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My first mission to the Hubble space telescope was in 1999.
I'd been training for years for that mission but
more personally i felt like I'd been training for that mission from birth.
Because I loved taking things apart putting them back together as a kid,
I liked to work on cars, and then fell in love with science.
Studied to be an astronomer and astrophysicist and my job
in training to be an astronomer was to build new scientific instruments
to explore the universe.
"Veteran spacewalker John Grunsfeld out of the
airlock recognizable by the red stripes around his pant legs and up on the
backpack of his suit the backpack housing all of his life support..."
It was an amazing time growing up on the south side of Chicago
and there was kind of a serendipity that I think set me on the path
that I eventually followed which is I remember seeing the Gemini
astronauts, I remember seeing the Apollo astronauts and Neil Armstrong and Buzz
Aldrin landing on the moon. my ability to experience that
space race going on and our success on the moon
inspired me to tell my mom I want to be an astronaut.
"Enhance the vision of Hubble into the deepest grandeur of our universe..."
I was also very interested in science though and it was the science that
propelled me through my young career going to high school getting involved
with the science teachers and math teachers and then going on to college
to study physics. And as a college student
I approached a group that was doing research in astrophysics and said hey
I'd like to work in astrophysics and so I started working with NASA
missions, Small Astronomy Satellite 3 and then building instruments that went
on high altitude balloons to look at neutron stars and black holes
and so I was absolutely driven by learning about the universe.
When I got my doctorate in physics at the university of Chicago
I thought you know maybe having a doctorate in physics doing astronomy
building instruments for astrophysics would be the kind of thing
that might interest NASA in me as a potential astronaut. I filled
out an application and sent it in to Houston
and about six months later I got a call from Houston saying...
"Would you be interested in an astronaut interview?" and I said "Of course!"
That was 1989, I was not selected in that application process but I kept doing
science, I worked with the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory looking at
neutron stars and applied again and in 1992 was selected as an astronaut
in the 14th group of astronauts.
I got assigned to the Hubble mission, got to orbit
in my space suit with Steve Smith, my space walking partner,
and we went out of the hatch into a vacuum and I looked up and there was
Hubble for real! I was on the robotic arm on the space
shuttle and moving back towards the Hubble I got
about three feet away from the Hubble and just had one of these surreal
moments where I thought I just can't believe
this is happening this is too cool! And I reached out with a finger and
touched the Hubble just to prove you know that it was all real now of
course I believed it was real but it was one of those moments where I felt
like I had to go you know knock knock knock and say yeah
yep we're really here and then went went off to work
the space walk and we upgraded the Hubble.
"This is a really tremendous adventure that we've been on a very challenging
mission. Hubble isn't just a satellite it's about humanity's quest for
knowledge. As Arthur C Clark says... "The only way of
finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the
impossible." And on this mission we tried some things
that many people said was impossible: Fixing STIS,
repairing ACS, achieving all the content that we have in this mission but we've
achieved that."