Handprints on Hubble by Kathryn D. Sullivan

As exciting as that accomplishment was, the bulk of Handprints relates to her work on the Hubble Space Telescope, the world’s most successful orbiting astronomical observatory.

Sullivan joined NASA in 1978 as part of the largest astronaut class to date, Group 8, the “Thirty-Five Fucking New Guys.” She made history as the first American woman to do an EVA-an extravehicular activity, otherwise known as a spacewalk-when she performed the feat on Shuttle mission STS-41-G in 1984. To subvert an old advertising phrase, it’s more about the steak than the sizzle. It’s the story of her career at NASA, of course, but it focuses consistently on the projects she was assigned to, worked on, and came to love. By contrast, Kathy Sullivan’s new book Handprints on Hubble: An Astronaut’s Story of Invention is as purposeful as she is. Who they married, why they divorced, and how much they like airplanes. Most astronaut books are about, well, astronauts.

Handprints on Hubble was published with the support of the MIT Press Fund for Diverse Voices. Because in-flight repair and upgrade was part of the plan, NASA was able to fix a serious defect in Hubble's mirrors-leaving literal and metaphorical “handprints on Hubble.” Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space, recounts how she and other astronauts, engineers, and scientists launched, rescued, repaired, and maintained Hubble, the most productive observatory ever built.Īlong the way, Sullivan chronicles her early life as a “Sputnik Baby,” her path to NASA through oceanography, and her initiation into the space program as one of “thirty-five new guys.” (She was also one of the first six women to join NASA's storied astronaut corps.) She describes in vivid detail what liftoff feels like inside a spacecraft (it's like “being in an earthquake and a fighter jet at the same time”), shows us the view from a spacewalk, and recounts the temporary grounding of the shuttle program after the Challenger disaster.Sullivan explains that “maintainability” was designed into Hubble, and she describes the work of inventing the tools and processes that made on-orbit maintenance possible. In Handprints on Hubble, retired astronaut Kathryn Sullivan describes her work on the NASA team that made all of this possible.

It has, among many other achievements, revealed thousands of galaxies in what seemed to be empty patches of sky transformed our knowledge of black holes found dwarf planets with moons orbiting other stars and measured precisely how fast the universe is expanding. The Hubble Space Telescope has revolutionized our understanding of the universe. The first American woman to walk in space recounts her experience as part of the team that launched, rescued, repaired, and maintained the Hubble Space Telescope.

Handprints on Hubble by Kathryn D. Sullivan