NASA astronaut speaks to students
Musgrave talks about designing Hubble Telescope
Michael Vernor
Issue date: 11/20/08 Section: News
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The highly-accomplished NASA astronaut and engineer gave his lecture, "The Beauty of Nature - The Art of Technology" as the semester's final event Tuesday night in the Lecture-Concert Series.
"I never finished high school," Musgrave said. "School and me weren't compatible. I had a real world out there with real responsibilities on the farm, and I had nature for exploration and discovery."
Musgrave said he went off to Korea shortly after leaving high school in 1953. There he served as a mechanic with the Marine Corps.
Even though he could make judgments and imagine what was wrong with the vehicles on his own, as he had been doing since he was young, the rules dictated he study and follow the established manuals. As a result, Musgrave said he "learned to read books in the Marine Corps."
He talked at length about his work on the Hubble Telescope. As a designer, Musgrave was charged with the task of making the ambitious project maintainable.
"They told me in 1975 they want to put a big telescope in space," he said. "I was given the test of finding out anything and everything that might go wrong with it, and then I had to be able to fix it during a spacewalk."
Musgrave described to the audience how spending 17 years designing the Hubble forced him to innovate and use his imagination in ways he never had before, whether it was designing new tools to do the work he needed or applying terms like "choreography" in ways they had never been used before.
In 1993, because of his thorough planning and expertise, Musgrave and his team were able to perform repairs on several critical errors on the Hubble, including an incorrectly-designed mirror, which had rendered the telescope nearly useless since its launch in 1990.
Since then the Hubble Telescope has produced some of the most beautiful, inspiring and scientifically valuable pictures in the history of mankind. During his lecture, Musgrave shared some of the Hubble's best pictures and other photos he has collected throughout his career, which demonstrate the role both nature and technology have played in his life.
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