♪ ♪
NARRATOR: In 1977 NASA is given an enormous challenge --
build a space telescope with the potential to unlock
the secrets of our universe.
MIKE: It’s an engineering wonder.
It really is an engineering miracle.
NARRATOR: The project pushes engineers, scientists
and astronauts into uncharted territory.
ARCHIVE: Liftoff of the Space Shuttle Discovery
with the Hubble Space Telescope.
ED: We put our careers and lives in that shuttle bay.
NARRATOR: From construction to release.
STORY: The solar panels wouldn’t go out. They were stuck.
MISSION CONTROL: I need answers now.
NARRATOR: From ridicule...
JIM GUNN: I thought that there was no conceivable way
that they could fix this.
NARRATOR: To redemption.
JEFF: Man, that was a neat moment.
ED: It’s a classic story of human ingenuity
and human perseverance.
NARRATOR: This is the story of the unsung heroes
who built the Hubble Space Telescope.
ARCHIVE: Discovery, Hubble is open for business.
[♪ theme music ♪]
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: December 7th, 1993.
In the lethal environment of space, astronauts risk
their lives trying to save the $1.5 billion Hubble Telescope.
ED: We had to do it. The future of Hubble was at stake.
Perhaps even the future of our agency.
JEFF: The servicing mission was a technical challenge
like none anybody had ever seen.
NARRATOR: Delicate new hardware must be installed.
Without it the telescope’s performance
is critically impaired.
ED: You’ve got this huge spacesuit on with big thick gloves.
How in the world are you gonna do very fine electronic work?
MISSION CONTROL: Have you checked your mechanism’s cocked, Story?
STORY: People consider that to be the most critical maneuver.
If I tap that thing, it’s over.
ASTRONAUT: Okay, are you ready for me to let go?
ASTRONAUT: Yes I am.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: For over two decades, the Hubble Space Telescope has provided
humanity with unparalleled views of the universe.
ASTRONAUT: Hubble isn’t just a satellite.
It’s about humanity’s quest for knowledge.
NARRATOR: Before it, images of this clarity simply didn’t exist.
MIKE: Hubble shows us the beauty of the universe.
We all can look up at the sky at night and wonder
what’s going on out there, where did we come from, who are we?
Is there anyone else out there?
CHARLIE: The great fun of science is that it answers questions
and that it creates questions, and Hubble’s done both.
NARRATOR: Named after American cosmologist Edwin Hubble,
this school-bus-sized observatory circles our planet
at over 17,000 miles per hour, capturing light
6 billion times fainter than the human eye can see.
ED: Your eye can see more or less a flashlight,
a two-cell flashlight maybe a couple miles.
Hubble could see that flashlight on the moon,
240,000 miles away.
NARRATOR: The incredible journey to build
this revolutionary machine begins over 70 years ago.
♪ ♪
September 1946.
American astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer writes a short paper
that changes the course of history.
He’s frustrated with trying to observe space
from the Earth’s surface -- because our atmosphere blurs
the view of the heavens.
DAVID: You know that, "Twinkle, twinkle, little star"?
Well, everybody loves that song.
Astronomers hate it,
because they wanna get rid of that twinkle.
NARRATOR: Earth’s atmosphere also filters out wavelengths
of light such as ultraviolet that are critical
for unraveling the evolution of our cosmos.
Inspired by advances in rocket technology,
Spitzer makes a revolutionary proposal --
an orbiting observatory above our atmosphere.
ED: The idea of putting a telescope in space,
I mean, give me a break; we didn’t even have satellites
when Dr. Spitzer wrote that paper.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: Spitzer devotes the next three decades
to promoting cutting-edge research
which will make his dream possible.
CHARLIE: What Lyman Spitzer did is
move the space telescope idea from pure science fiction
to, you might actually be able to do this.
NARRATOR: In 1977 his efforts are finally rewarded
when Congress approves funding for a space telescope.
NASA must now deliver Spitzer’s dream.
But building this telescope is an immense technical challenge.
Chief engineer Jean Olivier shoulders much of the burden.
JEAN: Hubble was an extremely ambitious program.
The further we got into it,
the more ambitious we realized it really was.
NARRATOR: Before construction of the telescope can even begin,
NASA must decide how to launch it into orbit.
As it happens, the agency’s crown jewel, the space shuttle,
is in the final stages of testing.
DAVID: As NASA put all of its dimes into the space shuttle,
many scientific missions had to be redefined
in terms of being carried by the shuttle.
ARCHIVE: Fitting into the shuttle’s cargo bay,
the telescope will be latched to a tilting mechanism...
NARRATOR: Putting Hubble into orbit with a reusable vehicle
offers engineers a fantastic new opportunity.
JOHN: The space shuttle was going to be there
to service the Hubble and upgrade its instruments
every three years or so.
NARRATOR: To ensure Hubble can be improved over time,
engineers design it to be modular.
Each of its five scientific instruments,
tasked with unlocking the mysteries of the universe,
must be packaged in its own easy-to-replace box.
MIKE: And so everything had to be done such that
it could be removed, but removed by spacewalking astronauts.
NARRATOR: But while the shuttle extends Hubble’s shelf life,
it has one major drawback.
ED: Basically Hubble was built as large as it could be built
to fit in the shuttle bay.
I’m sure many of the engineers wished they had more room,
as it turned out.
NARRATOR: Hubble needs to be smaller and lighter
than Earth-based telescopes
but also have more advanced scientific capabilities.
And no part is more important to the taxpaying public,
whose dollars fund the project,
than the one that will provide the pictures.
JEFF: If you’d have asked what’s the one thing that
you have to have, the answer is you had to have a camera.
But at the time nobody had built a camera
that had to be this good.
NARRATOR: Unlike most telescopes on Earth at the time,
it’s not practical for Hubble’s camera
to use photographic film.
BOB: We had to have a camera that would work very remotely
and sent its signal back.
NARRATOR: Restricted by size, the camera must be lightweight,
robust and sensitive to a wide spectrum of light.
The battle comes down to two very different devices.
DAVID: You had a choice that had been tested,
the television-type camera tube.
But then you had something new.
Something untested but really promising.
And that is solid-state, silicon technologies
that we call, today, charge-coupled devices.
NARRATOR: These nifty electronic "eyes" convert light
into electricity, building up a picture made
of tiny individual squares called pixels.
Smaller and more sensitive to light, the charge-coupled device
or CCD, appears to be the better bet.
But there are serious drawbacks --
they’re untested, can’t detect UV light,
and they have a field of view much smaller
than the television-type tubes.
ED: It was pushing the state of the art a little bit too far,
a lot of people thought.
NARRATOR: With no clear winner, NASA puts out a request
for proposals.
Bob O’Dell is a prominent member of the selection committee.
BOB: I cannot say I made the selection,
but I wouldn’t have been in the room without having
a strong opinion and expressing it.
NARRATOR: At the California Institute of Technology, the
challenge attracts the attention of two maverick professors
-- Jim Westphal and Jim Gunn.
BOB: Jim Westphal was wonderfully hands-on;
he was absolutely a Thomas Edison type person.
Jim Gunn was the scientist, well-acknowledged to be one of
the smartest guys in our field.
NARRATOR: Since 1975, they’ve been experimenting
with ground-based telescopes fitted with CCDs.
JIM GUNN: They were clearly the magic bullet. So we had to do this.
NARRATOR: But Jim Westphal isn’t convinced.
JIM GUNN: Jim was as allergic as I was to bureaucracy,
so I knew that it was going to be an uphill battle.
NARRATOR: October 1976.
DAVID: One day Jim got a phone call
and it was from Jim Gunn,
and a phone call from Jim Gunn usually means something.
Jim simply said, "Can I come over and talk?"
JIM GUNN: I think I just wandered over there and said,
"We have to build a CCD camera for space telescope,"
and the reaction as I remember was exactly as I expected.
"No bloody way."
NARRATOR: But Gunn won’t take no for an answer.
JIM GUNN: I think I finally twisted his arm by
figuratively reading Lyman’s paper to him.
And saying, "Look, this is an opportunity
we simply cannot pass up."
NARRATOR: Westphal agrees to lead the project
and recruits an elite team.
Together they must create a camera
that will help unlock the secrets of the universe.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: In the fall of 1976 James Westphal
and his newly assembled Caltech team begin fresh experiments
with the technology they hope will form the core
of their camera -- charge-coupled devices.
JIM GUNN: You have a thing that’s very, very close to this
in your smart phone.
The problem was that at the time this technology was very new.
And though it was incredibly promising,
it was also very risky.
NARRATOR: Convincing NASA that CCDs are the technology to go for
means overcoming some critical engineering challenges.
First up -- field of view.
In the mid-1970s CCDs are relatively small.
This limits the size of image they can produce.
But scientists demand that Hubble’s camera
has a wide field of view to record larger portions
of the cosmos.
To compete with television-style cameras,
Westphal must increase the CCD’s field of view
by at least a factor of 4.
As it happens, Bob O’Dell has a radical solution
that he chooses to share with Westphal.
Instead of building a single larger CCD,
he suggests using four smaller ones.
As light from the telescope enters the camera, a specially
designed pyramid-shaped mirror splits the beam
and redirects it onto four separate CCDs.
BOB: So the final image is a mosaic of the four components.
NARRATOR: Now just one daunting engineering roadblock
stands in Westphal’s way -- capturing ultraviolet light.
JIM GUNN: People were very interested in what stars are made out of.
They were very interested in what the gas
and the galaxy is made out of.
To understand that you really need to look
into the ultraviolet.
NARRATOR: The trouble is CCDs can’t see
in the ultraviolet spectrum because
the silicon they’re housed in absorbs it.
Westphal must overcome this crucial problem.
JIM GUNN: Problems were something that Jim solved.
So naturally he was the guy who was going to,
who was going to do this.
NARRATOR: For inspiration, Westphal turns to nature.
He studies chemical reactions that occur in living organisms
which create light.
Through his research, Westphal unearths
some potentially game-changing chemicals
that can convert UV light into visible light
through a process called fluorescence.
To test if fluorescence can be recorded by CCDs,
Westphal carries out top-secret experiments
with two different chemicals.
Each is given a codename to ward off competition.
JEFF: They’d talk about it as bug juice or mouse milk.
This kind of magical stuff that you put on the surface
of the CCD.
NARRATOR: Westphal coats the CCDs in either bug juice --
the chemical lumigen --
or mouse milk -- the chemical coronene --
by evaporating them in a vacuum.
JEFF: Nobody had done that kind of thing
before with these devices.
NARRATOR: Next, the detectors are inserted into a camera,
exposed to a UV light pattern, and a picture is taken.
If the tests fail, Westphal and Gunn’s dream
to build the Hubble camera is over.
♪ ♪
The results with coronene are a breakthrough.
The two main barriers to using CCD technology
have now been overcome.
Westphal’s team have increased the detector’s field of view
and discovered how to record ultraviolet light.
JIM GUNN: We were able to convince NASA
that this was a technology that worked.
But mouse milk won over bug juice in the end.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: NASA green-lights construction of
Westphal’s Wide Field/Planetary Camera, known as Wiffpic,
with its core technology of CCD detectors.
For the public, the camera will define Hubble’s success.
ED: We had to do great science
but also get that science to the public.
So pictures were critical,
and what instrument produced the neatest pictures?
The Wide Field/Planetary Camera.
NARRATOR: NASA’s chief scientist, Ed Weiler, pushes for
the construction of a duplicate camera to keep in reserve.
ED: Having an insurance policy that would only cost
maybe $50 million was worth it.
NARRATOR: After some cajoling
the NASA hierarchy approves the idea,
and the following year work starts on a replica camera --
Wiffpic 2.
♪ ♪
Crucial to the success of all Hubble’s instruments
is the design of the telescope itself.
Telescopes capture light using lenses and mirrors.
The bigger they are the more light they can gather,
and the more detail they can see.
The further the light travels inside the telescope
before it’s focused, the greater the magnification.
But because Hubble must squeeze into the bay
of the space shuttle, it can’t be as big
as engineers would like.
To extend Hubble’s view into the universe,
they boost its magnifying powers using
a 300-year-old optical trick -- hyperbolic curved mirrors.
Reflecting light back and forth inside the telescope
increases the distance it travels,
making the instrument more powerful.
It’s the perfect solution to engineering
a lightweight high-performance telescope.
But the success of this design hangs on the quality
of the telescope’s light-gathering primary mirror.
ED: It’s the brain or the heart of the telescope.
That’s where it all starts.
NARRATOR: NASA contracts the PerkinElmer company
to undertake much of the complex technical work.
This includes engineering the mirror.
JEAN: The most challenging thing first was to build a mirror
precisely enough to meet the resolution needs.
ED: It had to be accurate over that 2.4-meter surface
to a millionth of an inch.
JEAN: If you were to take the diameter of Hubble
and blow it up to the size of the Earth,
then any deviation of more than about six inches
would be unacceptable.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: To achieve this level of precision, Hubble’s
primary mirror is carved from a one-ton block of glass
and meticulously polished with a spinning abrasive pad
controlled by computers.
After polishing sessions lasting up to 70 hours,
the mirror’s shape is analyzed in this chamber.
JOHN: The task of the optician to make the Hubble mirror
is first to create a device that allows him
to measure the surface.
NARRATOR: But creating equipment that can measure accurately
enough is a challenge in itself.
CHARLIE: With Hubble we wanted to make a perfect mirror,
and so the PerkinElmer, really smart guys,
conceived of a thing called a reflective null corrector.
NARRATOR: A null corrector is a precision optical test device.
By shining a beam of light
through this carefully calibrated instrument,
engineers can create a light-wave pattern
in the exact shape of the desired mirror.
This light is then reflected back by the mirror
and the interference pattern recorded.
Straight strips mean the mirror’s curvature is perfect.
A distorted pattern indicates it’s the wrong shape.
By studying these images, optical engineers
know where to continue polishing the mirror
to create the perfect curvature.
But it’s a painstakingly slow process that puts PerkinElmer
badly behind schedule.
CHARLIE: I think originally it was supposed to take nine months
and probably took twice that.
NARRATOR: As preparations for launch begin,
PerkinElmer deliver the mirror to NASA.
What they don’t realize is that a tiny flaw
in the test equipment has gone unnoticed.
DAVID: It was an oversight, and it had enormous ramifications
in the life of the Hubble Space Telescope.
MISSION CONTROL: 3, 2, 1 and liftoff, liftoff,
of the 25th space shuttle mission.
And it has cleared the tower.
NARRATOR: January 1986, just months before Hubble is due to launch.
MISSION CONTROL: Challenger, go with throttle up.
ASTRONAUT: Roger, go with throttle up.
[Explosion]
MISSION CONTROL: Oh, God -- no!
NARRATOR: The Challenger disaster plunges
the space shuttle program into turmoil.
MISSION CONTROL: Obviously a major malfunction.
MISSION CONTROL: Okay everybody, stay off the telephones.
Make sure you maintain all your data;
start pulling it together.
NARRATOR: As America comes to terms with the tragedy,
NASA grounds the shuttle fleet,
and Hubble’s launch is postponed indefinitely.
For four years it sits in hibernation.
MISSION CONTROL: Liftoff of Space Shuttle Discovery
with the Hubble Space Telescope, our window on the universe.
NARRATOR: Finally, on April 24th, 1990, after 13 years
of blood, sweat and tears, Hubble is ready to leave Earth.
ED: By the time we launched, about 10,000 people
had spent some part of their lives working on Hubble.
ASTRONAUT: Roger. Roll Discovery.
JEFF: And you realize that sitting up there
on the very top of that pillar of fire
is this thing that you have attached your life to.
This thing that is carrying the hopes of a whole science.
MISSION CONTROL: Discovery’s velocity now 23,000 feet per second.
JEFF: It kind of takes your breath away.
NARRATOR: Discovery soars to nearly 380 miles,
higher than any shuttle has flown before,
to place Hubble above the Earth’s atmosphere.
Now it’s time to set the telescope free.
STORY: Discovery, you’re go to transfer Hubble
to internal power on time.
ASTRONAUT: Roger that, understand.
Go transfer of internal power on time.
NARRATOR: Story Musgrave is capsule communicator at mission control.
STORY: I knew the importance of that mission.
I knew what Hubble meant to people.
NARRATOR: To generate power, Hubble relies on two solar arrays
absorbing energy from the sun.
But to unfurl the arrays there is a critical stage
where Hubble must run on internal batteries.
NASA must deploy the solar panels
before the batteries run down.
STORY: Once you’ve taken the power off of Hubble it’s gonna die.
So we’re time-constrained.
NARRATOR: The first panel unrolls perfectly.
Now time for the second.
ASTRONAUT: Houston, Discovery. It looks like the motion
has stopped with just about one panel showing.
STORY: They’re supposed to motor out, and it wouldn’t go out.
JEFF: It’s like you’re watching the birth of your baby
and it’s stuck. It’s a big deal.
STORY: Okay, with the panels that you’ve got out there right now,
that’s not satisfactory to stay overnight.
NARRATOR: Years of work and billions of dollars are at stake.
Engineers must find a way to release the stuck panel
before time runs out.
MISSION CONTROL: I need answers now.
NARRATOR: The problem is quickly diagnosed.
ASTRONAUT: Discovery, go ahead.
MISSION CONTROL: We think there may be some problem
with the tension monitoring software.
NARRATOR: A sensor is saying tension in the panel is too high.
One solution is to override it.
But this could snap the solar array’s stem booms,
rendering them useless. It’s risky, and engineers are split.
MISSION CONTROL: We need to get on with it.
NARRATOR: Under pressure from flight control,
Jean Olivier is in the hot seat.
JEAN: Finally it became clear we were at deadlock,
so I just had to say, "No, we’re gonna do it.
We’re gonna override it."
STORY: We are disabling the tension check.
ASTRONAUT: Okay Houston, we see motion.
ASTRONAUT: It’s fully deployed.
STORY: You let the breath go out, you let the air --
"Okay, we got through that one."
NARRATOR: Now receiving the full power of the sun,
Hubble can finally fulfill its primary purpose.
To capture the universe in unprecedented detail.
STORY: And Discovery, Hubble is open for business.
MISSION CONTROL: We got our telescope. We got our telescope.
MISSION CONTROL: That’s it.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: May 20th, 1990.
Scientists and engineers eagerly await
the telescope’s first image.
JEFF: The first image comes down,
and it doesn’t look at all like what we expected it to.
♪ ♪
Not these sharp little images,
but instead were kind of these big blobs
that frankly didn’t look any better
than the ground-based image.
NARRATOR: Something has gone drastically wrong
with the $1.5-billion-dollar space telescope. But what?
♪ ♪
June 1990.
Over the next month every effort is made
to understand what’s causing Hubble’s blurred vision.
DAVID: It was a puzzle, a very dark puzzle.
NARRATOR: Part of the Wiffpic camera team,
Jon Holtzman and Sandy Faber analyze six further images
taken by the telescope.
They hint at a catastrophic problem -- spherical aberration.
Spherical aberration is caused when the primary mirror
is built the wrong shape so that it fails to focus light
into a single point.
Instead light is smeared out, and the object appears blurred.
It’s such an unlikely mistake that
many engineers and scientists can’t believe it’s true.
JEFF: We’re sure that spherical aberration
isn’t going to be a problem, you know.
Nobody’s going to screw it up that badly.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: But Holtzman and Faber have compelling evidence
that supports the theory.
Holtzman shows the NASA hierarchy
a comparison of six photographs taken by the telescope
with a series of six computer-simulated images
with spherical aberration built in.
JON HOLTZMAN: And the match was nearly perfect,
and I think that kind of proved to everyone
that that was the problem that we had.
NARRATOR: The most accurate mirror ever made is flawed.
JOHN: It was made very accurately, very beautifully,
to the wrong prescription.
NARRATOR: In July 1990 an inquiry into the cause
of Hubble’s faulty mirror reveals a mistake
with the test equipment -- the null corrector.
JOHN: It wasn’t quite aligned correctly,
and that built into the whole operation an aberration.
NARRATOR: Mis-spacing the null corrector by just a fraction of an inch,
the outer edge of the mirror was polished incorrectly
by 1/50th the diameter of a human hair.
JEAN: We very precisely did the wrong thing.
DAVID: The management error was that there was
not enough checks and balances.
NASA CONFERENCE: Now we will go to the floor for questions.
NARRATOR: Of Hubble’s five scientific instruments,
the Wide Field/Planetary Camera is the worst affected.
It’s a major blow for everyone involved with the telescope.
ED [Archive]: It would be dishonest of me to say
the mood of the scientists is very happy right now.
We’re all very frustrated, obviously.
♪ ♪
JEFF: If you ever want a picture of a person just in anguish,
you want to find a picture of Ed Weiler
at the end of that press conference.
ED [Archive]: We feel right now that there’s
probably no real science that we can do
with the wide field camera at this time, and I’ll stop there.
ED: It was very depressing because a lot of us
had put our lives into this, our entire careers.
Clearly Hubble’s future was in doubt.
Perhaps the space shuttle’s future was in doubt.
Perhaps NASA’s future was in doubt.
NARRATOR: Some of the founding fathers are so disillusioned
they leave the project altogether.
JIM GUNN: About this time, I didn’t have enough faith in NASA.
I thought that there was no conceivable way
that they could fix this.
NARRATOR: The press have a field day at NASA’s expense.
JEFF: God, they were vicious.
One that I remember; Jay Leno was, he just hit it again
and again and again, and one of the jokes that I remember,
it was around Thanksgiving, and he said,
"What is, what sound does a space turkey make?
Hubble, Hubble, Hubble."
NARRATOR: As public support for Hubble dwindles,
it appears the dream for this space telescope is over.
But Charlie Pellerin, the man in charge of the Hubble program,
refuses to give up hope.
CHARLIE: This was a, a horrible, deep pain,
and only one way to get rid of it,
and that’s to find a way to fix the telescope.
There was no, no other way.
NARRATOR: The burning question is how to correct the flaw.
Pellerin risks his career by secretly bankrolling
a mission to find an engineering solution.
CHARLIE: So, I brought in my budget analyst,
and I said, "I wanna find $60 million for --
and by the way, you can’t tell anybody we’re doing this."
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: The fact Hubble can be serviced by astronauts
offers a glimmer of hope.
ED: If there were no way to service the Hubble,
Hubble would’ve rapidly become in 1990
a very expensive piece of floating space garbage.
NARRATOR: It’s only now that Ed Weiler’s decision
to build a backup camera becomes a masterstroke.
ED: And thank goodness we had that clone going ready to go,
because it was a simple -- a simple fix
to change out four little nickel-sized mirrors.
NARRATOR: These mirrors divert the light from the telescope
to multiple electronic detectors within the camera.
JOHN: It was like going to the optician and saying,
"Well, your eyes aren’t quite right.
You need this corrective lens."
We put that correction on those little mirrors.
NARRATOR: It’s an internal fix that can be done by engineers on Earth.
When it’s installed, the new modified backup camera
will go some way to fixing Hubble’s vision.
But saving the four other instruments that scientists hope
will unravel the mysteries of our universe
proves much more challenging.
ED: The other instruments didn’t have clones
being built of them. There were no second copies.
NARRATOR: These instruments require an external fix
that can only be done by astronauts in space.
The goal is to place corrective mirrors deep inside Hubble,
in front of the remaining instruments,
to correct their vision.
But squeezing them into a very restricted space
proves a technical nightmare.
Jim Crocker is part of a multinational team
tasked with finding a solution.
JIM CROCKER: There were literally hundreds of ideas,
but all of these were either impractical
because an astronaut couldn’t do them in gloved hands
or because it was too dangerous,
such as going down the barrel of the telescope,
where an astronaut might be trapped.
NARRATOR: A mechanical fix is needed
that won’t put the astronauts at risk.
But the team struggles to come up with a viable design.
♪ ♪
After a conference in Germany, Crocker returns to his hotel.
JIM CROCKER: I went to take a shower,
and when the maid was cleaning the room,
she had folded the arm down
and slid it all the way down to the bottom.
So to take a shower I had to slide it up and raise the arm,
and when I did that I had this epiphany.
The shower head got me into a different way of thinking.
So it was the idea of raising something up
above the other instruments
and flipping it out to do the correction
that we hadn’t thought of before.
NARRATOR: In this moment a corrective optics device --
COSTAR -- is born.
It will be prepackaged in an astronaut-friendly box
with mirrors that deploy remotely.
The only downside --
one of the existing scientific instruments
will have to be sacrificed to make room for it.
Crocker’s shower-head-inspired invention
is now displayed here at the Smithsonian’s
National Air and Space Museum.
DAVID: This is the elegant engineering solution to
what was a daunting technical challenge.
The little mirrors that you see were deformed
precisely to counteract the flaw in the main mirror,
and only once the entire box was inserted
with everything protected inside did the column extend,
and then as it extended it deployed
these little stalks with the mirrors
into the optical beam of the other instruments.
NARRATOR: To repair Hubble, both Wiffpic 2 and COSTAR
must be installed by astronauts
on a series of grueling spacewalks.
This takes three years of meticulous planning.
STORY: Stop. Stop. Up. Up.
NARRATOR: Story Musgrave, who’s been working with Hubble
for 15 years, is the first astronaut to be recruited.
To prepare his body for the spacewalking ordeal ahead,
Musgrave goes to extraordinary lengths,
enlisting the help of Olympic athletes
like figure skater Dorothy Hamill.
STORY: I brought athleticism into the spacewalking world.
If you look at a spacewalk, it is the choreography,
the dance of this body and the tools,
that’s gonna get to the finish line, and that’s it.
There’s nothing else. That’s it.
NARRATOR: As expectations of rescuing Hubble grow,
the mission becomes more than just repairing a telescope.
JEFF: It wasn’t just space telescope that was on the line.
It wasn’t even NASA that was on the line.
It was the broader question of, do we still do big science?
♪ ♪
If the servicing mission had failed that may well have been
the end of trying to do things like this, and we knew it.
STORY: We just had to do it and do it right.
ARCHIVE: Three zero. We have ignition.
NARRATOR: December 2nd, 1993. Kennedy space center.
ARCHIVE: Roger, roll Endeavor.
NARRATOR: Space Shuttle Endeavor thunders skyward
on a mission to rescue Hubble.
ED: We put our careers and lives in that shuttle bay.
♪ ♪
ASTRONAUT: It’s quite a sight.
NARRATOR: As Endeavor approaches Hubble, the crew reaches out
with the robotic arm to capture the telescope.
ASTRONAUT: Houston, Endeavor has a firm handshake
with Mr. Hubble’s telescope.
MISSION CONTROL: Copy that Covey, and there are smiles galore down here.
NARRATOR: With Hubble tethered, the astronauts embark
on a series of perilous spacewalks.
CHARLIE: The people that are willing to put that suit on
and go out there and try and fix a science instrument
is, is heroism at a level that’s almost unparalleled.
NARRATOR: After two days of intricate repairs,
Story Musgrave and Jeff Hoffman
remove the original Wide Field/Planetary Camera
in order to install the backup -- Wiffpic 2.
MISSION CONTROL: Okay.
Have you checked your mechanism’s cocked, Story?
STORY: I’ve just cocked them, yes. I’ve just done them.
NARRATOR: At the front of the unit is a delicate instrument
that diverts light from the telescope into the camera --
the pick-off mirror.
STORY: This was the most critical part
of 40 hours of spacewalking. If I touch that mirror, it’s over.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: As the world watches, Musgrave and Hoffman
slowly maneuver the Wiffpic 2 camera into position.
JEFF: These astronauts have to take this thing
and somehow manage to slide it into this bay.
ASTRONAUT: Looks like it’s in there.
ASTRONAUT: Yes.
ASTRONAUT: Okay are you ready for me to let go?
ASTRONAUT: Yes I am.
NARRATOR: The camera is installed without a hitch.
Now for the corrective optics device.
ASTRONAUT: Keep coming up, coming up, coming up.
NARRATOR: Packaged in a module the size of a telephone booth,
the device is key to every other instrument on Hubble
working perfectly.
STORY: The booth just went in, bang,
put the power tool on, it’s done.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: The crew of Endeavor complete
one of the most ambitious repair missions
in the history of space exploration.
MISSION CONTROL: Through your superb efforts, you have really shown
that NASA can do all we promised to do and more.
ED [Archive]: Good job.
NARRATOR: But has Hubble’s eye surgery been successful?
Four days after Endeavor’s triumphant return to Earth,
Hubble’s new camera transmits its first image.
It’s the moment of truth for those
who’ve dedicated their lives to the telescope.
JEFF: And the image comes down and here,
it is coming up on the display...
[All cheering]
And it was right.
I mean, how do you describe that? How do you...?
How do you capture the emotions
when you’ve been a part of something that was built up
with such incredible high hopes?
Man, that was a neat moment. God, that was a neat moment.
ED: Having the first picture come down and prove,
and absolutely prove that we had fixed
the Hubble Space Telescope -- that was a moment of redemption.
I said "Holy [expletive]," and I wasn’t fired for it.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: Over the next quarter-century
Hubble observes more than 30,000 objects
and beams back over half a million images.
Its discoveries transform modern astronomy.
JIM GUNN: And you think about it
and you’re looking 10 billion years back,
and you’re seeing history in front of your eyes as,
as the light comes. It’s an amazing thing.
NARRATOR: Witnessing the birth and death of stars,
confirming the existence of supermassive black holes
and thousands of unknown galaxies
and measuring the age of the universe --
Hubble’s science and images transfix the world.
Between 1993 and 2009, four further shuttle missions
return to upgrade Hubble.
Aboard two of those is astronaut Mike Massimino.
ASTRONAUT: Okay Mass, you have a go.
MIKE: I think it’s the greatest scientific instrument
ever built, not only because of the science it produces
but because of the engineering that went into it.
MIKE [Archive]: Oh, what a beautiful view.
MIKE: It’s an engineering wonder.
It really is an engineering miracle.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: But after a quarter-century in orbit
and with no more servicing missions planned,
Hubble’s days are numbered.
MISSION CONTROL: And we wish Hubble the very best.
NARRATOR: Now there’s a new kid on the block.
Set for launch in 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope
will extend our window into the universe.
JON ARENBERG: We’re gonna see unprecedented views
of the birth of stars and planets, the origins of life.
NARRATOR: As with Hubble, engineers work tirelessly behind the scenes
to ensure the mission’s success.
JON ARENBERG: The thing that keeps me up at night
is the problem we didn’t think of.
So-called failure of imagination.
NARRATOR: While the James Webb Telescope is the future,
Hubble’s engineering tribulations
and eventual triumph ensure it a prominent place in history.
JEFF: Hubble originally was sold as this instrument
that was going to revolutionize our understanding of
the universe, and it delivered on that promise, I think,
more than anybody could have dreamed.
NARRATOR: And all this has been possible
because of the scientists and engineers
who turned humanity’s dream of a space telescope into reality.
CHARLIE: Commitment to find a way to fix it
is one of the, the great things I’ve ever done in my life.
NARRATOR: The lessons learned transcend engineering and science.
ED: We tried something hard, it’s important, and we screwed up.
And it was such a screw-up that the whole world laughed at us.
But the important thing of that story is perseverance.
We kept trying, and we eventually succeeded.
JIM CROCKER: And that’s a story that we humans love,
and it’s certainly one that I loved having been a part of.