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Handprints on Hubble: An Astronaut's Story of Invention
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.
The Hubble Space Telescope has revolutionized our understanding of the universe. 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. In Handprints on Hubble, retired astronaut Kathryn Sullivan describes her work on the NASA team that made all of this possible. 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.
Along 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. 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."
Handprints on Hubble was published with the support of the MIT Press Fund for Diverse Voices.
The Hubble Space Telescope has revolutionized our understanding of the universe. 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. In Handprints on Hubble, retired astronaut Kathryn Sullivan describes her work on the NASA team that made all of this possible. 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.
Along 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. 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."
Handprints on Hubble was published with the support of the MIT Press Fund for Diverse Voices.
292 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 5, 2019
27 people are currently reading
844 people want to read
About the author
Kathryn D. Sullivan
12 books7 followersKathryn D. Sullivan is a NASA astronaut (retired), former Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and an inductee in the Astronaut Hall of Fame.
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February 18, 2020
Most astronaut books are about, well, astronauts. Where they came from. What their parents were like. Who they married, why they divorced, and how much they like airplanes. By contrast, Kathy Sullivan’s new book Handprints on Hubble: An Astronaut’s Story of Invention is as purposeful as she is. 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. To subvert an old advertising phrase, it’s more about the steak than the sizzle.
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. 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. Originally the plan for prolonging Hubble’s lifespan involved periodically retrieving and returning it to earth on NASA’s new “space truck,” the Shuttle, for upkeep and repairs. But somewhere along the line, as it became clear that the Shuttle was not going to be quite as frequent or as cheap a flier as envisioned, a decision was made that Hubble would need to be fully maintainable in space—i.e., while it was in orbit.
This was a revolutionary concept, and the practical problems were formidable. Think of it this way. You and your fellow taxpayers have just paid over a billion dollars to create an innovative, highly-sensitive piece of machinery that scientists all over the world hope will give humankind an unprecedented understanding of our place in the universe. If anything goes wrong, the machine will have to be fixed where it’s found—and you’re part of the team of people trying to figure out how this will happen, given that Hubble will be three hundred miles above the earth, in an environment that will kill any living thing that isn’t wearing a pressure suit, and any tool you use will go floating away into the cosmos the moment you set it down. Add to these challenges the problems inherent in working on anything that’s been designed so that lots of important parts fit in a very small space. As Sullivan has said elsewhere, working on Hubble’s Main Power Unit is a little like trying to change the spark plugs in your car while wearing two snowmobile suits, a pair of mittens, and a bucket over your head.
For the next several years, , including those bad blue days following the Challenger disaster in 1986, Sullivan and fellow astronaut Bruce McCandless II spent countless hours with engineers and technicians from NASA and aerospace contractor Lockheed Martin, planning and practicing how to make maintainability happen. A NASA engineer and native Mississippian named Jean Olivier had dreamed up an architecture for the telescope in which systems were housed in modular units around the cylindrical body of the satellite. A great start: but how, exactly, to get at and into these units? Ensuring Hubble would be fixable in orbit was literally a nuts-and-bolts project, involving unheralded but brilliant engineers and technicians like Olivier, Michael Withey, Ron Sheffield, Frank Costa, and dozens of others. (In fact, one of the first steps in the process was to figure out which bolts to use. In the end, the team settled on a double-height 7/16-inch bolt with a hexagonal head.) McCandless developed a space tool tethering system, still known as the “McTether,” that simplified and eased the ways in which astronauts could transport and use tools in space. In order to work on the telescope—to turn a wrench, for example—an astronaut would need to be able to anchor his or her feet in order to apply torque. Sullivan and McCandless worked to improve a proposed astronaut anchoring platform—it became the “Adjustable Portable Foot Restraint”—and Sullivan came up with a semi-rigid tethering system for astronaut Sherpa duties, including lugging the Adjustable Portable Foot Restraint from the Shuttle to a satellite work station. Descendants of these pieces of hardware are still used by astronauts on EVAs to this day.
The Hubble deployment mission, STS-31, left earth on April 24, 1990. Deployment was problematic. Astronaut Steve Hawley had trouble plucking Hubble from Discovery’s payload bay with the spacecraft’s robotic arm and lifting it “above” the shuttle, where ground control could activate it. Then, once this act of positioning was achieved, one of the satellite’s two solar arrays failed to deploy. The arrays are sheets of solar cells that collect energy to power the satellite’s operations. A major innovation in Hubble’s design was to attach the cells to a flexible “sheet” that could be rolled and unrolled around a central drum, like a window blind. As clever as the concept was, it didn’t work as planned. As time wore on and the problem persisted, Sullivan and crewmate McCandless were instructed to suit up for an EVA to manually deploy the errant array. They started the process of breathing pure oxygen to purge the nitrogen from their bloodstream, standard procedure for any spacewalker entering the vacuum of space. After several attempts at troubleshooting, however, engineers on the ground finally figured out that a faulty tension monitoring module was preventing the roll-out of the balky solar array. Once this was fixed, Sullivan and McCandless received orders to stand down. Ironically, the Hubble was deployed while they were still in the payload bay, pressure suited and waiting to begin their repair mission. They missed the activation of the satellite they’d both worked so hard to bring to life.
Hubble’s deployment seemed to represent a triumph for NASA, but the good feelings were short-lived. The telescope’s main mirror had been manufactured incorrectly, and was sending back scientifically valuable but decidedly sub-optimal images from space. It wasn’t that the mirror was flawed. It was perfectly ground—but ground to slightly wrong specifications. Once the defect was made public, the American press howled with derision. Hubble quickly went from being a symbol of success to the embodiment of technological (and financial) folly. But here’s where NASA’s “maintainability” work proved its worth. Hubble could be fixed. In 1993 a Shuttle crew led by Story Musgrave installed additional small mirrors to correct the main mirror’s faulty vision. As a result of this and several other servicing missions—Hubble was, indeed, fully maintainable in space—over the years, the apparatus continues to function even today. It flies 340 miles above the earth’s surface and orbits the planet fifteen times a day. It has captured stunning snapshots of galaxies previously undreamt of, and allowed us new insights into the nature of the universe and how we got here—and, maybe more importantly, where we’re going.
Among the discoveries and confirmations Hubble has facilitated are the surprising—and somewhat alarming—fact that the universe is not only expanding, but in fact expanding at increased velocity; that the universe is around 13.7 billion years old; that black holes do in fact exist, as astronomers and physicists had previously postulated, and may in fact be at the heart of most if not all galaxies; that Pluto has a fifth moon; and that orbiting the sun even beyond Pluto is a giant, potato-shaped rock that astronomers have dubbed Ultima Thule, after the Romans’ name for the mist-shrouded, most distant land in the ancient world.
Hubble allowed astronomers to watch Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9’s kamikaze crash into Jupiter and has detected what seems to be a massive saltwater ocean under the ice of Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede. It has also found what star-watchers believe to be the most distant galaxy ever observed, the mysterious GN-z11, located some 32 billion light years away in the constellation Ursa Major. One source reports that over 15,000 scientific papers have included data from Hubble. Almost as important as the science is the beauty. Data counts, but so do diamonds. The images Hubble has sent back to earth astonish even jaded sky watchers, much less those of us who wouldn’t know dark matter from Darth Vader. We goggle at sights like the odd, hourglass-shaped Southern Crab Nebula, several thousand light years away; and the shimmering pillars of the Star Queen Nebula, extended like fingers on the hand of God; the teeming galactic petri dish of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, every one of its points of light a million possible and impossible worlds. The size, shape, and sheer spectral weirdness of the images Hubble relays to us boggle the imagination, and make prophets and dreamers of us all.
While Sullivan has called space flight a “magical, crazy, indescribable experience,” Handprints on Hubble leaves little room for reverie. Sullivan is notably reticent about her personal life and feelings. That’s her prerogative, of course, and has no bearing on the science and engineering discussed in the book. Frankly, some other astronaut accounts have offered a little too much personality. Still, it would be nice to know more about Sullivan as a person, outside the space suit and the neutral buoyancy tank at JSC. What does she read? Who does she love? This quibble aside, Handprints is a valuable, absorbing account of men and women—women and men?—inventing the sorts of real-life solutions to scientific challenges that have allowed us to significantly advance our understanding of the cosmos. If you’re interested in the American space program, and space astronomy in particular, do whatever you have to do to get your handprints on Sullivan’s book.
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. 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. Originally the plan for prolonging Hubble’s lifespan involved periodically retrieving and returning it to earth on NASA’s new “space truck,” the Shuttle, for upkeep and repairs. But somewhere along the line, as it became clear that the Shuttle was not going to be quite as frequent or as cheap a flier as envisioned, a decision was made that Hubble would need to be fully maintainable in space—i.e., while it was in orbit.
This was a revolutionary concept, and the practical problems were formidable. Think of it this way. You and your fellow taxpayers have just paid over a billion dollars to create an innovative, highly-sensitive piece of machinery that scientists all over the world hope will give humankind an unprecedented understanding of our place in the universe. If anything goes wrong, the machine will have to be fixed where it’s found—and you’re part of the team of people trying to figure out how this will happen, given that Hubble will be three hundred miles above the earth, in an environment that will kill any living thing that isn’t wearing a pressure suit, and any tool you use will go floating away into the cosmos the moment you set it down. Add to these challenges the problems inherent in working on anything that’s been designed so that lots of important parts fit in a very small space. As Sullivan has said elsewhere, working on Hubble’s Main Power Unit is a little like trying to change the spark plugs in your car while wearing two snowmobile suits, a pair of mittens, and a bucket over your head.
For the next several years, , including those bad blue days following the Challenger disaster in 1986, Sullivan and fellow astronaut Bruce McCandless II spent countless hours with engineers and technicians from NASA and aerospace contractor Lockheed Martin, planning and practicing how to make maintainability happen. A NASA engineer and native Mississippian named Jean Olivier had dreamed up an architecture for the telescope in which systems were housed in modular units around the cylindrical body of the satellite. A great start: but how, exactly, to get at and into these units? Ensuring Hubble would be fixable in orbit was literally a nuts-and-bolts project, involving unheralded but brilliant engineers and technicians like Olivier, Michael Withey, Ron Sheffield, Frank Costa, and dozens of others. (In fact, one of the first steps in the process was to figure out which bolts to use. In the end, the team settled on a double-height 7/16-inch bolt with a hexagonal head.) McCandless developed a space tool tethering system, still known as the “McTether,” that simplified and eased the ways in which astronauts could transport and use tools in space. In order to work on the telescope—to turn a wrench, for example—an astronaut would need to be able to anchor his or her feet in order to apply torque. Sullivan and McCandless worked to improve a proposed astronaut anchoring platform—it became the “Adjustable Portable Foot Restraint”—and Sullivan came up with a semi-rigid tethering system for astronaut Sherpa duties, including lugging the Adjustable Portable Foot Restraint from the Shuttle to a satellite work station. Descendants of these pieces of hardware are still used by astronauts on EVAs to this day.
The Hubble deployment mission, STS-31, left earth on April 24, 1990. Deployment was problematic. Astronaut Steve Hawley had trouble plucking Hubble from Discovery’s payload bay with the spacecraft’s robotic arm and lifting it “above” the shuttle, where ground control could activate it. Then, once this act of positioning was achieved, one of the satellite’s two solar arrays failed to deploy. The arrays are sheets of solar cells that collect energy to power the satellite’s operations. A major innovation in Hubble’s design was to attach the cells to a flexible “sheet” that could be rolled and unrolled around a central drum, like a window blind. As clever as the concept was, it didn’t work as planned. As time wore on and the problem persisted, Sullivan and crewmate McCandless were instructed to suit up for an EVA to manually deploy the errant array. They started the process of breathing pure oxygen to purge the nitrogen from their bloodstream, standard procedure for any spacewalker entering the vacuum of space. After several attempts at troubleshooting, however, engineers on the ground finally figured out that a faulty tension monitoring module was preventing the roll-out of the balky solar array. Once this was fixed, Sullivan and McCandless received orders to stand down. Ironically, the Hubble was deployed while they were still in the payload bay, pressure suited and waiting to begin their repair mission. They missed the activation of the satellite they’d both worked so hard to bring to life.
Hubble’s deployment seemed to represent a triumph for NASA, but the good feelings were short-lived. The telescope’s main mirror had been manufactured incorrectly, and was sending back scientifically valuable but decidedly sub-optimal images from space. It wasn’t that the mirror was flawed. It was perfectly ground—but ground to slightly wrong specifications. Once the defect was made public, the American press howled with derision. Hubble quickly went from being a symbol of success to the embodiment of technological (and financial) folly. But here’s where NASA’s “maintainability” work proved its worth. Hubble could be fixed. In 1993 a Shuttle crew led by Story Musgrave installed additional small mirrors to correct the main mirror’s faulty vision. As a result of this and several other servicing missions—Hubble was, indeed, fully maintainable in space—over the years, the apparatus continues to function even today. It flies 340 miles above the earth’s surface and orbits the planet fifteen times a day. It has captured stunning snapshots of galaxies previously undreamt of, and allowed us new insights into the nature of the universe and how we got here—and, maybe more importantly, where we’re going.
Among the discoveries and confirmations Hubble has facilitated are the surprising—and somewhat alarming—fact that the universe is not only expanding, but in fact expanding at increased velocity; that the universe is around 13.7 billion years old; that black holes do in fact exist, as astronomers and physicists had previously postulated, and may in fact be at the heart of most if not all galaxies; that Pluto has a fifth moon; and that orbiting the sun even beyond Pluto is a giant, potato-shaped rock that astronomers have dubbed Ultima Thule, after the Romans’ name for the mist-shrouded, most distant land in the ancient world.
Hubble allowed astronomers to watch Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9’s kamikaze crash into Jupiter and has detected what seems to be a massive saltwater ocean under the ice of Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede. It has also found what star-watchers believe to be the most distant galaxy ever observed, the mysterious GN-z11, located some 32 billion light years away in the constellation Ursa Major. One source reports that over 15,000 scientific papers have included data from Hubble. Almost as important as the science is the beauty. Data counts, but so do diamonds. The images Hubble has sent back to earth astonish even jaded sky watchers, much less those of us who wouldn’t know dark matter from Darth Vader. We goggle at sights like the odd, hourglass-shaped Southern Crab Nebula, several thousand light years away; and the shimmering pillars of the Star Queen Nebula, extended like fingers on the hand of God; the teeming galactic petri dish of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, every one of its points of light a million possible and impossible worlds. The size, shape, and sheer spectral weirdness of the images Hubble relays to us boggle the imagination, and make prophets and dreamers of us all.
While Sullivan has called space flight a “magical, crazy, indescribable experience,” Handprints on Hubble leaves little room for reverie. Sullivan is notably reticent about her personal life and feelings. That’s her prerogative, of course, and has no bearing on the science and engineering discussed in the book. Frankly, some other astronaut accounts have offered a little too much personality. Still, it would be nice to know more about Sullivan as a person, outside the space suit and the neutral buoyancy tank at JSC. What does she read? Who does she love? This quibble aside, Handprints is a valuable, absorbing account of men and women—women and men?—inventing the sorts of real-life solutions to scientific challenges that have allowed us to significantly advance our understanding of the cosmos. If you’re interested in the American space program, and space astronomy in particular, do whatever you have to do to get your handprints on Sullivan’s book.
April 28, 2021
Too many pictures of uninteresting space hardware taking up room in this book.
July 15, 2022
Handprints on Hubble is a unique astronaut memoir, in part because Dr. Sullivan is a scientist first and an astronaut second. Longing to explore, she began her academic life in oceanography before realizing the opportunities the Space Program might offer her. She joined in the class of the Thirty Five New Guys, as the Shuttle Transport System was still being finalized: one of her early projects was to help create the launch checklist for shuttle missions, in fact. When dreams of a large space telescope began to be realized, she was involved extensively in helping figure out how it could be made maintainable by astronauts working in space -- developing and practicing procedures and tools that could be applied on a spacewalk. Sullivan lost several friends and classmates when Challenger was destroyed, but the two-year suspension of activity allowed the Hubble team more time to better improve Hubble's prospects for long-term maintenance. Sullivan was with the team that launched Hubble itself, though she missed the first repair flight, since she'd started transitioning into a career at NOAA as its chief scientist. is more about technical development, engineering, and science than it is a gossipy history of NASA, but it can't be beaten for someone interested in the development of Hubble -- which has only recently been surpassed by the Webb telescope.
August 20, 2020
Kathy Sullivan grew up in California with a fascination for the world around her, poring through the maps that arrived with each issue of National Geographic. The young oceanographer found herself selected into the astronaut corps in 1978, as part of the first class of astronauts selected for the Space Shuttle era and as one of the first six women ever selected. In this book, she recounts her three spaceflights but devotes the heart of the book to the Hubble Space Telescope that the shuttle Discovery deployed during her STS-31 mission in 1990. She believes that one crucial detail about Hubble deserves more recognition: the building of maintainability into its design over the years prior to its launch. Though the astronauts usually receive the bulk of the credit for human spaceflight, she gives credit to the Maintenance and Repair (M&R) team at Lockheed, the telescope contractor, for the work they did to make sure astronauts could service the vehicle while making spacewalks in orbit. These engineers inspected every inch of the school bus sized observatory, fit-checked every tool astronauts would have to use in servicing the telescope during their EVAs, and then observed the astronauts as they went about their training for those EVAs in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. The ability of astronauts to work outside the shuttle also became easier with the use of a portable foot restraint and a T-shaped pip pin to tether the tools they were working with. All of this work culminated in several successful servicing missions that have allowed Hubble to make its groundbreaking observations of the universe.
Some of the engineering details in the book may be confusing for lay readers to understand, but overall Sullivan has done a great job giving justice to the people she calls "the countless earthbound hands" who made the work of the astronauts who serviced Hubble in orbit possible. Though there are many autobiographical details in the book, she wants to give credit to other people and that is where the book really shines.
Some of the engineering details in the book may be confusing for lay readers to understand, but overall Sullivan has done a great job giving justice to the people she calls "the countless earthbound hands" who made the work of the astronauts who serviced Hubble in orbit possible. Though there are many autobiographical details in the book, she wants to give credit to other people and that is where the book really shines.
November 10, 2019
This combination of memoir of one of the first female astronauts and story of the beginnings of the Hubble telescope spacewalking procedures is awesome! It tells the human part of the story. Definitely not a boring technical book. As a blind reader, I loved that I could follow the whole book. As the title suggests, it’s very hands-on!
January 29, 2020
I’ve been hoping for this book for 20 years.
As a kid, I invested myself in a plethora of interests one of which was the space program. I loved every era of NASA history, reading and watching everything I could lay hands on. I still watch rocket launches and space walks – and I might read a little less, but the allure of a new space book, even one that covers pretty much the same thing as many that came before, is very hard to resist.
Many of the people I can point to as the “heroes” of my teenage years were connected to NASA. Many of those people are obvious like John Glenn, Gene Kranz, Jim Lovell, and Neil Armstrong. And others are less remembered like Robert Goddard, Deke Slayton, Bruce McCandlless, Guion Bluford, and Eileen Collins. Falling somewhere in the middle are the first six women who served as astronauts. Everyone knows who Sally Ride was, but I always found Shannon Lucid and Kathy Sullivan’s stories more interesting, and teenage me was disappointed to find they never got any biographies or autobiographies.
Several years ago, a news article about another celebrity falling from grace prompted some morbid googling on my part. Many of those people whose flight numbers I memorized and whose pictures I posted on my wall must be still alive, right? How were they faring the test of time?
I am happy to report that as a whole most of the names I looked up came through unscathed. Mostly because all we as a public know about them is their time in NASA, but I still take that as a win. If they had done something worth being drug through the mud for since then, I’m confident it would have made the news. But unexpectedly, one of them stood out in a good way.
Kathy Sullivan retired from the space program to do equally cool and impressive work with NOAA. In fact, given how little press her time as an astronaut seems to have gotten, she’s probably better known to the public for her work there than at NASA. However, while Dr. Sullivan might not have been the first American woman in space, she got to be the first American woman to do a spacewalk.
And finally, I’m holding her book.
Okay, I’m holding her second book. Several years ago, she helped author a kid’s picture book biography called Too the Stars. I purchased it as soon as it came out too, and it is a very well loved bedtime read at our house that probably deserves its own post someday. But, as giddy as I was to get that after all those years, that’s nothing compared to finally having the real story. And Dr. Sullivan clearly knew where to focus her book because as much as this is her story, in her words, it’s all going to the thing that made her stand out all those years ago: launching the Hubble Space telescope.
Look, part of being a good nut about anything is having opinions. And being a NASA nut, I had and have many feelings about the direction of the program in general. I feel gipped that no one has walked on the moon in my lifetime and unsure why NASA allowed itself to become so earthbound with the shuttle program. However, the shuttle program had some massive high points too, and the Hubble program has to be up near the top of the list.
But I suppose a critique of the book I’m reviewing is actually order. Handprints on the Hubble is an excellent autobiography and even better book about space. Like any firsthand account I’ve read from an astronaut, it’s got a bit of slow start. I’m not reading these books to learn about their author’s childhood and education so that part always goes into the “not meant for me” category. Though I will say, I love how Dr. Sullivan writes. It’s very conversational, and mostly I feel like I’m hearing a lecture rather than reading a book. Her story through it all is very streamlined and precise with almost blunt wording. (Unlike this review!) She’s telling the facts as they happened, and her emotions and private musings are much rarer than I’m used to in this kind of book. So I didn’t skip the early life section like I often do. But where Dr. Sullivan’s style of prose really starts to shine is when we get to NASA.
As much as I love the space program, I’m still working from layman’s understanding of engineering and math. Many astronaut stories focus on the experience of going to space, but some do delve into the technology or the science. Unless the author uses a pretty broad brush in explaining those things, I generally get lost. I get why putting a square cartridge in round hole with whatever you happen to have in space is hard. I am excited when a solution is found. But I can’t really tell you what that solution was. Handprints on the Hubble does an amazing balancing act with the technical side of the story. It’s told with just enough simplicity and extra explanations that I understand it, without dumbing the science down into “yay telescope!” I genuinely learned science as I read, and I realized I never had to reread through the technical explanations to work things out.
I also read it through in one go which is getting uncommon for me. I even did it during the afternoon which is even more unusual. That’s prime kid interruption time, and I often lose track of storylines and find myself having to start over. When Handprints on the Hubble was delivered, I sat down to page through it and see if I thought it was going to live up to what I wanted it to be. Three hours later, the answer was yes. I could not put it down, and I haven’t been this excited over space stuff in years. The kids and I spent the rest of the afternoon looking at Hubble pictures, star maps, and telescope schematics. I still hope that someday I’ll get to hear Dr. Sullivan talk about her time in space in person, but if this is as close as I get, I’m quite happy. It feels rare to have something I cared about so passionately come back into my life untarnished and improved. I look forward to the sequel about ocean exploration.
I would highly recommend this book for anyone high school and up who is even the least bit interested in space exploration. Now I’m going to go read it again for the third time. And tomorrow I’ll probably read it again.
Cross posted from my site: http://myrdan.com/index.php/adult-non...
As a kid, I invested myself in a plethora of interests one of which was the space program. I loved every era of NASA history, reading and watching everything I could lay hands on. I still watch rocket launches and space walks – and I might read a little less, but the allure of a new space book, even one that covers pretty much the same thing as many that came before, is very hard to resist.
Many of the people I can point to as the “heroes” of my teenage years were connected to NASA. Many of those people are obvious like John Glenn, Gene Kranz, Jim Lovell, and Neil Armstrong. And others are less remembered like Robert Goddard, Deke Slayton, Bruce McCandlless, Guion Bluford, and Eileen Collins. Falling somewhere in the middle are the first six women who served as astronauts. Everyone knows who Sally Ride was, but I always found Shannon Lucid and Kathy Sullivan’s stories more interesting, and teenage me was disappointed to find they never got any biographies or autobiographies.
Several years ago, a news article about another celebrity falling from grace prompted some morbid googling on my part. Many of those people whose flight numbers I memorized and whose pictures I posted on my wall must be still alive, right? How were they faring the test of time?
I am happy to report that as a whole most of the names I looked up came through unscathed. Mostly because all we as a public know about them is their time in NASA, but I still take that as a win. If they had done something worth being drug through the mud for since then, I’m confident it would have made the news. But unexpectedly, one of them stood out in a good way.
Kathy Sullivan retired from the space program to do equally cool and impressive work with NOAA. In fact, given how little press her time as an astronaut seems to have gotten, she’s probably better known to the public for her work there than at NASA. However, while Dr. Sullivan might not have been the first American woman in space, she got to be the first American woman to do a spacewalk.
And finally, I’m holding her book.
Okay, I’m holding her second book. Several years ago, she helped author a kid’s picture book biography called Too the Stars. I purchased it as soon as it came out too, and it is a very well loved bedtime read at our house that probably deserves its own post someday. But, as giddy as I was to get that after all those years, that’s nothing compared to finally having the real story. And Dr. Sullivan clearly knew where to focus her book because as much as this is her story, in her words, it’s all going to the thing that made her stand out all those years ago: launching the Hubble Space telescope.
Look, part of being a good nut about anything is having opinions. And being a NASA nut, I had and have many feelings about the direction of the program in general. I feel gipped that no one has walked on the moon in my lifetime and unsure why NASA allowed itself to become so earthbound with the shuttle program. However, the shuttle program had some massive high points too, and the Hubble program has to be up near the top of the list.
But I suppose a critique of the book I’m reviewing is actually order. Handprints on the Hubble is an excellent autobiography and even better book about space. Like any firsthand account I’ve read from an astronaut, it’s got a bit of slow start. I’m not reading these books to learn about their author’s childhood and education so that part always goes into the “not meant for me” category. Though I will say, I love how Dr. Sullivan writes. It’s very conversational, and mostly I feel like I’m hearing a lecture rather than reading a book. Her story through it all is very streamlined and precise with almost blunt wording. (Unlike this review!) She’s telling the facts as they happened, and her emotions and private musings are much rarer than I’m used to in this kind of book. So I didn’t skip the early life section like I often do. But where Dr. Sullivan’s style of prose really starts to shine is when we get to NASA.
As much as I love the space program, I’m still working from layman’s understanding of engineering and math. Many astronaut stories focus on the experience of going to space, but some do delve into the technology or the science. Unless the author uses a pretty broad brush in explaining those things, I generally get lost. I get why putting a square cartridge in round hole with whatever you happen to have in space is hard. I am excited when a solution is found. But I can’t really tell you what that solution was. Handprints on the Hubble does an amazing balancing act with the technical side of the story. It’s told with just enough simplicity and extra explanations that I understand it, without dumbing the science down into “yay telescope!” I genuinely learned science as I read, and I realized I never had to reread through the technical explanations to work things out.
I also read it through in one go which is getting uncommon for me. I even did it during the afternoon which is even more unusual. That’s prime kid interruption time, and I often lose track of storylines and find myself having to start over. When Handprints on the Hubble was delivered, I sat down to page through it and see if I thought it was going to live up to what I wanted it to be. Three hours later, the answer was yes. I could not put it down, and I haven’t been this excited over space stuff in years. The kids and I spent the rest of the afternoon looking at Hubble pictures, star maps, and telescope schematics. I still hope that someday I’ll get to hear Dr. Sullivan talk about her time in space in person, but if this is as close as I get, I’m quite happy. It feels rare to have something I cared about so passionately come back into my life untarnished and improved. I look forward to the sequel about ocean exploration.
I would highly recommend this book for anyone high school and up who is even the least bit interested in space exploration. Now I’m going to go read it again for the third time. And tomorrow I’ll probably read it again.
Cross posted from my site: http://myrdan.com/index.php/adult-non...
April 17, 2020
I really admire this book. The technical details are fully laid out, but are pretty straightforward for a layperson (such as myself) to follow, or skim, depending on interest level. The author's hard work and determination really come through, along with all the teamwork that went into launching the Hubble. I wouldn't have picked this up had it not been on display for women's history month, so, thanks, library!
July 29, 2021
This astronaut memoir was fascinating! Hubble is an engineering marvel.
July 16, 2025
Kinda boring (and that’s coming from someone in this field…)
May 25, 2023
Astronaut memoirs are always fascinating, and Sullivan's NASA career provides plenty of highly interesting material for a book that is both engaging and highly informative regarding both her experiences and the projects she worked on.
May 3, 2020
In Handprints on Hubble Kathyrn Sullivan gives us a different sort of astronaut autobiography. There's not a lot here about her personal life, instead the focus is mostly on her involvement in her work prior to and during the STS-31 mission that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope back in 1990. She places special emphasis on the behind-the-scenes work that was done in prepping the telescope and the tools that astronauts would use in making sure that the telescope was serviceable during future missions. It is a bit "techie" in places but I enjoyed it.
March 6, 2020
A great story of innovation, focusing more on the processes and technologies that were created to make the Hubble missions, and its maintainability possible.
June 1, 2020
Half astronaut memoir, half Hubble Telescope biography, this book details the exacting measures that put the Hubble into orbit. Sullivan was on the space shuttle crew that deployed it in 1990, but she spent the previous 5 years determining how to maintain it in space. NASA realized they couldn’t bring it back to Earth every 5 years and that maintenance would have to be done 330 miles above the planet. Therefore, it had to be serviceable by astronauts wearing bulky EVA suits and that all systems requiring maintenance would have to be accessible. She worked tirelessly to make sure the tools they would use functioned, hardware could be reached, and Hubble could be repaired or upgraded.
Because of all the engineering components and challenges, this was certainly the most technical astronaut memoir I’ve read. There’s a lot of detail about tool design and development and testing the functionality of these in the neutral buoyancy SIM tank. There’s also a lot of bureaucracy to keep up with: “The people side of the equation was just as complex as the technical side: shuttle flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Hubble flight controllers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and engineers from both Lockheed and the Marshall Space Flight Center all had to learn to understand each other and develop the skills needed to work together at 17,500 miles per hour.”
A bonus is that the book includes plenty of illustrations on the glossy pages throughout. There were a few editorial missteps, but otherwise it was a fascinating look at one of mankind’s greatest achievements from the perspective of an individual who was directly involved.
Because of all the engineering components and challenges, this was certainly the most technical astronaut memoir I’ve read. There’s a lot of detail about tool design and development and testing the functionality of these in the neutral buoyancy SIM tank. There’s also a lot of bureaucracy to keep up with: “The people side of the equation was just as complex as the technical side: shuttle flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Hubble flight controllers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and engineers from both Lockheed and the Marshall Space Flight Center all had to learn to understand each other and develop the skills needed to work together at 17,500 miles per hour.”
A bonus is that the book includes plenty of illustrations on the glossy pages throughout. There were a few editorial missteps, but otherwise it was a fascinating look at one of mankind’s greatest achievements from the perspective of an individual who was directly involved.
March 8, 2023
I found this book fascinating - I am always interested in reading about space, astronauts, etc. I vaguely recognized Kathryn Sullivan's name prior to reading the book (for a book group discussion), but had no idea of all of her accomplishments. She is a truly spectacular person, who has achieved much during her lifetime ... and she is not done yet!
While the book does contain some technical information about her missions, and especially the Hubble telescope, I did not find it overwhelming. The writing style is very conversational and easy to read - it is almost as if the reader is listening to Dr. Sullivan tell her stories about her life and experiences. I learned from my virtual book discussion (which Dr. Sullivan actually joined for a few minutes - we were very privileged!!) that her motivation for writing this book came from her wanting to acknowledge and honor the team of people who made Hubble possible. That definitely comes through in the book, as she spends much time introducing a large variety of scientists, engineers, astronauts, and others and describing the amazing work that went into creating, deploying, and maintaining this space telescope. She does talk about herself, and her story, also - how she became an astronaut (after initial career in oceanography), training and doing space walks as part of shuttle missions, her extensive involvement with the development and deployment of Hubble, and her life after NASA.
Highly recommend this book for anyone who likes to learn about space, astronauts, innovation, invention, creativity, teamwork .... and a strong, brilliant, adventurous woman.
While the book does contain some technical information about her missions, and especially the Hubble telescope, I did not find it overwhelming. The writing style is very conversational and easy to read - it is almost as if the reader is listening to Dr. Sullivan tell her stories about her life and experiences. I learned from my virtual book discussion (which Dr. Sullivan actually joined for a few minutes - we were very privileged!!) that her motivation for writing this book came from her wanting to acknowledge and honor the team of people who made Hubble possible. That definitely comes through in the book, as she spends much time introducing a large variety of scientists, engineers, astronauts, and others and describing the amazing work that went into creating, deploying, and maintaining this space telescope. She does talk about herself, and her story, also - how she became an astronaut (after initial career in oceanography), training and doing space walks as part of shuttle missions, her extensive involvement with the development and deployment of Hubble, and her life after NASA.
Highly recommend this book for anyone who likes to learn about space, astronauts, innovation, invention, creativity, teamwork .... and a strong, brilliant, adventurous woman.
January 22, 2020
Starting with listening to the radio in our school classroom when the first American astronauts went into space, I've been interested in our space program. And the Hubble Telescope's launch was some excitement and chat at work with others who were hoping it would be successful. Kathryn Sullivan became an astronaut when a required college science class became more interesting than her study of foreign languages, and then her brother challenged her to apply to NASA when she was a research oceanographer. This book, though somewhat detailed in a dry style, really was an eye-opener about how astronauts are trained and the comprehensive work they do to provide input to engineers for the design and improvement of the Space Shuttle, and now the Space Station, and any payloads they carry. The opaque and uncertain scheduling, the Challenger disaster, the cross-agency rivalry all make the scientific work more stressful and challenging for these super-bright and motivated people. Kathryn had a major role in making the Hubble able to be deployed safely, and to be updated and modified as necessary. She gives attention and high praise to all the team she worked with, and while she didn't actually produce a gizmo to make a spacewalk movement more efficient and safe, she had to analyze what needed to be done and work with the vast team doing all sorts of support.
April 6, 2020
I wanted to enjoy this book because I know nothing about the space program. From the perspective of learning new tidbits of knowledge, better understanding the complexity of planning, innovation and problem solving, I would give it a *5*; however, from the perspective of a reader who was reading a memoir and not a textbook, it fell far short. I have taken many science courses at university, so I have a bit of a science background, so I was not lost in the complexities, but rather that is not what I wanted to read, a textbook. The author is clearly a brilliant, talented scientist and risk-taker (I mean, anyone who is an astronaut must be a risk-taker) but none of that aspect of her personality comes across in this book. There is very little humanity or personal about her in this book. Almost zero. And if there was, it was hidden under the textbook nature of the book. She experienced some amazing, one of a kind opportunities, and her storytelling was blah. This book was fairly divided down the middle in my bookclub; some likes and dislikes. I guess a positive thing is I would never in a million years read a book about the space program (not really an interest of mine) but... I definitely learned stuff! This one blew me away -- the Hubble telescope is so powerful that it can see the stars on the American flag from 1000s of miles away!
June 7, 2023
Hubble, what an amazing feat of engineering and craftsmanship! What an adventure to be part of the team to deploy it! This book shares one perspective on that adventure. Sullivan shares the political and physical challenges that faced the Hubble program. She starts by chronicling her journey to space and the skills that she developed that lead her to be part of its launch. It’s full of tidbits of mission details and personal memories.
The only drawback is the amount of detail. I’m sure, especially after reading her account, that the size of each bolt is of incredible importance, and the thought that goes into such minute detail is impressively hard. Still, a chronicle of people thinking and then trying another material, size, or configuration of this or that does tend get a little mundane.
It was a clean read.
The only drawback is the amount of detail. I’m sure, especially after reading her account, that the size of each bolt is of incredible importance, and the thought that goes into such minute detail is impressively hard. Still, a chronicle of people thinking and then trying another material, size, or configuration of this or that does tend get a little mundane.
It was a clean read.
March 18, 2024
Unfortunately, this book was less memoir and more "this is how the Hubble Space Telescope was assembled and how it works". Which is fine! But Kathryn Sullivan skips over a lot of the reasons I read astronaut autobiographies: descriptions of traveling into space, what it feels like to be one of a few humans not living on Earth, astronaut training, and the complexities and politics of the NASA offices. She was also one of the first women in space AND the first American woman to walk in space!A lot of that was skimmed over which was so disappointing. However, the descriptions of Hubble and working on Hubble were the few moments in the book where you can tell she was excited and her passion for this project shone through. I just personally wish the book dove more into her personal experiences in space and in her life at NASA.
February 1, 2020
I got a copy of this book at a book talk at my work by Kathryn Sullivan, who really impressed me. I loved that she talked some about the technical challenges that she worked on, rather than focusing solely on her personal experiences, and the book was more of the same. It gave me a much better idea of how Hubble actually got made and upgraded, and what the astronaut's role in the process is, than a memoir. It even made me think seriously about trying to be an astronaut! I may have tabled that idea for now, but Kathryn Sullivan is still an inspiration for me, and I will find some kind of adventure to go on to channel her spirit!
October 7, 2021
This book let me look into the work of the NASA astronauts very deeply and now I respect their commitment and professionality even more than before. The development process and ground testing of the tools used during the EVAs (ExtraVehicular Activity = space walk) is very interesting. I was surprised by the fact that the on-orbit maintenance and satellite refueling tasks were one of the the 'raison d'être' of the space shuttle. These were absolutely forgotten goals since the end of the shuttle era.
September 5, 2025
This a most interesting story about the development of an astronaut and her contribution to deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope. As a design engineer, I appreciate the considerations of not only how to deploy but how to repair a highly complex instrument — in outer space! (I never had to worry about replacing a circuit board or power supply in a day center as one might do on a “satellite” in orbit. In addition to an accessible description of the technical effort, I thought the detailed descriptions of teamwork on the ground, under water, in the lab, and in space were inspiring.
March 3, 2020
This is a fascinating read. Learned so much about becoming an astronaut in the early shuttle days, especially for a woman. Kathryn Sullivan writes in an easy to read style, altho I did skip a lot of the technical details. She was on the trip that put the Hubble telescope into space. I will look for more books on Hubble photos. Especially recomment to young women interested in the sciences: earth, space, ocean.
August 24, 2021
A detailed and fascinating overview of Sullivan's career as a NASA astronaut working during the 1980s and '90s. Sullivan has a gift for describing complex procedures in an engaging and clear fashion, and I enjoyed seeing the intersection of her interests in deep sea and outer space exploration, as well as the problem-solving that went into the installation of the Hubble telescope. Her eye for detail and generous mentions of her colleagues make for a vivid and enjoyable read.
March 18, 2022
7/10
I really enjoyed this. Her enthusiasm is evident throughout the entire book.
I don't know how much appeal this would have for people not interested in spaceflight. There are long parts devoted to things like what kind of bolts were selected for Hubble and EVAs in general, and designing toe holds for working on an EVA.
My favorite part was how much respect she commanded back in a time when women didn't typically get much respect
I really enjoyed this. Her enthusiasm is evident throughout the entire book.
I don't know how much appeal this would have for people not interested in spaceflight. There are long parts devoted to things like what kind of bolts were selected for Hubble and EVAs in general, and designing toe holds for working on an EVA.
My favorite part was how much respect she commanded back in a time when women didn't typically get much respect
March 1, 2020
Fascinating true story of the author’s work on the Hubble Telescope and her participation on space shuttles. Interesting insight about this history of NASA and her career both in space and weather science at NOAA. Had the opportunity to meet the author at events for the 50th anniversary of NASA over the summer and at a book release event for her at the United States Patent & Trademark Office.
April 17, 2020
History of one of the greatest scientific achievements
The book is an accurate documentary of the development and deployment of the Hubble space telescope. It recognizes the important people whose wisdom and brilliance made a scientific tool that went far beyond it’s goals. Our knowledge of the universe has been greatly expanded.
The book is an accurate documentary of the development and deployment of the Hubble space telescope. It recognizes the important people whose wisdom and brilliance made a scientific tool that went far beyond it’s goals. Our knowledge of the universe has been greatly expanded.
December 7, 2020
Sullivan tells the stories we rarely hear when describing the adventures of NASA: those of the teams that design, build, and test the equipment that is launched into space. Dr. Sullivan and her teammates navigate technical and organizational challenges to build a maintainable instrument whose operation will persist, and improve, as a result.
January 22, 2020
Some of the technical details were beyond me, but overall this is a good read for those interested in science and astronomy. The embedded photos were really interesting, especially the "lunch team" pin.
February 15, 2020
The writing style was a bit dry for my taste. However, if you're interested in the details of space training and how the Hubble got into space, then this book is for you. There are some amusing anecdotes along the way as well to keep anyone interested.
June 7, 2020
Amazing detailed story of the birth and life of the Hubble telescope
I loved the book. Amazing details and the dedication of the teams of astronauts and engineers who have opened up the universe to our eyes. K. Sullivan is an amazing lady I’m so thankful for her dedication to space and sharing her wonderful story.
I loved the book. Amazing details and the dedication of the teams of astronauts and engineers who have opened up the universe to our eyes. K. Sullivan is an amazing lady I’m so thankful for her dedication to space and sharing her wonderful story.
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