice, starts talking through the data. He looks at his console and says that the temperature and pressure readings in the fuel lines around that valve are inconsistent with it being open. Lewis: So the computer is screaming 'DANGER!' but this one engineer, based on 'fundamental physics,' is saying, 'No, the computer's wrong. The sensor is lying.' Joe: Precisely. He trusts his understanding of the system over the digital warning. He tells the launch director, "I am prepared to manually override the software and proceed with the count." Lewis: Wow. That takes guts. To bet the entire mission on your own judgment against the machine. Joe: And the launch director trusts him. He gives the go-ahead. The countdown resumes. And 31 seconds later, Discovery roars into the sky. The crew is in orbit, and they're all marveling at the cool professionalism of this one engineer who saved them from another scrub, or worse. Lewis: That’s incredible. It really reframes the whole idea of spaceflight. We see these perfect, automated launches, but behind the scenes, it’s this intense human drama. It makes you wonder, what kind of person can even function in that environment? What prepares someone for that level of pressure? Joe: That's a huge part of Sullivan's story. The book is highly rated for its technical detail, but some readers have found it a bit dry. I think that's because the emotion is baked into these stories of resilience, not spelled out. You have to look at her background to understand. Lewis: What was her path? Was she one of those kids who dreamed of being an astronaut from day one? Joe: Not at all. Her path was completely unconventional. As a kid, she was obsessed with maps, not rockets. She wanted to be a diplomat. She only stumbled into earth sciences in college because it was a mandatory requirement she tried to argue her way out of. Lewis: Oh, I love that. The class she didn't want to take changed her life. Joe: Exactly. But the real crucible for her was her childhood. When she was twelve, her grandmother, who she was incredibly close to, passed away. Her mother fell into a severe depression and alcoholism. Sullivan writes about how she and her brother had to become the adults in the house, hiding the car keys, managing the household, and her living in constant fear. She says, "I appointed myself housekeeper and tried to be the always-strong-and-calm intermediary, ever-watchful and ready to stabilize tense situations." Lewis: That's heartbreaking. But you can see the connection. The kid who learns to stay calm and manage a crisis at home becomes the astronaut who can handle a life-or-death situation in orbit. Joe: It's that resilience forged by adversity. During her NASA interview, they didn't just ask about her PhD in oceanography. They asked about her life. She told them a story about being on a research cruise where a critical sensor on a 1,500-foot cable broke in the middle of the night. Her professor, the chief scientist, got frustrated, yelled "Fix the damned thing," and went to bed. Lewis: Leaving her to solve it. Joe: Leaving her to solve it. She and the deck hands manually hauled in this massive cable, fixed the sensor, and got it back in the water. But she told the interviewers that she didn't go to bed then. She stayed on watch for hours to make sure the fix held, and only then did she wake up the next shift and brief them. Lewis: That’s the story. That’s what they were looking for. Not just the technical skill to fix it, but the responsibility to see it through. The person who stays calm when the boss walks away. The person who can make the call at T-minus 31 seconds. Joe: Exactly. It's the human element. And that human element is at the heart of the book's other major, and I think more profound, argument.

Lewis: It's amazing that the mission even got off the ground. But that's just the start. The book's real argument, which I found fascinating, is that the true genius of Hubble wasn't just launching it. It was designing it to be fixed. Joe: Yes. The book’s foreword puts it perfectly. It says, "Hubble, from its first moments on the drawing board, was designed to be maintained, repaired, and upgraded." This was a revolutionary concept. Satellites were disposable. You launch it, it works for a few years, it dies, you launch another one. Lewis: The ultimate throwaway culture, but in space. Joe: And Hubble was the antidote to that. The book gives this great, relatable example. Sullivan talks about her old car's radio antenna getting stuck. She, an incredibly capable scientist and astronaut, spends a day and a half trying to fix it and fails. She takes it to a mechanic, who fixes it in five minutes. Lewis: Because the mechanic has the special tool and the know-how. Joe: Precisely. The antenna was maintainable in principle, but not in practice without the right tools and procedures. And that was the philosophy behind Hubble. It wasn't enough to say, "Oh, an astronaut can replace that part." The engineers had to invent the entire ecosystem of maintenance. Lewis: That's the complete opposite of my iPhone! It feels like it's designed to be unfixable. They're creating a universe of standardized, repairable parts in the most hostile environment imaginable. Joe: And it starts with the simplest things. One of the best stories in the book is about an engineer at Lockheed named Henry Ford—no relation to the car guy. He was on the team designing Hubble for EVA, for spacewalks. He realized that if every component had different screws and bolts, an astronaut would need a giant, clunky toolbox and would waste precious time and energy just finding the right wrench. Lewis: Which, in a bulky spacesuit with limited oxygen, is a nightmare. Joe: A complete nightmare. So Ford went on a quest. He found one specific, high-strength, 7/16th-inch hexagonal bolt. And he went to every single engineering team—the electronics team, the mechanisms team, the instruments team—and convinced them, one by one, to use his bolt. For everything. Lewis: He standardized the universe. That’s brilliant. It’s such a simple, elegant solution to a massively complex problem. Joe: It’s genius. And that one decision, to standardize the fasteners, was later adopted by NASA for the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. It’s a perfect example of how designing for maintenance is an act of invention. And it didn't stop there. The astronauts themselves were inventors. Lewis: How so? I picture them as pilots and scientists, not necessarily tool designers. Joe: Well, they had to be. Take Bruce McCandless, Sullivan's crewmate. He was the first person to fly the Manned Maneuvering Unit, that jetpack you see astronauts use. He was a brilliant engineer. The rule for spacewalks is "Everything shall be tethered at all times." You can't let a wrench float away. But the standard tether hooks were these clunky, two-handed clips that were nearly impossible to operate with thick, pressurized gloves. Lewis: Right, you'd spend half your spacewalk just trying to unhook your tools. Joe: McCandless saw this and, with a designer named Michael Withey, adapted a simple T-shaped pin, a 'pip pin,' that was already used elsewhere on the shuttle. It was a simple, elegant design you could operate with three fingers. It became known as the "McTether." It was a tiny invention, but it saved countless hours and made the complex Hubble repair missions possible. Lewis: So the handprints on Hubble are literal. They’re the marks of the people who not only deployed it, but who invented the very way it could be touched and fixed. Joe: Exactly. The book argues that we're obsessed with the "spark of innovation," the big, disruptive idea. But the real, lasting genius is often in the quiet, methodical, and deeply creative work of maintenance. It's the work of the people who ensure that our greatest creations don't just have a spectacular birth, but a long and productive life.

Lewis: So the story of Hubble isn't just about seeing the stars. It's about the human handprint—both the literal ones left by astronauts on its outer skin, which Sullivan describes so beautifully, and the metaphorical ones from the thousands of engineers on the ground who had the foresight to make it last. Joe: It's a powerful symbol. Over the years, Hubble's shiny silver skin has been weathered by the harshness of space, but it's also been marked by the scuffs and prints of the astronauts who kept it alive. Sullivan says those visible handprints are just the "tip of an iceberg," representing the countless earthbound hands that designed the tools, wrote the procedures, and ran the simulations. Lewis: It’s a completely different way of looking at technological achievement. It’s not a monument we build and admire from afar. It’s a relationship. It’s something we tend to, that we care for. Joe: Exactly. The book really makes you question our throwaway culture. What are we building today that's designed to be cared for, to be maintained, for decades? We celebrate the launch of the new product, but we rarely celebrate the person who can keep the old one running perfectly. Lewis: It’s a powerful thought. And it makes the title, Handprints on Hubble, so much more meaningful. It’s about the legacy of human touch, of care, of ingenuity in the service of longevity. We’d love to hear what you think. What’s something in your life you wish was designed to be maintained instead of replaced? Find us on our socials and let us know. Joe: It’s a great question to reflect on. The book is a testament to a different way of thinking, and Kathryn Sullivan, as both a scientist and a pioneer, was the perfect person to tell it. This is Aibrary, signing off.