Science Friday - Astronaut Kathryn Sullivan, Marie Curie Play. Nov 22, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: November 22, 2019

For most Americans, the story of the Hubble Space Telescope began on April 24th, 1990, the launch date of the now 30 year-old observatory. But for astronaut Kathryn Sullivan, Hubble’s journey began on a wintery day in early 1985 at a meeting at NASA headquarters, where she was assigned to the mission that would take Hubble into space.  For the next five years, Sullivan, a former oceanographer and first female spacewalker, got to know Hubble intimately, training and preparing for its deployment. If Hubble’s automatic processes failed as it was detaching and unfolding from the spacecraft, Sullivan would be the one to step in and help. And she almost had to. Sullivan joins Ira to share the untold stories of Hubble’s launch and her time at NASA as told in her new book Handprints on Hubble. Physicist Marie Curie is remembered as the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the first person—of two ever in history—to win two Nobel Prizes. With her role in discovering radium and polonium, and the energy emitted in the decay of large atomic nuclei, she brought us the concepts of radiation and radioactivity. Curie helped lay the groundwork for a revolution in both physics and chemistry.   But a new play explores the person behind the brilliant scientist. In The Half-Life Of Marie Curie, we meet Curie after a scandal: She’s been caught having a love affair with a married man. But in a time of depression and isolation, she’s rescued by a friend,  English scientist Hertha Ayrton—also an intrepid but lesser-known physicist, engineer, and suffragette.  Playwright Lauren Gunderson joins Ira to talk about the deep friendship between the two scientists, the importance of seeing Marie Curie as a person outside her work, and the many connections between storytelling and science.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, former astronaut Catherine Sullivan recalls what it took to launch the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit nearly, oh, 30 years ago. If you have a question about the early days of Hubble or NASA's first class of female astronauts, you can give us a call. Our number 844-724-8255, or you can tweet us at Cy-Fry. But first we turn to Madam Marie Curie, the physicist who helped discover radium and with it radioactivity. And for her work, she was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only person to win two in different sciences. It's possible you knew that last part, but did you know that she also invented a portable x-ray to help injured French soldiers during World War I? Or that she drove the ambulance and administered the x-rays herself.

Or how about this? She had a close friendship with another brilliant woman in science, the English physicist and suffragette Hertha Ayrton. These are all just a few of the things that I learned from a new play. The Half-Life of Marie Curie, which pulls back a curtain to reveal the human side of this scientist. And now the playwright is with me. Lauren Gunderson is a playwright whose webpage loudly proclaims, I love science. Welcome to Science Friday.

Hi, Ira, I'm such a fan of the show. Thanks for having me. Well, thank you. You know, I'm going to quote from your web page again, I find deep and thrilling drama in the course of scientific progress and put it on stage as much as possible. And you have been doing that during your career. I have indeed. It's almost two decades of diving into science because I think science is incredibly stageworthy. It's riveting. It's emotional. It's intellectually thrilling. So I always go back to it. Let's talk about this latest play, The Half-Life of Marie Curie. It doesn't actually start with Madam Curie's science, but a personal scandal, right? Indeed, yeah. What made me want to write this story was taking something that we do know, Marie Curie,

and something we don't know, which one of those is a person, Hertha Ayrton, her great friend, and as you mentioned, incredible engineer and physicist and suffragist. But also this moment in Marie Curie's life where, frankly, she was closer to Monica Lewinsky than to Albert Einstein. She was brutalized in the press, absolutely just diminished, and the just radical cruelty that she survived because of this love scandal that her secret letters between her and her colleague, Paul Langevon, were released to the press, and it was just a May Day against her. And here is this incredible woman.

This also happened when she was in the process of winning her second Nobel Prize. And I found those two things deeply interesting, partly because it exposes that scientists are people. They're not just brains. They are bodies and hearts. And it is not what we expect of this certain scientist of Marie Curie. And I found that to be a really thrilling alchemy to put on stage, rich emotion, high stakes. And, you know, it becomes a story about this incredible, unstoppable friendship that defines both of these women and frankly changes the world as well as saves their own lives. Let's talk about that friendship. We meet Marie's friend Hertha Ayrton and accomplished scientist in her own right. And I would wager that most people

have never heard of her. Yes, I hadn't. Tell us about her, how they met and what the relationship was. Yeah, she's an incredible woman in history, a person in history. So she likes to, like her. Marie Curie kind of came from not much, was not expected to be much more than a wife and a daughter, but they both found science. And what Hertha became was this radical intellectual. She was a fan of literature and poetry. She actually chose her own name from a poem by Alderman Swinbird called Hertha, which he wrote about this goddess of the earth. So that's the kind of woman she is. She says, my name is Sarah Marks, but I'm going to choose the name of a goddess. And she finds that a great inspiration in the science is particularly in electromechanics show.

She invented a solution to the electric arc, which was, of course, lamps at that time. This was at about turn of the century. And she found a way to re-engineer the lamp so that doesn't make this terrible hissing and popping noise that it used to. And these lamps were everywhere on streets and stages, homes. And so she really kind of saved the world from this racket. but also took the time to investigate all sorts of large and small parts of the physical world, ripples in the sand and wave dynamics. So I found her incredibly interesting.

She was also a political activist during the suffrage protests and movement at that time. Pankhurst was a friend of hers. All of the suffragists would come to her house after they'd been starving themselves in prison. They would go to Horth's house to be fed and kind of welcomed back to society. So she's the most fascinating, incredible person. And I didn't know anything about her. And there was one little footnote where she was a great and true friend of Marie Curie's, and they exchanged all these letters and they visited each other.

And then this one moment in time in which the play focuses is this true moment where Hertha basically saved Marie Curie's life. She said, you are in the middle of this scandal. You are physically ill. You depressive to a concerning point. And I am going to be your best friend. I'm going to save the day. and you're going to come to my beach house on the countryside of England, the coast of England, and stay as long as you want. And she did. And both of these women and their daughters spent the time that summer.

And it really did save Mary Curie. And I think the play goes into why and how. And how do friends save each other? How are we there for each other? How can this certain kind of deep, true, brave, courageous friendship just really become the bastion. the support that any of us would need. So in many ways, even though it's about two scientists, about history, and it's about two women, it's actually all universal global themes of the human experience. And in fact, we have a clip from one of the scenes in the play that I really, I really, really liked.

And it's where Hertha and Marie are talking about what moves them most. We love our lovers. We adore our children, but our life's passion is proof. Yes. knowing what's true and proving it, peering for just a moment into the heart of the universe and snatching some truth before the curtain closes. Mother Nature doesn't give you much, but when she does,

she gives you everything. That is the greatest feeling in the world. God, yes, it is. Wow, Lauren, these scientists are not at all dispassionate or emotional. removed from their work? Do you think that would surprise people? Oh, I think it absolutely would. I think people might assume, oh, this is a history lesson. Oh, this is something unimpassioned and cold because it's scientists or scientists. Either science is boring or scientists are boring and none of those are true. And I will say just an incredible shout out to our actors, K. Mulgrew and Francesca Feridani, who play their hearts out on the stage every night in this production. They were really great. You know, and I've made the mistake over the years. Sometimes when we talk about scientists, we say they're a scientist and then there are people, you know.

Right. But your play goes, I mean, that seems to be a central core of your play is showing how these are, they have emotions, they're humans, they think about themselves and their families and their love life, just like real people. Indeed, aren't they just like all of us? Well, that's, I think, what makes it so compelling is you get what is incredible. about the study and the rigor of science. You get universal, global themes. You get massive ideas, change-making, world-shaking ideas. But you also get people who make coffee and our mothers and fathers and get their hearts broken

and all of these day-to-day human things and frankly things that all of us will face, mortality, legacy, meaning. So in that way, it's part of why I keep going back to science is you have this one level that is intellectually rigorous and another that is emotionally engaging. And both of those matter.

And I'm married to a scientist, an incredible virologist, and I see in him, as in many of my friends, who are physicists and mathematicians, this passion. And it is a quest for knowing that isn't as detailed as solving an equation, although, of course, that's part of it. It is big and philosophical and metaphysical.

And I'm so drawn to that part. Well, you're very famous for writing other plays about women in science. I'll just name one in particular. The famous people like Adelaide, and you also had Emily Ducatelais. What drew you to Marie Curie? Oh, well, it's funny. I have written a lot about scientists. I'm a very first science play was about a kind of unknown cosmologist named Ralph Alfer. He did win the National Middle of Science before he passed away, but he was a cosmologist. And then I wrote about Newton and Darwin and kind of found, and I asked myself, wow, that's a lot of dudes. I keep writing all the boys. There's, they're

must be some other women here. And of course, it actually occurred to me to write about Marie Curie, even back then. This was a decade and a half ago. But I didn't. In some ways, because I thought it was too obvious. So here I am now, finally at a place where I can, I think, gratefully understand her more. She was a mother. She was a mother of two, as a I. Her female friendships were so fundamental to her vulnerability, to her resilience. And that has been true for me. She had an incredible sister. I have an incredible sister. So there's something about waiting for this moment in my life to reach across time to talk to Marie Curie about her life. It felt like it could be a play, again, about all of these fabulously exciting ideas and radioactivity and that birth of that science

that she was critical and foundational too. But also about being alive, being a person, being a parent, being a friend, being someone whose emotions get away from them who loses in love and gains love and misses people that you've lost in your life. And at this point in my life, I feel like I know her more than I would have if I'd written it 10 or 20 years ago. It was it tough picking the actors for this? Oh my God. Well, there are incredible actors, but I will say as soon as I heard Kate Mulgrew, who is known for Orange as a New Black and of course Star Trek. She is an absolute force of nature. And Hertha is the same. And I felt in them kind of there was a twinning there. So it felt

very right and very real. And Francesca, similarly, she has this fire in her. And what we really wanted was, I think if you look at pictures of Marie Curie and read her speeches, they're very stoic and conservative, and she looks kind of conservative. And we wanted to find the woman who would, you know, roll her sleeves up and dig through uranium ore for years with no help. Who is that woman? That's the woman I want to. I want to know and do so well pregnant and do so, you know, well engaged and like, oh, my God. So we had to find somebody with that fire, and Frankie has that. Yeah, that's great. The actors are terrific. It's a terrific play. We're talking with Lauren Gunderson playwright, the Half-Life of Marie Curie that's running in New York City until

April, until December 22nd, December 22nd, and then available on Audible, on Audible starting December 6th. And it's only two actors in the play, so it should work on Audible, I think. She's going to stick with us. If you have a question 844-7-24-8255, you can also tweet us at SciFri. We'll be right back after this break. More with Laura Gunderson. Stay with us. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato. We're talking about what we don't know about Madam Marie Curie, brilliant physicist, pioneering woman in science and the drama inherent in stories of science. But if you'd like to know more and really enjoy a terrific play, you can go see the half-life of Marie Curie. It's now playing in New York, and it's written by Lauren Gunderson, who is with us right now. How much do you decide to put how much science into each play, whether, you know, it's going to go over the head of the audience or too deep into the weeds? Yeah. I mean, I think what, like with any expertise, you want to hear what it actually sounds like. So I want our scientists and this play and any scientist I write to use the language of science, whether that's math or, you know,

whatever verbiage feels authentic. I think that's important. You also have to make sure the science is right. And there is a simplification, but I think in truth, a lot of science ideas can be simplified into an expressible form, perhaps not incredibly abstract mathematical concepts,

but the physics that she was doing that hurt that were doing were material. And so there is a way to talk about it where it is engaging, exciting, even funny. What I love so much about this play in this production is how hilarious it is that actors just bring so much riotous heart to it. But you can do that while still being accurate with the science.

And, you know, I want people to learn something. I find that to be a great gift of the theater is always walking away, almost in any play, learning something new. So I certainly want that to be part of it. And you use the concept of half-life as a metaphor in this play. What metaphor is it for? Yeah, Half-Life being the moment when radioactive material decays into a different element, radium decays to radon and to lead.

And, of course, that being a metaphor for the human experience, for human life, for all of us, how we change. There is the core of us that is continuous. You can trace where we come from as people, but we change, you know, from a teenager to, you know, all of it. And Marie Curie is at this particular moment when we meet her. And Hertha is as well at a great moment, a crux, a deciding point. And, you know, this scandal could have very nearly ended her life. And what a tragedy. What a stupid tragedy it would have been to have something, this gossipy, be the end of this great mind.

And it wasn't in large part because of this friendship. But it was interesting that you have highlighted two women who are struggling in two separate fields for the same kind of recognition. You know, one is political, one is for science. Did you carefully weave that in together? Yeah, I mean, partly because they were real friends, it was already woven in, you know, their friendship. And the kind of contiguous themes between these two incredible thinkers and women's lives were very complimentary because they shared them. Hertha asked Marie Curie to basically borrow her brand a hundred years ago to put her name on the cause of. of suffrage in England.

And Marie always wrote to her about different science and kind of life moments. So they shared a ton, and that way it was already braided together beautifully. Let me go to the phones. Let's go to Sunnyvale, California. Harleen, hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thank you so much for a fascinating discussion. I had two questions. One was, how did you research about Madam Curie?

And secondly, how much of the play is fact? versus fiction. And I'll take the answer on offer. Okay, thanks for calling. Sure, yeah, great question. I mean, every research, all of the research that I do for my plays is very dedicated. And the only fiction is we don't know exactly what they said when doors were closed in rooms that were not being recorded. But there are many quotes throughout the play, including those of Albert Einstein written to Marie Curie and Herta's actual quotes about the power and the perseverance of science. And so all of that is real. And this exact moment in time it happened. this summer happened, the scandal happened, the timing is intentionally and deeply accurate

because I love digging into those corners of history where we know the bookends, we know where they left and where they came back, but we don't know what happened in the middle, except that lives were saved or discoveries made. And I think it's the kind of wonder and the power of theater and fiction that we can time travel, really. We can go right to the heart of that moment and explore. what must have been a crushing emotional experience for Marie Curie and find truth in that, that we can all take away.

I think you explore also something that most people don't know, and most people say, Madam Curie, radium, you know, that sort of thing. And it's the only person they know. But you also talk about the really interesting aspect of using X-rays in World War I, how many thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. She actually drove a van with an X-ray machine, a portable X-ray machine around. to the battlefield? Isn't that nuts? It's the coolest thing. And she did it with her daughter. She and her daughter, and she invented this x-ray. Of course, x-rays had been around for a decade or so at

that point. And she decided, well, let's make the mobile. So she put them in a war zone. And again, this is fighting for a country who just, I think, betrayed her, who was calling her these terrible names in the press, basically ran her out of the country for this scandal. And here she is coming back and saying, I'm still a patriot. This is still my adopted country. And I will, I will engineer and fight and show up to the front lines. I find that amazing. And Hertha, of course, also did some amazing engineering at that time for the British military, creating a system to get rid of the horrendous poisonous mustard gas from the trenches. So both of them, you know, even being denied so much by their own societies and scientific communities, still said,

you know what, I got a good idea, it's worth it, and put it out there and change the world. I just, I can't get enough of these women. And you frequently top the list. of most produced playwrights in America. I mean, more plays being produced on more stages than anyone else. What do you think this says about what audiences want from theater? You know, honestly, I know I'm on Science Friday, but I hope it says that people want stories of thinkers and of science. I think now is certainly more time than ever

that we need the stories of why science is so powerful and important and urgent and why the stories of women and allied men are the things. important as well, diverse voices in the American theater. Because when we go to the theater, we go to have our hearts and minds engaged and hopefully changed and grown. And I think what people have shown me by this incredible thing to be on the top of this list is a commitment to understanding more than you could ever understand by yourself. We're, you know, bigger and more and better together. So, and, you know, half of my plays more than half are about scientists, including a play Silent Sky that's going to Ford's Theater in D.C. in January, a massive, beautiful production.

And I'm definitely going to sit in that link in box because if you have a play at Ford's Theater, you got to. What's that play going to be about? Biography? Yeah, it's the astronomer Henrietta Levitt. She was one of the Harvard computers who, again, about the same time, actually, 100 years ago-ish. She was one of the people who found what's now called the Standard Candle and basically helped us measure the size of the universe, but she did so at the turn of the century being what they literally called computers.

They computed the science for the male astronomers. And so it's a gorgeous story about astronomy and mathematics and the women who were at the forefront of that field. So again, I hope because these plays are on stages all over, it means that there is, we have not lost what is intellectually compelling and urgent about these stories of big ideas and big feelings and people. Yeah, the dirty little secret is people. love science. They do. It's a dirty little secret. Don't tell everybody.

I have a couple of requests from people. I have a tweet coming in from page who says, why don't you write about Grace Hopper, the mother of modern programming, and someone else says Rosalind Franklin is overdue to have a play about. Rosalind Franklin has an amazing play by Anna Ziegler wrote about her.

She's incredible. And Grace Hopper, I would agree, just her savvy and would be an amazing play. Well, we wish you great success with this play. It's going to be here in New York till December 22nd. And then this is an audible play, right? Audible-sponsored. This play?

Yes, you can download it on December 6th and listen to these incredible actors and the beautiful sound design and hopefully join us wherever you are in the world. There you go. And congratulations to you, Lauren, for a great play and hope you keep out the good word. Thank you. That means the world hour. Thanks for having me own.

You're welcome. Lauren Gunnison, playwright of the Half-Life of Marie Curie. For most Americans, the story of the Hubble Space Telescope began 30 years ago on April 24, 1990. The day the first of its kind observatory was launched into orbit. But for astronaut Catherine Sullivan, the story of Hubble began on a wintry day five years earlier. When she was called into the office, a flight crew operations director, George Abbey, and named as a member of the five-person crew that would take Hubble into space. And for the next five years, Sullivan, a former oceanographer and the first American female

spacewalker, got to know Hubble intimately, training and preparing for its deployment. If automatic processes shut down or failed as Hubble was detaching and unfolding from the spacecraft, Sullivan would be the one to step in and help. And she almost had to. Dr. Sullivan shares that story as well as others in her new book, Handprints on Hubble, an astronaut's story of invention. And if you have a question about the early days of Hubble or NASA's first class of female astronauts,

you just want to talk to Catherine Sullivan. Hey, we're happy to have you do that. 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at Cy Fry. Dr. Sullivan is a former astronaut, and also you may not have known. She was under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere. And NOAA administrator.

Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks, Cyrus. Great to be with you. Nice to have you. You were a member of NASA's first class of female astronauts in 1978. Is that right? That's right. We were the first group hired for the space shuttle. And so we had two genres of astronauts. We had test pilots, as everyone had come to know before, back from Mercury Days. But in our class, we had quite a large cadre, in fact, 20 out of the 35 that were scientists and engineers. We were going to be this new thing called mission specialist. Yes, I know Jeff Hoffman from back of the day when he was working with us on Science Friday and my other reporting duties. You call yourself the 35 new guys. Was that an official name?

It became an official name. It's sort of one of the first little hazing rituals, I suppose, for each batch of astronauts that arrives at Johnson Space Center is pick out your nickname. And we put our minds together and thrashed around every which way from Sunday. It was hard to come up with anything too very clever. And besides that, there is an acronym in the military flying circles, TFNG. It stands for the blank new guy. I'll let you and your listeners fill in what the blank might be. So we thought the cleverest thing we should do since we had the T and the F already in our 35

was just go with that flow and become the TFNGs, the 35 new guys. 35 new guys. And you came to NASA with a Ph.D. in oceanography. I mean, that's looking in the other direction, is it? Yeah, it is through all the murky water as well. But the thing that was in common, or at least that struck me as being an element in common, was the putting together of expeditions. You've got some scientific event or quest or discovery or measurement you want to make.

You need to do either out at sea or up in space. What kind of vessel can take you there? How does it work? What are its peculiarities and handling qualities? And what's the equipment you need to take with you to do that work? How do you make the two mesh together and really function together smoothly? And then, oh, by the way, at sea, just as in a spaceflight, the one thing you can count on is events will not unfold completely as you had laid out in your plan. So how adroit, how nimble are you? How much have you thought in advance and equipped yourself with everything from spare parts to backup mechanisms? that even when life deals you a different hand than you expected, you can still achieve the objective that you were after. Amira Flato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking with former astronaut Catherine Sullivan, and talking about the first days of this space race and the Hubble in that,

not the space race, but the Hubble. Did you find that you were well equipped, or did you have to start over again? Because, you know, being looking at the oceans, you have to relearn everything. Yeah, we all sort of started over. Our first year, all 35 of us, was spent going together through a very elaborate curriculum that I call graduate school for astronauts. So if you think of any aspect of science or engineering that faintly pertains to spaceflight, everything from human health and physiology to solar physics to spacecraft engineering to meteorology, we all went through a real thing. really condensed crash course that was about equivalent to a first-year graduate student

course, I would say. We all went through all of those together. At the end of that year, we had a couple things going for us. We'd kind of bonded as a class. We knew each other pretty well now. We knew each other's respective areas of expertise. And, you know, I was maybe out in front on the meteorology and the oceanography and the geology, but I caught up a lot on the spacecraft engineering and physiology. And so it cross-fed in all these wonderful directions. So we all scampered a lot during that first year and learned an awful lot during that first year.

But I did feel actually well-equipped because I wasn't going on the shuttle to continue doing oceanography. I was really going to be an operator and operate equipment, experiment, satellites on behalf of other people who would remain on the ground and not get to do their own work in space. And again, that connected in my mind back to the work I had done on a oceanographic research vessels. Did you ask to be, go with the Hubble Space Telescope assigned to that, or were you just open to whatever they assigned you to? You know, I think every astronaut is open to being assigned to absolutely every flight. I was just finishing up from my first flight, actually,

and the White House had tapped me to serve on a presidential policy commission. So I was sort of buried in those two things. And it was a delightful surprise for my boss to call me in really so quickly after my first flight and tap me for a second flight. Oh, so you, and you made multiple flights and, and, well, were you surprised what it was like to be up in space? Yeah, on some level, I think you have to be surprised. It doesn't matter how much you watch other people fly in space, and I think I had watched every astronaut since Alan Shepard, the experience of it.

And, you know, the journey, your own journey of preparing yourself as a crew member until that moment that you launch. and you get into orbit, you know, the journey itself changes the experience that you have when you're doing it instead of watching someone else or looking at someone else's pictures. I think I was surprised in the right kind of ways, not in ways that really were an obstacle or a shock that might prevent me from getting the important things done we needed to get done. But I was wonderfully surprised by just how much fun it is to goof around in zero gravity and absolutely surprised, despite all of my background and all of my studies, absolutely flabbergasted

by how exquisitely beautiful the earth is when you see it with your own eyes. Yeah, something like Carl Sagan, the pale blue dot, and we're all in this together, right? Get that impression? We were more pale blue beach ball. We were not as far away as Carl had in mind when he coined that phrase. Can I coach you on that? That was a good, that was a good comment. Sure, go ahead. Pale blue beach ball from Dr. Sullivan.

But we're talking with Catherine Sullivan, author of Handprints on Hubble, an astronaut story of invention. If you'd like to talk with her, 844-8255 is our number. We'll come back and talk about a lot of really interesting aspects of the Hubble Space Telescope you didn't know of. Like, the original idea, it was to bring it back to Earth for repairs every time you wanted to repair it. Boy, that didn't happen. And for a good reason, we'll talk to Dr. Sullivan about that journey.

Stay with us. We'll be right back after the break. Hey there, Ira here, coming at you with some great news about how you, yes, you can make a big impact right now. Science Friday has a dollar-for-dollar donation match in effect, which means that if you make a donation right now, it will be doubled. Yes, I said doubled. You heard me say this before. Any size donation makes a difference, and that's never been more true than now. I know you care about Science Friday, so don't wait on this opportunity. Go to ScienceFriday.com slash give and double your impact. Thanks.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. We're talking with Dr. Catherine Sullivan, former astronaut, most recently Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere, and NOAA administrator. Dr. Sullivan was part of the five-man crew that accompanied Hubble on its voyage into space nearly 30 years ago, and she has a new book out called Handprints on Hubble, an astronaut story of invention. And I have to ask you this question because you did accompany the Hubble into space,

and you have handprints on Hubble, but you say in the book you never got to touch the Hubble. It's true. But I claim I have metaphorical handprints on Hubble because of the work I did leading up to launch. And more importantly, a point that gets really to what my motivation was to write the book, there was this gang of engineers, some at the Lockheed Martin Corporation, some in Houston, some in Huntsville, Alabama,

who really did this foundational work of making sure that Hubble was repairable. We had the tools. We had the equipment. We had the detailed knowledge of the telescope, and we could hand that all off to whichever crews would come along, whichever astronauts would come along, actually given the challenge of going up and fixing it. So my argument is, I think I have a metaphorical handprint on Hubble, and as importantly, so to all these unsung engineers who laid that vital foundation. No argument on this end. What I find interesting and some of the great little nuggets that I've never knew about,

and I covered the Hubble and I covered the shuttle from day one, is the idea that the Hubble was originally made or thought about, we knew it would have to be repaired and parts we were at, and we would bring the Hubble back to Earth, fix it and send it up again? Is that right? That's right. And it surprised me, too, to discover that and to discover how long that idea held on. That idea kind of came about in the late 60s, as, again, the space shuttle itself is just a concept that's emerging.

So shuttle and Hubble really came into being at the same time and played off each other in many different ways. Before either of them was a real spacecraft. The engineers were, you know, counting, banking on each other back and forth. And so the first idea was scientific instruments, maybe tape recorders, maybe batteries, that list of things will count on astronaut crews from the shuttle to go up and swap those out maybe every two years or so. But a lot of the other stuff, the really guts of the telescope, the electronics boxes, that's going to be harder to do. You're not going to be able to design that for spacewalk. So every five years or so, we'll bring the Hubble back to Earth,

and we'll do those tough jobs in a nice facility on the ground. That idea, had lasted till something around 1984, as far as I could tell from papers in the archives. And I think what really happened is with a few years of experience with the space shuttle, seeing it was more expensive to operate than had been estimated. The turnaround times between flights were not as fast as an airliner. And a lot of customers had signed up. So I think finally the Hubble team realized if you ever bring this thing back, it's going to end up in a museum, not ever back in space.

again. And by the way, you're going to have to maintain these tremendous amount of really very specialized and expensive equipment on the ground to handle it when it comes home. So you really got to keep all that going for a two-week visit every five years? That doesn't make any sense. You know, I think of all the accomplishments of the space program, and let's say post-luner missions, that I think the Hubble, the photographs coming back from the Hubble and still coming back from the Hubble, the publicity given to the cosmos out there, is one of probably NASA's greatest public achievements in telling us about, in keeping the public informed about space. Yeah, I would agree with that, Ira.

And I think Hubble is unique or maybe a peer with the Apollo missions in that sense. But it's certainly the first, I would argue, only tell us, whose work has entered the public imagination and pop culture to the degree it has. That's at least a bit due to the fact that Hubble came into being as the computer revolution was really taking off and the internet was coming into being the thing that we know what to be today. So getting information out to huge numbers of people suddenly was happening at the speed of light. But still, I see it to this day on cell phone covers on the side of U-Haul trucks on people's socks and T-shirts. I mean, it's really pervaded our culture in a way that I can't remember any other scientific instrument doing.

Let's go to the phones for a phone call or two. 844-724-8255. Let's go to Jim in Birmingham, Alabama. Hi, Jim. Thank you. I'm Dr. Thorne. I'm actually from your hometown, Montgomery. And my daughter also graduated from, she graduated from the Aerospace Engineering School at Auburn.

And I used to speak in her classrooms and lots of other classrooms. and lots of other classrooms about getting kids interested in science, math, and engineering, and management. And my daughter was actually told by another child in her class one day that girls don't do science. So that glass ceiling was still around. That was in the 1990s. She's a level three engineer now and just accepted a new job with Lockheed Martin, as you mentioned. but what was it like for you, I think he went to Sydney Lanier High School in very conservative Montgomery and then to Auburn, which was male-dominated. Jim, I'm not sure you have the right, I'm not sure you have the right astronaut.

But anyhow, let's talk about the glass ceiling. What do you think about Dr. Sullivan? Yeah, you're confusing me with Catherine Fortin, who we all called KT in the astronaut corps because she spells her name the same way I do. and KT did fly on the first Hubble servicing mission, as well as a number of other flights. I don't come from quite that same background, but not all that dissimilar, and I'm a bit older than KT. So it was certainly true that it was rare, and in both circles considered either unusual or just not done, for women to go into field camp as a geologist, for women to go out to sea as an oceanographer. lucky for me, I was raised by parents that inoculated me with the notion that no one gets to edit what I'm interested in and no one gets to tell me what I can't pursue. I may have to fight my way forward a bit. But if you're interested in something, if you're passionate about something, you invest in it and pursue it to the best of your abilities and you don't respond to the peanut gallery.

I alluded to this in the intro in the segment. Can you share with us what happened when Hubble deployed? in space, and the spacewalk that almost was. Yeah, so Hubble was connected by a power cord to the space shuttle while we took it up into orbit, and at some stage, as we're unbuttoning it and getting ready to lift it out of the cargo bay, at some stage, of course, we unplugged that power and put Hubble onto its own batteries. The batteries could only run for a certain amount of time before they would run down so low, it would be dangerous. And so that little window of time, everything had to go right.

Intentas had to unfold. Most importantly, the solar arrays, which were very complicated mechanisms. They were like pull down window curtains. They had to unfold. And Bruce McCandless, my spacewalking buddy and I, we were prepared and trained and spring-loaded to jump on our spacesuits and grab a wrench and go outside and manually back up any of those events that didn't happen correctly.

Well, sure enough, one of the solar rays did not spool off of its roller the way it should. So Bruce and I dove into our spacesuit to get in the airlock. We're going through all the steps of emptying out the airlock and heading outside. And just before we were going to dump the rest of the air from the airlock and go outside, just before that, an engineer on the ground recognized that the problem was a faulty sensor, not a real issue. So he sent a software command that solved. it, and Bruce and I, having worked on Hubble for five years, were the only members of the crew that

did not see it deployed. We were both staring at the very sterile, white interior wall of the airlock while all the excitement happened on the upper deck. How disappointing was that? I mean, you are in the suit, ready to go. You know, Ira, honestly, in the moment, I was just so focused on where are we with Hubble, where are we on the battery clock? I mean, it was so great. I mean, to get to be a part of making this instrument happen and get into space. At the moment, I just was still in the moment and listening to all the events as they unfolded. One of my crewmates, Charlie Bolden, actually came on the intercom and apologized to Bruce and me for leaving us stuck in the airlock instead of getting us out so we could see the deployment. And we both said, no, no, that's fine. You guys carry on. Get this done. This is bigger than a sightseeing opportunity.

Make sure Hubble survives. You write in the book about how the Challenger disaster actually kept Hubble grounded for more than four more years, but it actually ended up helping the mission? It certainly did help the lifetime of the telescope. As I said earlier, at the start of things, there was a fairly short list of boxes and components on the telescope that astronauts were meant to change on orbit. And everything else it was imagined would be done when you brought the telescope down to the ground. Right around the time, Bruce and I started working on the telescope, that notion flipped on its head, and now suddenly everything is going to have to be repaired or replaced by astronauts in orbit. So our charge became not only be ready for the things that might go wrong when you deploy it, but dive into every other box on the telescope and do everything you can to make it a little easier, a little more friendly for, you know, working in a spacesuits like working in two snowmobile suits with a bucket on your head. It's very cumbersome work arrangement.

So see what you can do to make sure that these other devices actually could be handled by spacewalking astronauts. And in a couple of instances, we made modifications to units on the telescope itself that absolutely saved the day several years later when indeed astronauts went up and had to change out one of these really gnarly, impossible boxes. And those changes had made it possible, possible but still horrendous. difficult, but they got it done. Interesting. We asked people to call in via the SciFRI Voxpop app, and we asked their questions about living in space. We had this from a read from Colorado Springs. Last month, I showed the live footage of Koch and Myers working outside in space to my students when the following question came up. Do astronauts ever use hammers either inside or outside the ISS? There you go. Yeah, good question. The toolkit does

include a hammer, certainly did on shuttle and the last time I saw the station toolkit, but I'm not aware of the hammer actually ever being used. We never used one on any of my shuttle flights. That's interesting. It's in the toolbox?

Yeah, well, you know, it's just in case you had to apply a sharp force to something to put it into position or get it out of position, but you know, you don't build space stations and space shuttles with nails, so you're not using it for nails. So do you have a special kind of ratchet or ratchet wrench or something that you use? Yeah, the ratchet wrench on orbit is a different one. And one thing that's particular about it is where the handle connects to the wrench head,

that little pivot point. We've got about a three-inch diameter disk there. And that's so when you're working in a spacesuit with it, you can just put a flat hand on the top of the wrench at that pivot point and make sure that the ratchet will run. really, will really ratchet. I think anyone who's worked with a ratchet wrench, you know sometimes you actually kind of need to hold on to it and make sure that it clicks back into position with each swing of the wrench. You can't grip your hand that tight with a spacesuit, so we wanted to

be able to use a flat hand. Let's go to the phones to Birmingham, Alabama, and David, hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks so much. Really love the show. I have a nine-year-old daughter, Katie, who is very interested in space. She has actually been writing a collection of NASA facts for the month of November that have been broadcast on a local radio show in our area. And a question that she has, what is the, what's the best way for an interested young woman to to make her way to space. What's the best path of study and research if that's a direction she chooses to go? Thank you.

Yeah, thanks for the question. You know, find a path in science, engineering, or math that really fascinate you, that ideally you've got some passion about it because that'll bring out your best. But at the same time, look at areas, any areas in science or math that you're not so strong at, And instead of just chalking those off and walking away, think of them as muscles that you just haven't developed yet. So I always lived by the motto, build on my strengths and shore up my weaknesses. I think if you do that and center your studies in the scientific and engineering fields and then, you know, aspire to excellence in everything that you do, your best. That's the single recipe that I know of that's got a chance of getting you there.

What's your reaction to being a role model for so many kids or so many people who want to be scientists? Is it a burden or you feel it comes with the territory? It definitely comes with the territory, and I actually consider it mainly a privilege. The astronaut title, the nice blue flight suit seems to open, in particular young people's hearts and minds. They're hungry for inspiring stories. They're dreaming of things they might do. And so we get, I get this extraordinary opportunity to offer what stories I've got, what maybe little glimmers or nuggets of inside I've got, that maybe one of them can take it to heart and use to shape their own path. So I think it's a tremendous privilege.

I don't want to forget your role as Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and an NOAA administrator. Are you concerned with the state of the oceans and what climate change is doing to them? I'm very concerned about the state of the oceans, both from a climate change point of view and a land-based pollution point of view. The issue of plastics in the ocean is real. It's serious. It's getting into human food chains, but it's already very systemically in the oceanic food chain. And we, at the end of the day, all the humans walking around on this planet, we depend critically on the oceanic food chain, not just what we want to go out to a seafood restaurant, but actually for the life support system.

of our planet, the very oxygen that we breathe. So we should all be very concerned about the health of the oceans. Well, I want to thank you very much for taking time with us today, Dr. Sullivan. And good luck on the book. It's called Handprints on Hubble and Astronaut's Story of Invention. Very nice to read and something you might think about as a gift this holiday. Thank you, Dr. Sullivan, for taking time. Thank you. I always love the show and it's a delight to be with you. Thank you. If you missed last week's show due to the impeachment hearings, check out the Science Friday podcast to hear about how to milk ticks. Yeah, that's what I said. How to milk ticks and a whole

bunch more stuff on there. Or you can ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday and we'll have a podcast up there. And on Science Friday Vox Pop, okay, here's our question this week. We're asking for your suggestions for an upcoming show about the world's evolutionary diversity. Do you want to hear more about slime molds or stink bugs or something else? Download the Science Friday Vox pop op and let us know what you think and you can get it wherever vox pop wherever apps are you know you get your apps from and you might hear yourself on the radio in the future so it let us know do you want to hear more about slime molds stink bugs something else on our science friday vox pop app and of course you also say hi to us on social media twitter instagrams or whatever

just a reminder next week it's our annual ignobell award show you know it's the friday after Thanksgiving. We do the Ig Nobel Awards. We've been doing it for like almost almost 30 years now, and it's a, you'll love to hear it. It's again next Friday after Thanksgiving, speaking of which, have a happy, have a happy and safe and wonderful Thanksgiving. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Plato in New York.