by Quincy Saul
(originally written Spring 2006 as a final paper for a class at Hampshire College titled "Astronomy and Public Policy" taught by Salman Hameed. Republished here on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Telescope.)
Any
interpretation or analysis of science must incorporate the context in
which science is applied. The historical, political and economic
circumstances in which science is practiced will determine not only
the goals of science, but also the philosophy and method used to
achieve them. Never a static ideal, always a didactic process,
science is and has always been changing, exclusive of any single
definition. This is especially important to understand in the
twenty-first century, an open-ended era where there is a simultaneous
apotheosis and vilification of science in the cultural consciousness.
A faith-based technocracy of specialists are at the helm of what has
become Big Science -- a fraternity of industry, technology, and
politics.
The
Hubble Space Telescope has arguably done more to popularize a ‘pure’
science (in this case astronomy) than any other undertaking in
history. In this process it has also come to reinforce the role that
Big Science enjoys in society today. This is perhaps ironic, because
the long and winding path that the Hubble took on the way to its
almost miraculous success raised and continues to raise unanswered
questions about the methodology that got it there. In this sense, the
Hubble and its history are not only a microcosm of the scientific
culture and climate that produced them, but can also serve at times
as a poignant and thought-provoking illustration of the fusion of
science, technology, industry, and politics.
The
first proposal for a space telescope came a decade before Sputnik, in
1946 from astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer who was perforce employed,
like many scientists of the time, by the war machine, doing research
for the U.S. Air Force. He submitted his proposal, Astronomical
Advantages of an Extra Terrestrial Observatory, to the RAND
corporation, where it was subsequently classified for years. Thus
from its very beginnings the enterprise was embedded in a political
conduit which would shape and define its future.
While
the Hubble was to become the largest technological and conceptual
leap in astronomy since Galileo, in the initial decades of its
inception the Hubble met with resistance from many parties. It was
dismissed by most at first as science fiction. The now obvious
advantages of a space based observatory were not apparent enough at
the time to spark much interest in the public or in the majority of
the scientific community, and the size of the project was
unprecedented in the forties. However, technological innovations that
arose from the international conflicts of the following decades,
specifically in rocket science, brought the idea of a space based
telescope closer to reality.
Still,
the size and cost of the project turned many away from it. It was the
most complex undertaking in space-science to date (as opposed to the
Apollo missions, which were not scientifically motivated). Some
ground-based astronomers, already struggling financially, were
rightly worried that a space astronomy initiative would compete with
their already negligible funding. The years to come would be full of
scientific and political turmoil. Years later, Spitzer was fond of
remembering how an older colleague of his, Jesse Greenstein, said to
him about the space telescope, “Lyman, you’re young, you’ll
live to see it fail”. Against all odds, it is only due to the
persistent work of many dedicated astronomers, engineers, and
politicians that it didn’t.
The
initially small community of advocates had their work cut out for
them. The cost of their proposal necessitated federal funding, and so
began the congressional path to the launch pad. Historian Robert W.
Smith talked of how the Hubble was “[c]hiefly an American
creation... the coalition building, compromise and bargaining
entailed in winning approval for the Hubble Space Telescope are woven
into the fabric of American society”. A growing alliance of
scientists brought the proposal to NASA, who raised it before the
Office of Management and Budget, where it was taken on to the House
and Senate, and eventually to the White House. The telescope had to
be sold to astronomers, NASA, industrial contractors, congress and
the executive branch, and all of these parties influenced to varying
degrees the conception and design that the project would eventually
take.
In
the early to mid seventies, campaigning for the telescope got
underway in earnest. The
American Astronomical Society was split on the idea of a space
telescope, and many of those opposed had legitimate arguments. It had
never been done before. Since that influential organization had to
remain politically neutral, it was up to individual advocates to
enter into the scientifically shunned realm of politics. The few
scientists who were willing to do this, headed by Spitzer, John
Bahcall, and Martin Swartzchild, were persuasive in lobbying with
politicians, industries and fellow scientists. The idea of a space
telescope was also gaining a foothold in the popular consciousness
with marketing and advertising. In 1972, DC Comics published a
Superman episode featuring a space shuttle and a large space
telescope, where Superman cleaned dust off the lens of the telescope
with his x-ray vision.
In
the congressional realm, Smith described it as “a process in which
no one ever had a complete grasp of what was happening”. Another
very American tradition, this would prove to be a recurring theme. In
what is sometimes referred to as ‘the first shot’, in June of
1974 the House Appropriation Subcommittee for NASA, in deliberations
that lasted less than five minutes, slashed all funding for the Space
Telescope for fiscal year 1975. The subcommittee was chaired by
Edward Boland of Massachusetts, the same senator who would prohibit
funding of the Nicaraguan Contras eight years later. He was to remain
a staunch opponent of the Space Telescope. It was then taken to the
senate, where as a result of lobbying by the industrial sectors,
Senator Charles Mathias from Maryland was barely able to get the
Space Telescope back into the NASA budget. Then, suddenly, President
Nixon resigned, and his successor Ford cut funding for the Space
Telescope in half.
The
political atmosphere of these times forced advocates to be constantly
repackaging their product to appeal to the white house and congress.
In this process, other nations were incorporated into the project,
with the European Space Agency agreeing to pay for fifteen percent of
the costs in exchange for fifteen percent of the observing time.
The
technology was also affected by this perpetual remodeling. During
this period, the Space Telescope was linked with another NASA
project, the space shuttle program. This was to form an interesting
symbiosis. Smith noted that shuttle advocates used the telescope to
justify the shuttle, and telescope advocates used the shuttle to
justify the telescope. In the documentary Selling the Space
Telescope, Smith relates how some critics argued that the cart
was being put before the horse in an even broader sense; that the
telescope was being used to sell the space program itself. The
consequences would be far-reaching for everyone -- the design of the
telescope was profoundly influenced by political compromise, and the
politics of Big Science would be vindicated in the telescope’s
success. But the outcome was not so certain; as Ed Weiler, a chief
scientist for the telescope said, “[w]hether we like it or not,
this program is going to become a national triumph or a national
tragedy”. He was almost fired from NASA for saying this; a sure
sign that he spoke the truth.
Tensions
were high. C.R. Odell, a NASA project scientist who served as an
interpreter between scientists and politicians, urged that the
“strong support for the telescope was not always present, but is
the result of a carefully orchestrated activity over the last few
years to educate the ground based astronomers about the potential of
a space telescope... We are now riding on a crest of their support,
but if we fail to capitalize on it, we may lose it”. And so the
battle in congress over the space telescope continued.
It
wasn’t always easy to explain to congressmen why a very expensive
astronomy telescope would benefit the taxpayers. Perhaps Robert
Wilson, an influential physicist, said it best. When asked by a
congressional committee how research in particle physics would
contribute to the defense of the US, he responded: “By helping to
make it worth defending”.
But
such arguments were not always persuasive. True to his outspoken
opinion, the subcommittee chair Edward Boland canceled funding for
the telescope again in 1976. In a risky feat of political foresight,
NASA manager and space telescope advocate Noel Hinners succeeded in
cutting even the planning funds for the space telescope, which would
have allowed some research to continue. “The funds would not have
helped,” Hinners explained, so in a not uncommon political tactic
known as ‘the Washington monument game’, an apparently absolute
cancellation was used to strengthen the the coalition against the
verdict. It worked: in 1977, due to lobbying by the now substantial
coalition of NASA, optical and aerospace industries, and independent
scientists, when the NASA appropriations came up for a vote on the
floor of the House, the space telescope was restored. And so, thirty
years after Spitzer’s initial proposal, the real work began. Yet
Smith emphasizes, as a result of all the tricky political maneuvering
necessary to attain this stage, the space telescope was both
“oversold and underfunded,” which would lead to many difficulties
in the years to come.
Before
they even started building it, the space telescope’s design had
been altered considerably from its original projections. The main
mirror size had been adjusted from 120 to 94 inches, and the number
of instruments cut from seven to five. Much of its design was
affected by its convergence with the shuttle. Shuttle enthusiasts
even encouraged bringing the telescope back to Earth periodically for
repairs. Most of the leading scientists strongly opposed this;
Riccardo Giacconi, the first director of the Space Telescope
Institute, wrote that “[i]f Hubble ever returns to the ground, it
will most likely end up in the Smithsonian”.
What
we now call the Hubble is an amazing piece of technology. And perhaps
most amazing of all is that it works. It’s 43 and a half feet long
and weighs 12.3 tons, as big and heavier than a city bus. There are
400,000 different parts, 26,000 miles of wiring. The solar panels and
one of the cameras were designed in Europe. Various teams under
diverse leadership worked on the many interconnected and complex
details of how this thing would work, leading to a web of
intertwining bureaucracies that were in general cumbersome to the
scientific goals of the mission.
They
began grinding the lens for what would become the smoothest surface
ever made in 1978. An optical company from Connecticut called
Perkin-Elmer got the contract for the building of the main mirror in
a low-bid auction -- in other words, the company who could build it
the cheapest got the contract. But this is only one example of a
larger trend; Smith reminds us that the approval for the telescope
came at a price: everything was to be “[l]ow cost, high risk”.
Another
reason Perkin-Elmer got the contract was because they had also built
over a dozen mirrors for space surveillance satellites that the
Pentagon was using in a covert operation called Project Keyhole to
look at the Earth. The popular belief is that the size of the
shuttle’s cargo bay determined the size of the mirror, and this is
perhaps true to some extent, but the cargo bay could have held a
substantially larger mirror. It is likely that the Hubble’s mirror
was modeled after the ones of very similar size which had already
been built for the Pentagon. In his book The Hubble Wars, Eric
J. Chaisson writes,
NASA,
strapped for cash in the mid-1970’s yet eager to boost its
floundering shuttle development program with a science package,
developed [a large space telescope]... of three meter diameter -- by
piggybacking onto the Pentagon’s array of neat optical products.
Yes,
yet another influential player in the development of the space
telescope is the Pentagon and its covert operations. Chaisson is
pointed on this: “NASA itself, whether it can or wishes to admit it
publicly, has always had an association with this shadowy element of
society”. For many, the role of the military was frustrating. Much
technology which had already been developed by the Pentagon had to be
reinvented because of the enforced divide between government and
civilian information. Chaisson ominously wrote in 1994 that the
military intelligence community had “successfully built and
operated orbiting telescopes more cerebral, versatile, and powerful
than Hubble”. But there is nothing new here. Chaisson reminds us,
“Galileo himself helped make a living by tooling spyglasses for the
Florentine city-state”.
The
telescope was scheduled to launch in 1986, but that same year, in a
more gruesome convergence of science and politics, the Challenger was
pressured to launch despite the cold weather so that it could be
flying directly over Capitol Hill while Reagan delivered his State of
the Union Address, which compromised the fatal o-rings and resulted
in catastrophe. What was now called the Hubble was stored for four
years, and the solar panels were taken back to Europe. But in April
of 1990 it was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida in the
Discovery, the lightest of the space shuttles. The shuttle mission
was a success, the astronauts performed admirably.
But
right away there were problems; the astronauts almost had to perform
an emergency space-walk because one of the solar panels wouldn’t
open. For months, scientists struggled to learn how to control the
thing, and for months it whirled around in orbit before people
learned how to program the complex technology from Earth. Chaisson
described it “...like tuning a piano without touching it and while
moving at nearly 18,000 miles per hour”. The chief engineer of the
orbital verification team Gene Oliver imagined it “...like changing
a spark plug while driving down the road”. One of the first
civilian uses of artificial intelligence, Hubble meandered in high
earth orbit for the first few months in perpetual bouts of safe mode,
protecting itself from the confused and frequently error prone
attempts of the humans on earth to control it. Of the time, division
chief and astronomer Rodger Doxsey said that “[n]o one seems to be
in charge. A group meets daily and decides by the seat of their pants
what to do the next day. There is absolutely no method to their
madness!”
And
once they learned to point and shoot, the pictures were out of focus.
Chaisson laments, “[s]uch is modern science, big science. A
microscopic imperfection only a few percent of the width of a human
hair can cripple a two billion dollar piece of scientific apparatus”.
On June 21st, 1991 it was announced to the public that the main
mirror had a spherical aberration. The impaired telescope was four to
ten times less sensitive than expected. Lennard Fisk, a NASA
administrator testified in congress on the spherical aberration:
“It’s perfectly wrong, that is correct, a mistake ground in with
great precision”. Fisk remarked on another occasion something to
the effect that spherical aberration was the space-science equivalent
of the Challenger.
Senator
Albert Gore made the same comparison when he said in a hearing,
“[t]his is the second time in five years that a major project has
encountered serious disruption by an inherent flaw that was
apparently built into the project as much as ten years before launch
and went undetected by NASA’s quality control procedures”. Even
Senator Barbara Mikulski, a long time supporter of the Hubble,
accused the whole methodology of the enterprise, saying that it
“underestimates cost and overestimates technology”. By 1991, the
space telescope had cost two billion dollars, in contrast to the
original projection of four hundred million. Shuttle servicing
missions routinely cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
In
the next 26 months (remarkably fast for a big science enterprise), a
device called the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement
was devised. Consisting of 5,300 individual parts, it was a device
that used mirrors to correct the spherical aberration; the popular
allusion of the time was glasses for the Hubble. John Bahcall,
echoing a recurring sentiment about the Hubble project, said that the
success of COSTAR was “a question of life or death for NASA”. In
1994, the first servicing mission, throughout a series of space-walks
over ten days, installed COSTAR, replaced the solar arrays and four
gyroscopes, added four electrical devices and two magnetometers. The
servicing mission was an amazing success, a historic feat of problem
solving and human dexterity when there was no Superman with x-ray
vision to clean the lens.
On
January 13th, 1994, the mission was publicly declared successful, and
the once blurry vision was resolved, bringing us the amazing images
we have all seen, glimpses into the deep fields and swirling clouds
of a vast universe of unimagined phenomena. The Hubble had become a
success, revolutionizing astronomy and kicking off a new era of space
science.
But
the rocky road to Hubble’s current place as icon and reification of
space science and technology in the popular consciousness leaves us
with many unanswered questions. Looking back, Chaisson, who was
intimately involved with the project, writes of the initial stages of
Hubble that they exhibited a “flagrant lack of thinking, design and
application”. The whole project suffered from “...a case of
engineering myopia, a clear and steady failure to heed the bigger
picture”. About the Space Telescope Science Institute, Chaisson
regrets that it was established “...several years after [the
telescope’s] hardware had been frozen, its instruments nearly
built, its crucial optical system already shaped... too late to
influence materially the fundamental design”.
Many
of those involved in the Hubble project became strongly disillusioned
with the role of NASA in scientific endeavor. Chaisson remembers that
“NASA officials often stressed being part of the ‘Hubble team’,
not realizing that the Agency’s version of total management damps
innovation while breeding mediocrity”. Gerrit Verschur, a radio
astronomer with no conflict of interest, said that “[NASA’s]
weakness lies in public relations, unconsciously structured to
titillate and perpetuate scientific illiteracy”. Senator Dale
Bumpers said before Hubble was launched outside a hearing in
Washington that “NASA’s eyes are bigger than its stomach, and it
needs its wings clipped”. Chaisson is even more scathing in his
critique: “the space agency... has solidified into a bureaucratic
morass that rewards mediocrity and self-preservation while damping
creativity and innovation”. Chaisson continues to assert that
if
the US is to have a viable and vibrant space program, NASA needs to
be thoroughly reformed or replaced. (At the very least, its
educational programs that should propagate truth must be divorced
from its public-affairs activities that spin cheer leading, for the
former are clearly linked with the latter.) Indeed, many
knowledgeable individuals -- including a surprising number of high
ranking NASA administrators -- are privately of the opinion that the
space agency may well need to collapse before its successor can be
reborn.
But
just as in need of a critique as these institutions are the
individuals that made them up. In the incredibly stressful weeks
surrounding the announcement of spherical aberration, scientists
exhibited various perverse qualities. People stormed out of meetings,
slammed doors, and there was furious controversy over proprietary
data. A guest engineer at the time remarked, “I’ll be damned if
you guys don’t need a child psychologist”. One scientist remarked
to Chaisson: “We astronomers really can be spherical bastards... a
term left over from Edwin Hubble’s day to describe a malcontent
from any angle”. In the midst of a committee presentation at one
point, Giaconni interrupted, “[s]top! Enough! There is an absolute
proliferation of paper generating committees, most of them smoke
screens created by NASA management. And they are not helping”.
Giacconi is an example to remind us that many scientists exhibited
admirable patience and perseverance in the project. But the tensions
surrounding the Hubble brought many important questions about
scientific inquiry and etiquette to light which were seemingly
forgotten the Hubble’s success.
There
was a rising controversy over proprietary data rights, which had many
scientists covering their computer screens and yelling at camera
crews to go away. Lennard Fisk said that “proprietary data rights
are killing us... if you’re concerned about proprietary data
rights, then you’re worrying about who is stealing deck chairs on
the Titanic”. While the Hubble did not sink, it is unfortunate that
the debate over the scientific value of proprietary data and other
crucial aspects of scientific culture which the Hubble contraversy
illuminated were somehow forgiven in the Hubble’s triumph. Chaisson
ominously elaborated in 1994 that “[t]his attitude of exclusivity
on the part of leading scientists can only contribute to a widening
of the celebrated culture gap, and possibly even a head-long slide
toward a scienceless society”. Chaisson entreats: “...sharing is
as valuable as discovering, teaching as honorable as research”.
While
every image and discovery abetted by the Hubble is testament to the
capacity of innovative humans to work past their own limitations to
achieve amazing feats of scientific and technological innovation,
perhaps something overheard at the Goddard Space Center during the
first few months of confusion still stays with us: “We don’t own
Hubble. The high-strung bird owns us”.
It’s
very essential to acknowledge that the success of Hubble does not
prove the efficiency or quality of Big Science. In fact, the Hubble
was a success in spite of Big Science -- it was only thanks to
thousands of hardworking physicists, engineers, astronauts,
politicians, astronomers, and independent citizens at every stage of
the process that Hubble ever became what it is today. And yet
significantly due to the Hubble’s success, the vast machine of
infighting bureaucracies and the symbiosis of politics and science
has anchored itself in the popular consciousness as the way science
is done. In 2006 do we have any indicator to tell us that we are not
still mired in a terrain of space science that consistently, in
senator Mikulski’s words, underestimates cost and overestimates
technology? In the interim between spherical aberration and COSTAR,
astronomer Jim Gunn, in an open address to scientists involved
everywhere, left questions that are not answered by our Hubble
calendars and tee shirts:
We
have lost control of our destiny, having handed it to a bureaucratic
agency which means well but is unable to handle large projects of its
own (cf. the shuttle) and certainly not ours. We were not “screwed
over” -- we have been exquisitely vulnerable to precisely this kind
of thing happening for years; it is a part of our sorry heritage
which began with gentlemen astronomers in their coats and ties at Mt.
Wilson, continued with the sorrier example of the national
observatories, and has culminated with the first of the Great
Observatories, probably the most expensive scientific failure in
history... We are a discipline of technical incompetents, happy to
let our or NASA’s engineers build our tools to their desires, by
and large, not ours. It was an astronomical failure; it was an
astronomical satellite, and it does not matter a whit that it
was probably some fool at [Perkin-Elmer] that caused it and some
entirely expected failure of NASA’s criminally infantile [quality
assurance] program that failed to catch it... NASA’s style is
killing/may have already killed us, and we will never get another
chance to do anything about it, if indeed it is not already too late.
And
so now it becomes the task of all of us; whether as citizens or
scientists, professionals or amateurs, to question for ourselves the
trajectory of Big Science, and to consider our subsequent options in
respect to it. A behemoth Moon/Mars initiative hangs over our heads
which threatens to subsume all other science funding. On an even
deeper level, this extreme industrial methodology of science should
make us ask ourselves what science even means for each of us in this
day and age. Chaisson writes that “[t]he widespread notion that the
scientific method is unbiased and objective, that scientists are and
always have been lacking in human emotion in the course of their
work, is a farce”. It is the role of those concerned both
objectively and emotionally with science today to reverse the current
trend towards an elite priesthood of science with serves more to
alienate than enlighten.
The
question of reform or revolution in space science will most likely be
answered for us. It is unfortunately unlikely that a group of
brilliant scientists will commandeer NASA and steer it cleanly
between the scylla of industry and the charybdis of politics. With
the recent presidential decree of the Moon/Mars initiative, the space
science program soars headlong into both. While a failure of this
gargantuan initiative would devastate the space science industry,
perhaps only a failure of such magnitude could usher in a more
sustainable era of scientific enterprise. Conversely, a success of
the initiative at best will yield astronomically expensive hubris and
perpetuation of Big Science, which fittingly suffocates thousands of
fish with the pollution from every single shuttle launch.
And
so not only for unimagined phenomena, but for the meanings and
futures of science itself, we remember the words of Edwin
Hubble: “The search will continue. The urge is older than history.
It is not satisfied and it will not be suppressed”.
Bibliography
The
Hubble Wars: Astrophysics meets Astropolitics in the Two-Billion
Dollar Struggle over the Hubble Space Telescope, by Eric J. Chaisson.
1994
Selling
the Space Telescope: The Interpenetration of Science, Technology,
and Politics (Documentary). Narrated by Robert W. Smith. PBS, 1991
Hubble:
A New Window to the Universe, By Daniel Fischer and Hilmar Duerbeck.
1996
The
Space Telescope by George B. Field, 1989
The
Hubble Space Telescope Optical Systems Failure Report, NASA,
Washington D.C. November 1990
Wikipedia:
article on The Hubble Space Telescope accessed May 7th 2006
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope
