ASTRONAUT: Houston, Atlantis can report that the star tracker is not
the only thing that can see a star on our horizon.
I'm looking out the window here and it's an unbelievably beautiful site.
Everything you're seeing is real.
This beautiful imagery of our universe isn't
an artist's impression, but visualisations using data
from a telescope that orbits above our heads in space.
A telescope that has transformed our view of the cosmos.
The world's most famous telescope.
Hubble.
HST external power is complete.
In orbit since April 1990, Hubble has travelled more
than 6.5 billion kilometres around the Earth.
Pushing back the frontiers of astronomy and sending back
extraordinary pictures.
One could argue that Hubble is not only the most successful
telescope in human history, it's one of the most
successful scientific experiments in human history.
And to this day there's lots of science that you can only do
with the Hubble Space Telescope.
For me, Hubble represents a tremendous achievement
of using technology in a way that actually unifies humanity.
I love the fact that people around the world feel that it's kind
of their own personal eye to the universe.
What is remarkable about Hubble is its resolution.
Hubble has been really key in shaping our understanding of how
the universe structures itself.
Five, four, three, two, one...
Boom!
Lift off!
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of its launch,
this is the remarkable story of how Hubble revealed the awe
and wonder of our universe.
And how a team of daring astronauts risked their lives with a series
of dangerous and challenging missions to keep Hubble working.
Story Musgrave, take one...
Steve Smith, interview one, take one...
Interview, John Grunsfeld, take one.
Interview, Mike Massimino...
Kathy Thornton, take two...
As astronauts we can only go so far.
Hubble shows us the beauty of what's out there and it takes us places
where we can only imagine going.
Well beyond our solar system.
Well beyond our galaxy.
Hubble is the quest for the universe.
It's also the quest for, in a way, for who we are and who we should be.
So it's to put ourselves in perspective.
Who are we and who should we be and what is our future?
Hubble is exploring the universe for us.
Hubble was the first large optical telescope to be placed in space.
Orbiting more than 540 kilometres above the Earth,
it escapes the distorting effects of our planet's atmosphere
and so has an unobstructed view of the universe.
Hubble is orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes or so.
All the time that Hubble's looking at something,
it's also moving at thousands of miles an hour around the Earth.
It's actually not as hard as it sounds.
Hubble was basically designed with the predicate that astronauts
would go and replace a system that would become obsolete.
As a matter of fact, much of the science that Hubble
is doing today was not even imagined when Hubble was originally designed.
Hubble goes around the Earth about 15 or 16 times in a day.
And every day has a smorgasbord of science.
We might look at a planet for a couple of hours.
Right now it looks like we were looking at a nearby galaxy.
In a few more hours we might look at something completely different.
Hubble's mission is to solve some of the biggest
mysteries in the universe.
It's controlled at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center.
Right now you're standing in the Mission Operations Room.
This is where we command Hubble.
What you are seeing here are a bunch of displays that our flight
operations teams use for its daily operations.
We also have an image that shows Hubble in real time,
it's what shows us how it's oriented in space.
In this particular image you can see where the sun is and we've turned
the solar panels so that they can maximise the amount of sunlight
that's hitting it so we can produce enough electricity to not only power
the spacecraft but also to power and recharge the batteries.
So when we go into the shadow of Earth we can run off the batteries.
We monitor the temperatures of various instruments and make sure
that nothing is getting too hot or too cold.
We also monitor the voltage levels that are in different
parts of the spacecraft.
So we're monitoring all the hardware on Hubble all the time to make sure
that it's all working properly and that it's all safe.
Hubble is the only major general purpose observatory ever designed
to be looked after by astronauts.
On five daring missions, these astronauts have
risked their lives on dangerous spacewalks to repair
and upgrade Hubble.
Steve Smith, my mentor, helped me learn how to spacewalk.
And still is a very close friend of mine.
And we were neighbours.
Our kids were the same age.
We spent a lot of time together socially.
Kathryn is this very articulate, very thoughtful person.
KT was incredibly helpful in working the very minute details
with her experience and also with her personality.
Story is an amazing guy.
He's got like nine degrees or something.
He's always a student, always interested, always curious.
He keeps you laughing.
He keeps you guessing what he's going to say next.
I've enjoyed working with Story.
John is a PhD.
Very well educated, very deep into astronomy and so flying
with him was very educational.
He's never nervous about anything.
Really professional.
I think we're kind of a special band.
We all rally around this cause of upgrading and repairing
the Hubble Space Telescope, which has produced such
extraordinary science.
The theme that I was taught and accepted was every space flight
is a good space flight.
And then some people would say "but some are better than others."
The astronauts' journey to Hubble is certainly not
for the faint-hearted.
Strapped to a giant rocket that's about to go from zero to more
than 28,000 kilometres per hour in just eight-and-a-half minutes.
About one or two minutes before launch the spaceship starts to move
a little bit and that's because the engines
are being checked to make sure they can gimble.
So you can feel the spaceship moving left and right a little bit
and you hear some funny sounds as pumps start.
T-minus 10...
So there's this rumble and a shaking and so you know that those beasts
are alive in the back there.
It's a monster, it's a beast.
And it has you.
You're at its mercy.
After two minutes, when the main engines are shut down and separate,
it's a very, very smooth ride.
You feel the acceleration building up so you get heavier and heavier
and heavier in your seat.
And in eight-and-a-half minutes it's over.
You go from feeling like there's this gorilla sitting on your chest
to floating instantly.
It's an amazing feeling.
You can see it out on the horizon.
It shows up, it looks like a star out there.
And then you get closer and closer and closer and it gets
to be a brighter star.
So you keep pushing your velocity more and more.
So if the Earth is like this you just keep creeping up.
And then you're there.
Houston, Atlantis.
Hubble has arrived on board Atlantis with the arm.
The life of Hubble is intertwined with the life of the space shuttle.
Like a loving parent, the shuttle has looked after Hubble,
ferrying equipment to it and enhancing its power to make
new discoveries about the universe.
This is the incredible space shuttle Discovery.
Space shuttle Discovery is, I think, a really historic bird because it
launched the Hubble Space Telescope.
The Hubble Space Telescope was actually designed to fill
the volume of the payload bay of the shuttle.
They did an excellent job in maybe one of the closest tolerances.
T-minus five minutes and counting...
Close and lock your visors and initiate your O2 flow
and y'all have a good trip.
April 24th, 1990.
Space shuttle Discovery was sitting on the pad
at the Kennedy Space Center.
The countdown clicks down to zero...
And lift-off of the space shuttle Discovery with
the Hubble Space Telescope.
Our window on the universe.
Discovery leapt off the pad to space and eight-and-a-half minutes later
it was orbiting the Earth, travelling at 17,500 miles an hour.
Discovery, Houston.
You have a go to open the doors.
The crew in the cabin of Discovery opened the payload
bay doors, revealing the Hubble Space Telescope
tucked inside.
And then the crew grabbed the Hubble and gently lifted it out
with the robotic arm.
Extended it, deployed the solar arrays and sent it off
to do its mission of discovery.
Discovery, you're go for umbilical disconnect.
Hubble was one of the most anticipated scientific
projects of all time.
Once in orbit, astronomers all around the world prepared
for the amazing images to come.
But they were in for a nasty surprise.
More major problems for Nasa tonight and this time it's not a quick fix.
The Hubble Space Telescope, which cost $1.5 billion -
the telescope which was supposed to give scientists 15 years
of dramatic new pictures of space...
..it's broken.
Engineers have discovered that the giant telescope
has a warped mirror, which means the images sent back
to Nasa are distorted.
After the billions of dollars spent, the first pictures that Hubble
beamed down were blurred.
Astronomers were devastated.
An investigation revealed that the outer edge of the main
mirror had been made too flat.
The solution would involve the most spectacular
mission attempted by Nasa since the Apollo moon landings.
Story Musgrave and Kathryn Thornton were members of the seven-person
crew assigned to go and fix Hubble.
There weren't very many of us in the office at that time we had
done spacewalks and so that's how I got kind of a quick turnaround
from one flight to the next.
I started with Hubble in 1975.
The Astronaut Office gave me the role of being the astronaut that
would look at the future of this machine.
You know, in all the fares, the hundreds and hundreds of fares
I came up with that I had to accommodate, I did not
have a line item that says "Nasa put wrong mirror in telescope.
Hubble's misshapen mirror was too big and cumbersome to be replaced.
So, instead, the plan was for the astronauts to swap out
Hubble's main camera with a brand-new one.
The Wide Field Planetary Camera, the main instrument aboard
the telescope, which is located in a compartment in this area,
will be pulled out by two astronauts and replaced with a new camera
with corrective optical lenses aboard.
A second device called Costar would also be fitted.
Costar is a series of corrective lenses that will make the other
instruments on board the telescope be able to see clearly for the first
time in the Hubble's three-and-a-half-year history.
The stakes were high.
The astronauts knew that this mission would
determine Hubble's fate.
I never worried about getting hurt, I never worried about falling off
and getting lost in space.
I just didn't want to mess up.
11, 10, 9...
We have a go for main engines start.
Five, four, three, two, one...
And we have lift-off.
Lift-off of the space shuttle Endeavour on an ambitious mission
to service the Hubble Space Telescope.
While most people in the United States were still sleeping,
the space shuttle Endeavour roared off on its mission to fix
the Hubble telescope.
Endeavour has a firm handshake with Mr Hubble's telescope.
APPLAUSE.
The world held its breath as the astronauts carried out five
back-to-back spacewalks in an attempt to bring Hubble
back from the brink.
The first spacewalk on Hubble?
Did the dance.
When the music starts, whatcha gonna do?
Floating more than 540 kilometres above Earth's surface,
Story's job was to fit Hubble's mammoth, 280 kilo
replacement camera.
There would be no second chance.
Well, you've got a power tool and you unbolt the thing.
You undo the connection - zip, zip.
Stick it in a box.
Hang it over there, get the new one out.
Slide the new one in.
Zip, zip.
Story and Geoff took out the old Wide Field Planetary Camera
1, pulled a new one out of its container
and slid it in there.
It's fingertips, baby.
Fingertips.
That's what's so awesome about Hubble.
It's almost like plug-and-play.
We installed Costar.
We installed a co-processor on the computer to give it more memory.
Added a new magnetometer and other "cats and dogs", as we called it.
It is easy.
You've got to make it easy.
You ready?
Oh, I'm ready.
They say you've got to go for release.
It was my job to throw away the solar array that didn't retract.
And so I had the best seat in the house for that.
It started flapping like this big, giant bird.
It was beautiful.
Can you hear us?
The Vice President and I wanted to call you and congratulate
you on one of the most spectacular space missions in our history.
You made it look easy.
And touchdown...
All round the world, astronomers anxiously
awaited the first pictures from Hubble's new camera.
There was no plan B.
If the fix hadn't worked, then Hubble would be one of the most
expensive white elephants in scientific history.
It's called "first light" in that world, astronomy.
It's first light.
It's when a telescope, it's the first thing...
..how are we doing?
CHEERING.
Right there!
Oh!
Did it!
When the image hit the monitor...
..everyone screamed!
Just...
"God, it's fixed!"
That is better than any you've ever seen.
Hubble could finally see clearly with the crystal clarity
that had been promised.
It's a little premature but I'll shake your hand!
From its inception in the mid-1970s to its troubled birth -
even becoming the point of ridicule - alone and now fully functional,
Hubble had something to prove.
Something it was about to do in spectacular fashion.
One year after Hubble's vision was fixed, astronomer
Paul Scowen and his colleague, Geoff Hester, finalised plans to use
Hubble to explore one of the most important processes at work
in the universe.
How stars form.
One of the most fundamental things that astronomy is still striving
to understand and explain is how stars are manufactured,
how they are made.
Our own sun, which is the closest example of a star that we have,
is a medium-sized star.
But when we look around the Milky Way we see
this range of very few, very massive stars and a lot
of very smaller ones.
What we are trying to understand is how the conditions for making
stars affect how big those stars can get.
In an attempt to solve this mystery, in April 1995, Hubble
turned its powerful gaze for the first time to a giant
cloud of gas and dust called the Eagle Nebula.
Paul hoped that Hubble's unrivalled high resolution would reveal
processes at work within the stellar nursery for the first time.
When we get the data in the first place they are literally the images
that were read out of the camera up in space.
And nothing has been done to them.
So one of the first things we have to do is we have to get rid
of all the scratches that you see in the raw images that come
from energetic cosmic rays boring their way
through the camera itself.
The camera that we took this data with is actually four cameras
and so I had to actually stick all four frames together.
Hubble did not look at this nebula in colour,
as you and I would understand it.
It took separate black-and-white pictures that we had
to subsequently apply colour to.
Red, green and blue - literally what is used
in computer colour displays.
And we've just used that as a tool to portray the structure
in the nebula in a way that the human eye
can easily pick out.
Hubble showed the heart of the Eagle Nebula
in extraordinary detail.
It was at that point that I then had the ability to mentally take
a step back and say, "Oh, my gosh!"
"Look at what we're looking at."
We were just gushing about it and people were coming into the lab
from elsewhere in the department.
"Oh, my gosh, that's amazing, look at this!"
And then we were going up and down the corridors in the building
showing people and everybody was just so very excited.
It quickly got the buzz phrase "Pillars of Creation".
What Hubble had seen are vast clouds of mostly hydrogen gas.
The raw material for making stars.
The tallest of the pillars is at least 30 trillion kilometres high.
The equivalent of 1000 times the diameter of our
entire solar system.
The pillars have been sculpted by powerful radiation
and stellar winds raining down from newly-born, massive stars.
Viewed in infrared, the gas that makes up the pillars
becomes transparent, revealing clusters of
embryonic stars within.
Within the nest of the Eagle Nebula, Hubble had shown the birth of stars
in unprecedented detail.
Giving astronomers new insights into this incredible process.
Part of the reason that Hubble has become such a famous telescope
is that it's showing people phenomena that kind of speak to them
almost on a spiritual level.
The last people to see the origins of our universe.
Hubble's famous for a couple of reasons.
One is just that it has this ability to show us things
we haven't seen before.
The images are beautiful.
You know, they are aesthetically pleasing as well as
scientifically fascinating.
And so they inspire curiosity, they spark a bit of wonder.
The other is, there is a human connection to the observatory that
a lot of telescopes, you just don't have it.
There's a story there that just resonates with people.
It's the observatory who had problems, that got repaired
and suddenly is doing great things.
So it's the underdog.
It's the comeback story.
These beautiful, colourful nebulae that Hubble was famous
for are basically signposts to us that stars are continuing to form
in the Milky Way galaxy.
We are fascinated by these but we also think they're beautiful,
just like everyone does when they see these images.
But in reality, in the mid-1990s, this was only the beginning.
Hubble was about to go hunting for the most destructive
force in the universe.
All countdown events are on schedule and the launch team is on station
here in firing room three.
On the 11th of February 1997, space shuttle Discovery blasted off
again from Cape Canaveral.
Once again, astronauts were risking their lives.
This time to upgrade Hubble and give it new powers.
Space shuttle Discovery is on its way on a mission to keep the Hubble
telescope state-of-the-art.
In two days, Discovery will rendezvous with
the Hubble telescope.
It's the first time that Hubble has been visited since the 1993 mission
to correct its blurred vision.
A key part of the new mission would be to fit a state-of-the-art
instrument called a spectrograph.
Like a prism, the instrument splits light into its component colours
and would enable Hubble to probe the secrets of galaxies -
the building blocks of the universe.
Everything rested on the mission being a success.
The space telescope imaging spectrograph was about
the size of a refrigerator.
So it's this giant box and was worth on the order of 100 or $200 million.
The exact number doesn't matter.
It just was big, heavy and expensive.
Stop.
Taking the old box out went pretty straightforward.
But then I went over and picked up the space telescope
imaging spectrograph, put it in.
And that's when nervousness went up a bit.
Because now I've got the real box, there's
lots of people depending on me.
There's lots of people watching me.
And so, it was time to be really focused.
Could you bring it forward another foot, please?
We actually were able to get it into position with no issues.
When we tried to tighten it down, the first time it
did not tighten correctly.
At that moment, I thought, no, please let's not
have a big issue here.
Maybe just be a little bit off and maybe we can fix this.
Actually, give me another foot.
And sure enough, that's what happened.
We went to our back-up procedures, loosened the bolts,
I moved it around a bit, tightened the bolts
up and it was secure.
Houston, the test is complete and were successful.
Even before the space walk was over, we knew
that it was working pretty well.
I know a lot of scientists around the world are happy about that.
Mission accomplished.
Astronauts released the Hubble Space Telescope back
into orbit early this morning.
Nasa doesn't expect another mission like this until 1999.
With the new spectrograph, Hubble could probe the very heart
of galaxies, to search for one of the strangest and most
terrifying objects ever discovered in the cosmos.
Black holes.
Priya Natarajan is a scientist who wanted to use Hubble to shed
light on the largest black holes in the universe.
To confirm their existence, and discover how common they might be.
In 1997, when the second servicing mission was on, I was a graduate
student at Cambridge.
The prospect of settling the biggest open question of the time
within a matter of months after launch of this instrument
was really exciting.
A black hole is an area of such immense gravity that even light
cannot escape its pull.
In 1992, Hubble had seen evidence of a very massive black hole lurking
within the centre of a galaxy 45 million light years away.
Now, with its new instrument, it had the means to gather
definitive proof of its existence.
What we are looking at here is one of the earliest iconic images that
Hubble provided in 1992, before the installation
of the spectrograph.
And the supermassive black hole lurks right here, in the centre.
This image shows gas swirling around what astronomers believe
is a giant black hole, feeding on its surroundings.
The way in which we image and infer the presence of a black hole
is by looking at the impact that the black hole exerts
on its immediate environment.
So, in this instance, in this image, what we really see
is the effect of the gravity, the intense gravity
of the supermassive black hole that is sitting here that is pulling
all this gas towards itself.
And as the gas is being pulled in, it's being sped up,
it's getting heated up, and the gas starts to glow.
So what we're really seeing is the dying gasps of the gas before
it goes into oblivion, and gets sucked into black hole.
Armed with a new instrument, Hubble could now attempt
something incredible, and weigh a black hole.
Amazing as this image was, it's a static image.
So it doesn't tell you anything about the speeds
of gas in this region.
And those would be the ones that would totally ratify
the supermassive black hole picture.
Because the speeds of the gas, if we could measure them,
would give us a direct estimate of the mass of the black hole.
With its spectrograph, Hubble had become a black hole hunter.
On the 14th of April 1997, took aim at a galaxy called M84.
Hubble scanned the very heart of the galaxy.
Mapping the motion of the swirling gas and weighing the invisible
black hole at its centre.
The measurements revealed a black hole at least 300 million times
the mass of our sun.
A cosmic monster.
Hubble data showed that the stars and the gas were moving out,
I don't know, 880,000 miles an hour.
That's like 400 kilometres a second or something.
It is extremely fast.
Hubble turned its gaze to other galaxies to see if they might also
harbour monster black holes.
The expectation was that black holes were a rare phenomenon.
So it was totally surprising that at least in the nearby universe
Hubble found that pretty much everywhere it looked
there was a supermassive black hole in the heart of a galaxy.
Many astronomers had thought supermassive black holes were rare.
But Hubble found them everywhere.
Some spewing out fast jets of material and energy,
extending well beyond the confines of their galaxy.
What Hubble set afoot was this transformation in understanding,
completely radically changed our conception
of black holes.
So they've come from the sidekicks to playing the starring role.
And I think the quest is on to see if there's really...
Are there a class of galaxies that don't harbour a black hole?
Hubble had helped transform astronomers' understanding
of the make-up of galaxies, and revealed one of
the universe's great secrets.
As Hubble entered the new millennium, it prepared
for its greatest quest.
To see further across the universe than ever before,
to look back in time and explore cosmic evolution.
Once again, the shuttle and its crew were called to action.
It was a Monday morning.
Steve Smith knocked on my door at like 7am, which is time to start
getting to go to work.
And he shows my door.
And I said, what's going on?
He's holding a kid's book.
You know, like, Hubble Space Telescope kids book.
Good morning, Mr Massimino.
I'm Steve Smith, I represent the United States government.
I'd like to request on behalf of the people of the United States
if you could go service the Hubble Space Telescope.
In my estimation, Hubble was the ultimate, the epitome
of what you could do as an astronaut.
Not that the others aren't, but this is the big time.
We had a good man-hug between us and it was a really
celebratory moment.
The plan was to enhance Hubble's vision with a new camera, called
the Advanced Camera for Surveys.
Built at a cost of over $100 million in today's money,
it would be ten times more powerful than its predecessor.
The Advanced Camera for Surveys was going to be the best camera
ever put into Hubble.
And it had a wide-field sensor that would enable us to see deeper
into the universe than ever before.
Mike, you can tell, the New York wave there.
Fitting the more than $100 million camera involved
a dangerous spacewalk.
The astronaut chosen to do it had never even been in space before.
I was a pure rookie.
This was the first time they had ever sent a person out of the door
to work on Hubble that had never flown before.
I didn't know anything.
Columbia OTC.
Good luck on your mission, allowing us to better
glimpse our future by enhancing Hubble's view of the past.
Close all of your visors, initiate O2 flow.
Main engine start.
Lift off.
Just shy of 21 years after she first flew,
Space Shuttle Columbia hurtled to the heavens once again.
It was down to the rookie astronaut to upgrade the world's
most famous telescope.
I'm heading off to the side, is that correct?
The first thing we did was to open up the telescope
and get the old camera out of there and stow it.
Just go a little bit to your left.
We unhooked the Advanced Camera for Surveys from the carrier,
Jim got over with the robot arm and he was lifted out
by Nancy Currie, who was our robot arm operator.
I think it needs to come a little right, by about two inches.
Turned around, and I helped him and Nancy guide it into the telescope.
And then we drove its latches.
They've checked the door seal.
Very good.
Hubble has a way of throwing us curveballs now and again.
The Advanced Camera for Surveys went pretty smoothly.
Hooked it up to power and data, and did a little
checkout, and it worked.
Everything had gone to plan.
Me, personally, I couldn't think of a better first space flight.
Not quite to the moon, but still pretty good, I thought.
And I was very grateful for that opportunity,
and felt it went pretty well, and I was hoping I would get
a chance to go back someday.
As Space Shuttle Columbia returned to Earth, Hubble prepared
to use its new camera.
It was going to push back the boundaries of what was possible.
The camera would enable it to see further than ever before
across the visible universe.
What Hubble discovered next was truly extraordinary.
This is one of the deepest optical images of the universe ever taken.
It's the full-blown Hubble ultra-deep field.
And what's important to think about in this image is you're
looking at a lot of objects in what seems like two dimensions.
But, really, you've got a three-dimensional
view of the universe.
The light from the most distant galaxies has taken billions of years
to travel across the universe and reach Hubble.
By taking this picture, Hubble was literally
looking back in time, to see the very early universe.
The first thing you're going to see, down here on the right-hand side,
there is a galaxy very much like the Milky Way.
That galaxy is about 5 billion light-years away.
So, we are looking back in time by 5 billion years.
But if we go further back in time, 9 billion years into the past,
you see this little group of galaxies, in particular
these two in the centre.
They are odd shaped, because they haven't yet had time
to build these beautiful structures that we see.
These are colliding together, and that's how galaxies built up
to become what we see today.
Even further back in time, to 12.6 billion light years,
and what we see is this little red galaxy beginning to emerge.
It's red, because we're looking at a galaxy whose light was admitted
when the universe was about 10% of its present age.
And it doesn't look like an elliptical galaxy, and it
doesn't look like a spiral galaxy.
This is a piece of the universe that hasn't yet had time to come together
with other pieces to create the spiral and elliptical
galaxies we see today.
Hubble had looked back in time towards the final frontier,
the dawn of galaxies.
It had captured almost 13 billion years of history in a single image.
It was an astonishing achievement.
But, for the astronauts who had put their lives at risk
and made it possible, there was little room
for celebration.
I remember very distinctly, it was just before eight
o'clock in the morning.
I was sitting at home with my wife and we were watching the entry
of Space Shuttle Columbia.
We've got a little problem on the Space Shuttle Columbia.
It has been out of communication now for the last 12 minutes.
Let's take a look at a live picture of mission control in Houston.
Mission control centre did not have contact with Columbia.
And the clock kept ticking, and it was several minutes
after they were supposed to have contact.
And I turned to my wife, and said, I think
we just lost Columbia.
On the 1st of February 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia burned up
during re-entry with the loss of the two women and
five men on board.
My fellow Americans, this day has brought terrible news
and great sadness to our country.
At nine o'clock this morning, mission control in Houston lost
contact with their Space Shuttle Columbia.
A short time later, debris was seen falling from the skies above Texas.
The Columbia is lost.
There are no survivors.
Just a year earlier, Columbia had carried astronauts
to Hubble to fit the new camera, its last flight before
its fatal mission.
We all know that it's an incredibly dangerous business.
When it happens, though, it's just devastating.
Absolutely devastating.
And, you know, even though we all know what the risks are,
and we know what good comes out of it, on days like that,
it really takes time.
You need to take time to pause and think about it.
You know, explorers always feel that the programme should continue.
That's been documented many times by previous astronauts.
I, for example, before every flight wrote my family members,
each one of them, a letter, in case I didn't come back.
And I gave that to a close friend.
And so the ones to my spouse, for example, would say,
we know what the risks are, we know how great the gains are.
If anyone asks you, I'm totally in favour of us
continuing this venture.
And, by the way, you should get married again.
So...
In January 2004, Nasa announced that it was cancelling
the upcoming mission to Hubble.
With safety concerns over the shuttle, it was deemed
simply too dangerous.
Hubble was being abandoned, with no prospect of future
repairs and upgrades.
I was pretty disappointed.
They had already started getting ready for servicing mission four.
The equipment was built.
Those science instruments aren't cheap, and they don't really
have much purpose other than going to Hubble.
So were we really going to forget about this?
The decision to abandon Hubble provoked a massive outcry.
Before long, Nasa was receiving thousands of messages a week
in protest as the campaign mounted to save Hubble.
I remember going to a school in the midwest, where children had
raised funds when they heard that the Hubble Space
Telescope servicing mission had been cancelled.
They wanted to do something to help Nasa.
And of course, my heart was touched.
Then, in October 2006, the news came that Nasa had
reversed its decision.
Hubble was going to get one last visit before the space shuttles
were permanently retired.
John Grunsfeld used to say the Hubble knows when someone's
coming to fix it and service it.
And something will happen.
And sure enough, that's what happened.
As we started training, the space telescope imaging
spectrograph failed, followed by the Advanced
Camera for Surveys.
And suddenly we had a situation where it looked like all
of the scientific instruments on Hubble were failing,
and our job would be to bring them all back to life.
And here are the astronauts now walking out of
the astronaut quarters.
The first and only time in the entire space
shuttle programme history, there are going to be two
shuttles ready to go within a few days of each other.
Nasa has even put it another shuttle on standby in case they need
to launch a rescue mission.
We knew this was it.
So let's enjoy it, let's make sure we do the best job we can.
John Kennedy said we try these things not because they are easy,
but because they are hard.
Particularly in this mission, the final mission,
we are going for broke.
After seven years, Hubble needed a complete overhaul.
But the success of the entire mission had come down
to just one screw.
The biggest concerns we had were the repairs
of the space telescope, the spectrograph and
the Advanced Camera for Surveys.
The repair of the space telescope imaging spectrograph,
over 100 new tools were invented for this one task.
Including a power tool, because we had 111 small screws
to remove, and this was the most complicated spacewalk we had
ever thought of doing.
Getting ready to go out there and do it on that day,
I knew this was a big day for me.
In the back of my mind, I was thinking, well,
I wonder what's out there really waiting for me.
Because it's always that one thing out there that can get you.
And I was hoping nothing like that would surface when I went
out the door that day.
OK, here we go.
Mike Good and Mike Massimino went out of the airlock,
back to the telescope, opened the doors, prepared the work
site where the spectrograph lives.
And the first thing Mike had do was to remove a handrail.
He's engaged the lock.
I wanted this to be a perfect day.
And everything was going well for a while.
And then one of the simplest things we were going to do,
one line in the check list.
Remove handrail bolts, four.
Four handrail bolts.
One line in the check list.
We copy your discussion, and that's great.
We also have good video as well.
Two in the top came out.
One on the bottom left comes out.
This was nothing.
It was like tying your shoes in the morning.
The one on the right, I'm waiting for a good
green light on my tool, and spinning it, and
nothing is happening.
I thought, jeez, that's kind of funny.
I tried it again, and nothing is going on.
And then I look and see what I've done.
I am looking at a gnarled screw head.
I have destroyed that screw.
There is no way we are going to be able to unscrew that.
It's stuck.
The bolts are big bolts.
You know, how could you strip it?
And in training, we had never stripped one.
I don't think that one's coming out.
Well, that's not good.
For literally hours we had a team onboard and the team on the ground
trying to come up with a solution.
And finally, after a few hours, the ground called up.
Mission Control wanted Mike to rip off the handrail
using pure brute force.
The fate of one of Hubble's most important instruments
hung in the balance.
I went back to the telescope, I taped it up as best we could,
and gave it a few tugs.
And pulled, and pulled, and pulled.
And then bang.
It came right off and I was very grateful for a second chance.
We picked it back up where we were.
Easy, Mike.
Just real easy, OK?
547 kilometres above Earth, travelling at more than 27,000
kilometres per hour, all that was left for Mike to do
was to take one last look at Hubble.
I was in the airlock, and Scooter, my commander,
comes over the comms loop.
And he says, Mass, what are you doing?
I said, I'm just getting the airlock ready for ingress.
And then he said, is there anything you're doing now that
can't wait until later?
He goes, why don't you just go outside and enjoy the view?
And then I remember going out to right above the airlock
and putting a tether on a handrail and just kind of letting go,
and I just sat there and enjoyed the view for however
many minutes we had.
And it was magnificent.
There was something that this was the last lap here,
you know, this was it.
So, this was the last look at our planet and our universe, and Hubble.
The only thing left for me to do on that spacewalk,
and for my spacewalking career, was go inside.
Knew it would be the last time I would see the Hubble Space
Telescope, because the shuttle retirement was imminent.
It's why we have Space Shuttle Discovery in the museum.
I was wondering why I wasn't sad.
And then I thought, we've just given Hubble new scientific instruments,
we have repaired ones that were broken.
We have put in new electronics.
Making Hubble better than it's ever been before.
I had the chance to actually give Hubble a final pat
and a little salute, and wish the Hubble Space Telescope
well on its voyages.
Houston, Hubble has been released and now Hubble can
continue on its own, exploring the cosmos
and bringing them home to us, as we head for home.
Thank you.
I would never count this observatory out.
I would never bet against it.
Because it always has a way of making what seems
impossible possible.
Really great people on the ground, clever people find ways to do things
with this observatory that we haven't imagined before.
Marking Hubble's 30th anniversary, I am filled with both a sense
of great appreciation for what has been learned through this
magnificent platform.
I'm grateful for all the people, for decades, who have
enabled this to happen.
And so, the legacy of Hubble is one that doesn't end with Hubble.
Happy birthday, Hubble.
Happy 30th.
I miss you.
I wish I could see you again.
But good luck.
Hi, sweetie.
I love you.
Thanks for showing us the beauty of the universe.