Twenty-six years ago I was a reporter for The News-Times and Paul Estefan was one of the people in charge of moving the mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope from the Perkin-Elmer Corp. building where it was created to Danbury Airport and then to California for integration into the telescope superstructure.
In the newsroom, the police scanner alerted us to the traffic jam that the transport was causing so a photographer and I rushed to the airport to get the story. The Hubble had been famous for several years already and we wanted full access to the event. But Estefan, the airport administrator, stopped us at the gate leading to the runway. If we stood at the edge of the chain link we could see a little bit of the plane that the telescope was being loaded into, but the story pretty much died there. Paul and I argued but he refused to unlock the gate. I was angry and he must have felt bad about the whole scene because after that he would call me every so often and eventually we became friends.
At lunch in the summer of 2008 we were talking again about the day Paul moved the mirror and he said, “You know, the 20th anniversary of the Hubble launch is coming up. WestConn should host a forum on the telescope. It’s a big deal.”
I stole that idea and brought it back to my bosses, who told me to make it a reality.
As anyone who has planned a big event knows, things progress in stages. First, you fall in love with the concept (especially if the date is a long way off). You pull together a committee and start making the first arrangements. As the time gets closer, not only do you need to keep track of all the details, but they have to start falling into place. (Did I remember to invite those people to sit on a panel about women in science? No, I didn’t!) Will my contact at (crucial partner) finally call me back? I need to find money for what?
The main events of what we grandly call The Hubble Space Telescope Symposium will take place from April 20-24. They include a panel of female scientists and engineers who will talk to girls and young women about how to achieve careers that are not traditionally friendly to them; a roundtable of business people talking about the future of aerospace; a lecture by former astronaut Story Musgrave, who flew on the first repair mission to Hubble; a scholarship dinner for WCSU Emeritus Professor of Astronomy Dr. Phillip Lu; and a day-long science and technology fair on Saturday, April 24, that will feature exhibits about the Hubble and other space and engineering activities, including a space suit, a meteorite, and demonstrations. Preceding the symposium, on Feb. 23, a trainer from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center will lead a professional development day for science teachers. Details on all can be found at www.wcsu.edu/hubble.
At this point, things are coming together and even though I awaken and sit bolt upright every day at 2 a.m., I’m usually able to get back to sleep in an hour or so after running down a list of what is yet to be accomplished.
Normally I work hard to avoid putting myself in situations that disrupt my rapid eye movement. But, like a lot of people, I love the Hubble, whose achievements are at once beyond the reach of ordinary people and completely within our grasp. I don’t fully understand how the Hubble helped nail down the age of the universe, sometimes declared to be its greatest scientific finding but — those photos! — Hubble has sent us thousands of images that cause us to ponder who we are, and why. Who hasn’t seen one of those close-ups of an exploding star, or a light-years’ breadth of space filled with thousands of galaxies, and not been compelled to grab the arm of the person nearest to them and exclaim. Hubble makes us — me, anyway — feel insignificant and grandly human.
Michael Chabon, in his book “Manhood for Amateurs,” writes about looking through a telescope at planets and stars with his children and wondering whether one of the kids will one day feel compelled to study the universe.
“He or she will be able to look up at the sky and see not myths and legends and a history of failure but information, gases and voids, cold, infernal, luminous and pure. Or maybe my children will just look up and remember the weight of my hand on their shoulders as they stood beside me on a warm summer night, the rasp of my beard against their cheek, my voice soft at their ear, telling them, Look.”
I’m kind of hoping that if you take part in the Hubble Space Telescope Symposium you will experience something like that.
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