Fixing Hubble

I don't think the United States is a perfect society. We could think about the future more, consume less, and pay more attention to the arts. We got involved in at least one ill-considered war I can think of and that slavery thing seems, in retrospect, like something of a mistake.

But.

I love the Hubble Space Telescope.

I love what it says about human beings and I'm pleased with what it says about the United States. I'm very happy that the repairs are going well.

See (and I use that word advisedly), when I think about the Hubble I think about the first primitive human who looked at the night sky and wondered what those lights were. I think about the desert nomads who wondered who made all the magnificence they saw around and above themselves. I think of the Vikings, sailing so far from their native coasts that they discovered new worlds. I think of mountain climbers, explorers who went to the poles, who went to the ocean floor and finally took to the air in balloons and gliders and airplanes, flying over the trees and lakes like the birds we'd envied for so long. And I think about Galileo Galilei, peering through a telescope he made himself and seeing, for the first time in history, that Jupiter had moons.

We do horrible things, we humans. But the best of us burn to know more and see farther. Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding. And the telescope named for him helps us see farther and farther outward, and learn more and more about it. They're installing a new instrument on it called a cosmic origins spectrograph. I'm sort of a math dunce and I have only vague, general idea what a spectrograph is good for. But that name—it tells me that this machine was built by serious people who are hunting big game.

There's a very cool site about the telescope. And for God's sake, if you don't look at anything else, look at the images. We're humans, and even the most complacent of us have something inside that makes us wonder what's over the next hill. And we have a capacity for wonderment and awe. Look at the images—you'll thank me. And maybe you'll say, like me, that the United States is jolly well not perfect but that Hubble deal is pretty cool.

By the way, one of the guys floating in space and fixing it as I write this is an astronomer named John M. Grunsfeld. He's 50. I suppose they could have gotten somebody younger and cheaper, but I assume they thought he was the right person for the job. See? Some of us boomers are still actually good for something. His hobbies include mountaineering. That didn't surprise me.