It's easy today to take the Hubble Space Telescope and its
glorious views of galaxies and colorful nebulae for granted after 15 years of
amazing astronomy and countless cosmic photographs.
But just after World War II, when astronomy via a
"spaceship" got its first concrete proposal, putting telescopes and cameras
in space to look back in time sounded outlandish.
As astronauts prepare this week to fix and
upgrade Hubble one last time, astronomers are reflecting on the nearly half
a century it took to overcome both technological and political hurdles before
Hubble would send its first pretty picture.
In the post-war era, when the idea of a space telescope got
its first serious consideration, not a single spaceship had been launched, so
there was no precedent for launching anything, heavy or light, much less a
gargantuan telescope with a camera and setup for beaming images back to Earth.
The history of Hubble reveals it was a project that, for
several reasons, almost never got off the ground.
Long drama
Sputnik, when
launched in 1957, weighed just 185 pounds. By contrast, astronomically
powerful telescopes are quite heavy. The first 200-inch ground-based
observatory — the Hale
Telescope on Palomar Mountain in California — had yet to be completed back
in the late 1940s. And the Hale ended up weighing about 1 million pounds. And
that's at the lower end, size-wise, of what was being talked about for space.
Decades would pass.
Finally, thanks to astronomer Lyman Spitzer's vision for an
orbiting space telescope and work advocating for it, along with the efforts of
an army of engineers, politicians, astronauts and scientists, the first stunning
pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope were returned to Earth in 1994.
The hurdles were enormous and nearly unending, but the
Hubble had to happen, on some level, says science historian Bob Zimmerman.
"The drama of the story is how long it took, but never
the less, it was inevitable," he told SPACE.com.
Here is Zimmerman's short review of the hold-ups:
"In the 50s, astronomers were reluctant because of the cost.
In the 60s, they were reluctant because of the technological aspects. In the 70s,
they were on board, but Congress was an issue and the money wasn't available. In
the 80s, there were more technological issues. In the 90s, it was launched with
an incorrectly shaped mirror. It took almost 50 years from Spitzer's first
proposal before the telescope was sharp and clear and ready to take pictures."
A cast of thousands
Spitzer's initial idea, hatched in 1946, was actually
feasible, Zimmerman said.
After wrapping up work related to World War II in
Washington, D.C., Spitzer headed to Santa Monica, Calif., where he drafted a
paper for a project, "Astronomical Advantages of an Extra-Terrestrial
Observatory," for the newly formed RAND Project there.
His proposal for a 200- to 600-inch space telescope was
based on technology that was available at the time (including the German V-2
rocket used against the Allies in WWII) or thought to be on the horizon in the
coming decade, Zimmerman wrote in "The Universe in a Mirror: The Saga of
the Hubble Space
Telescope and the Visionaries Who Built It" (Princeton University
Press, 2008).
No one bit for another 10-plus years, Zimmerman found, based
on interviews he conducted with many key players over the years and his many
hours spent in various library and museum archives.
Eventually, Spitzer's proposal for an optical telescope in
space came to the attention of Nancy Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer, and
a working group of scientists who met to assess NASA's fast-growing science program
in 1962. The group was unwilling, though, to accept Spitzer's proposal, because
it was thought to be premature and faced serious technological hurdles,
Zimmerman wrote.
Another working group and a few years later, there was
strong support for what was then called the Large Space Telescope, with a
120-inch diameter mirror, Zimmerman wrote. It helped that Spitzer chaired the
group, and that the Ranger, Mariner, Gemini and Apollo programs were then
generating tons of space engineering. At that point, Roman became a heavy NASA
advocate for what became the Hubble Space Telescope, especially moving into the
1970s.
"She made it possible to get early telescopes up [into
space] to learn what needed to be learned," Zimmerman said. "As soon
as that technology started to mature, she was pushing for the design work. Her
hard-nosed nature helped get the telescope built, but worked against her
politically, eventually hurting her career."
Hubble heroes
Another Hubble hero down the road was energetic astronomer
Bob O'Dell, who eventually gave up a tenured position at the University of
Chicago to be the project scientist for the Large Space Telescope project at
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
Hubble's history in the 1970s involved a lot of political battles
for control of the project and a fierce, drawn-out battle to obtain money for
it from Congress. As a government employee with NASA, O'Dell was unable to
directly lobby for Hubble, but he dedicated countless hours to organizing
important astronomers to do that work, Zimmerman wrote.
O'Dell also did clean-up work on a number of others'
political missteps with Congress. Those missteps included asking for too much
money at first and mentioning a report that had given short shrift to the Large
Space Telescope.
At one point in 1974, the House Appropriations Committee
recommended zero funding for the telescope. Going against his boss's orders,
Zimmerman wrote, O'Dell then organized a successful, extensive lobbying
campaign by astronomers to undo that.
Key astronomers
One of O'Dell's key soldiers, along with Spitzer, was
astronomer John Bahcall at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. A
person with endless enthusiasm, Bahcall became a lobbying voice for O'Dell,
enduring some of the classic brush-offs and rude treatments that come with
dealings with members of Congress.
Budget cuts in the mid-'70s forced O'Dell and other to
reduce Hubble's aperture to 94 inches, which could fit inside the cargo bay of
the space shuttle. The shuttle was in the works, but not yet flying.
In 1975, Noel Hinners, the new NASA administrator, played
the ultimate political hardball, Zimmerman wrote. The political climate then
was unenthusiastic about space and NASA, and politicians were under deep
suspicion as a result of the Watergate scandal. So instead of accepting a small
figure from Congress to get the telescope off the ground, he refused all money
and deleted the entire telescope budget. This generated a firestorm of protests
and lobbying in 1976 and 1977, with O'Dell still working behind the scenes and
Bahcall in front of the scenes, leading the troops.
One dramatic highlight: Bahcall arrived five minutes late
for breakfast prior to some key meetings with members of Congress during that
time, Zimmerman wrote. The astronomer explained that had cut his thigh badly on
a nail sticking out of his hotel mattress and spent half the previous night in
an emergency room. Nonetheless, Bahcall hobbled up and down the long halls of
Congress the rest of that day, in obvious pain, continuing to make the case for
Hubble.
Another wild lobbying moment that year noted by Zimmerman:
Bahcall met with a Congresswoman in the ladies lounge adjacent to the House
floor so she could dash out for a key vote if necessary.
Success with funding
It worked. By the summer of 1977, a Congressional committee
approved a budget for the space telescope. Other enormous challenges followed
in building the telescope and then in addressing the well-known mirror problem
that cursed the telescope's first pictures in 1990. But all these were
surmounted and are another entire story.
However, the dedication and vision, especially of Spitzer,
for whom the Spitzer
Space Telescope was named as a tribute to his contributions to space-based
astronomy, are recognized by many in the field of astronomy and beyond.
In retrospect, Bahcall told SPACE.com in 2004 (a year before
he died) that he was "enormously proud" of the telescope's success.
"It exhibits some of the best properties of Americans — ingenuity, ability
to overcome obstacles, which we faced when the telescope was first launched and
had an imperfect prescription for the lenses. It reveals beautiful things to us
about the way the universe is that we would have otherwise not imagined and
that gives us a source of pride particularly on days when there are things in
the newspapers that are not a source of price for the United States."
Zimmerman agreed.
"The thing that stood out the most was the dedication,
the unwavering commitment to push this, the willingness to make sacrifices to
get it to happen," Zimmerman said. "Among the people who count are
Spitzer, who had the commitment to push for the telescope for decades; Bob O'Dell,
who made sacrifices in his career to make it happen; John Bahcall, who
sacrificed years of research time to lobby for the telescope; and Nancy Roman,
who antagonized a lot of scientists to push for this project."
Regarding the upcoming
repair mission next week, Zimmerman is not counting his chickens before
they hatch. "This is rocket science," he said. "Anything can
happen. The American track record is superb at trying to do these impossible
things, but they are impossible things. They take a little longer."
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