After Hubble’s deployment in 1990. Astronomers quickly realized there was a problem.
The conclusion we've come to from that is that there is a significant
spherical aberration appears to be present in the optics.
...and that we should be able to fix it in our insurance program.
Chaos and confusion
after the Hubble mission, there were threats about shuttle
coming to an end because NASA didn't have the capability anymore.
“And we have a go for main engine start.”
“Five, four, three, two...”
We couldn't do this, we couldn’t do that,
Hubble was a disaster.
None of this was in the books.
“Liftoff!
Liftoff of the Space Shuttle Endeavour on an ambitious mission to service
the Hubble Space Telescope.”
My boss on the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory,
he said, “Look, I'm going to form a team to design a new telescope.
We already know what we're going to call it.
Just the large telescope.
And I want you on that team, and I want you to go work
the mechanical system
and figure out how we can take advantage of the new
space shuttle program
to see how we could launch it
and maybe if necessary, repair it,
and upgraded it.”
And we built a full scale mockup over
about a four year period from 70 to 74.
And we came up with what was called a modular concept.
We designed the instruments and stuff, the complicated parts
of the spacecraft to be modular so they could,
interfaces could be simple, the modules could slide in and out
and be picked up by the same standard interfaces.
In 75, they picked a winner
and the winner was Marshall Space Flight Center and Lockheed.
And so we were essentially out of the business, other than to consult
with them, with regards to future servicing of Hubble.
We were responsible for the instrument development, which by that time
we decided they were going to be definitely modular instruments.
So modularity started to creep in the thing.
And then the third aspect is we were responsible after launch
for flight operations of Hubble. Right after the launch,
and they discovered we had this aberration.
I got approached by people at headquarters saying, “Hey,
would you be interested in doing a servicing mission on Hubble?”
And I said, “Yeah, we've been practicing.
We were ready for that.”
We had to figure out what had caused the optical problem,
and at that time there wasn't a sure answer.
What's caused the spherical aberration and how bad is it?
What are the optical constants that would allow us to correct?
So for six months
from August on, we focused on the problem that one problem.
“Three years later...”
We, indeed a privileged crew to be able to fly on this mission.
We have had some of the most intensive and extensive training
that I have ever experienced in preparation for a spaceflight.
That started with crew members being named early and continued
with the use of resources and facilities that had not been used before
in the development of the plan and in the training of crew members.
We have trained to be able to work with different people.
We have also done a lot of training...
...the differences between the kinds of training...
...we'd be very happy to stick with what we've been training to do for a while...
...indebted to the tool folks here at JSC and up at Goddard for not only giving us
the tools that are very EVA friendly, but actually modifying some existing tools.
As we went through training...
The astronauts figure out things,
they see things,
they figure out what to do in case something happens
if it's not going right
they figure out what to do.
Training opens your mind up to doing things other than what
you would normally do if you had to have a reverse way of doing it.
If you couldn't do it the way that it was planned
here's another way to do it.
There was always this part about training and testing
and so on that allows you to to find the other alternatives.
These missions didn't go perfectly.
Day one. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
No, no, no, no.
Almost every day was a horrendous fear challenge.
We didn't plan for failure per se.
We planned for,
what if this didn't work?
What if that didn't work?
What would be the back-arounds
to augmenting that failure or leaving that failure alone
and just going past it?
And we did have that.
We did have back-arounds for almost every one of our EVA
missions. That if we didn't do this,
we would immediately skip and go over here to this while
the engineers on the ground would figure out what to do there.
We would not allow ourselves to think of failure.
Now, every one of our missions, 100% successful.
Every mission led to three or four more years of future missions.
Eventually, the astronauts and the water tanks,
They got so comfortable with working with our mockups and stuff
that they began to ask us for help on things like servicing Station.
So we were able to develop and change
some of the tools, varied, the tools,
changed their design, so they would work on Space Station as well as Hubble.
And so pretty soon a lot of the tools that we were using initially on Hubble
ended up being used predominantly on Space Station for Space Station servicing.
And so that was a very important growth
prospect there. It gets back to this concept of enthusiasm,
it gets back to this concept of engineering management.
And from an engineering perspective,
you need basically
to coalesce,
to bring together a group of people with a common objective
and keep those people together via
communications, via large meetings,
via whatever is necessary to keep them going.
Hubble “represents never say no.”
If something is tough, go for it.
If it's worthwhile doing, go for it, dig in to it.
Do not let “no” bother you.
All these things, they can be solved.
They can be solved.
They can be solved if we make our minds up to go solve them.
“1994 - one month after the mission”
this mission.
Success was no accident.
We told our people across the board
very succinctly two things, that to be successful
we were going to do testing, testing, and retesting.
And as you can see by the images, they succeeded.
We succeeded, the formula panned out.
It's a formula which took 30 years to develop here at Goddard.
We've evolved from that point to get even to a better technology today,
and I think we move on from here into the future.
Servicing Mission 1 had five spacewalks. With extensive training, all were successful.
The lessons learned guided future servicing missions and influenced how we build and maintain structures in space.
Thirty years later, Hubble continues making discoveries that change our understanding of the universe.
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