It’s a little bit of an accident. I loved astronomy as a kid. I had a telescope, and then I made a telescope, my father actually got me started and got me a kit, and I ground a telescope, used it in sort of my backyard, actually above the garage, and I lived in the city of Milwaukee which wasn’t a great site for astronomy but it was okay, so I liked that. My real love early in life was physics, and mathematics. I just loved physics, I loved math, I also liked astronomy but it was just a sort of an aside. So when I went to college I majored in applied engineering physics, and I went to graduate school in physics, but when I got to graduate school at CalTech, I had to specialize in something and so I started to look at all of the things that people did and to me the most interesting of all of it was astrophysics, which was a subset at CalTech of physics. So I interviewed with a couple of professors who were doing different aspects of astrophysics, I chose one, the infrared group, which was led by Gary [hard to hear], who is still one of my great mentors and friends from that era, and I went into it, and that’s how I became an astronomer. I knew I loved science, I loved astronomy, I loved physics from an early age, so probably when I was already in 5th or 6th grade I knew I wanted to become a scientist, and all that [hard to hear] but specialization takes place a little later.

Hubble, frankly, didn’t belong to the astronomers at that point. It was publicly funded, yes, we use it for research, yes, it is great, it is the greatest of these instruments, but really we had been so successful in engaging the public in this mission that everybody thought they owned it and they couldn’t understand why it was going to be taken away from them. So I watched this sort of phenomena and the same thing happened throughout that day and the next day which was a Sunday. I kept getting them from New Zealand and Brazil, and all over the place.

So the following Monday I came in and I talked to some other people in the Director’s office and my colleagues, and one of them, who remains a close friend, he’s now in Santa Cruz, Bruce Morgan, said “You know Steve, we’re just going to have to fight this.” And we thought about it, and said yes, we would. And we did do that. But the reason I tell you this is that during that time, when we were advocating, one of the most remarkable things was – I believe it was in Cleveland, Ohio – a young school girl, I think she was in 7th or 8th grade, cared so much about Hubble she began taking up a collection of money, and she got money from her classmates, who gave their lunch money to help save Hubble. And in addition she got a local doctor to donate $100 so they had $120 in their fund and this became publicized – that school children were donating their lunch money to save Hubble – and NASA had to send a representative out to explain that a servicing mission to Hubble cost a billion dollars. It would be very tough to get there with that.

But it just sort of underscored the tremendous psychological impact that Hubble had on the public, and I think brought astronomy into the public mind. Not for the first time by any means, but it just made it so palpable, how interesting this stuff really is to people because we’re looking back to the beginning of time, we’re looking at the first stuff, we’re looking at our neighborhood in a way that if there are other beings like us out there we might be able to discover, we’re finding out what the universe is like, and Hubble has played absolutely unbelievable role.

Astronomy is the oldest science. We consider it the Queen of Sciences. And it’s very special because it is part of the human consciousness or awareness that’s we’re in something bigger than just ourselves. So I hope people in the Year of Astronomy think of our place in the universe and how our continued efforts to understand it do nothing but enrich civilization and make us all better people.

First of all, we know we can predict with very good – we believe we can predict certain discoveries that should be made which will be tremendously exciting, if we can build the technology. In the case of the James Webb, it’s designed to be able to look back beyond the beginning of galaxies. And we’ll be able to watch, in the sense of looking at different eras, we’ll be able to watch how galaxies are born, how they’re assembled, how everything is put together. It’s an absolutely critical piece of knowing if our understanding of the universe is correct. We have rather detailed theories of how this happens, but unless we can mesh these theories with observation, they’re empty. And so I think it’s critical that we have some telescope in place that will do that. Of course it’s always been the case that when you build a telescope much more powerful than its predecessors, you will make many discoveries that you can’t predict, because the universe is complicated. So I think we all believe that great discoveries will emerge from this, but we can’t prove it without James Webb.

I think beyond James Webb, there are clearly some problems out there that everybody can see are so compelling, that we will want to build an even greater fleet of bigger telescopes. I think the biggest one is life in the universe. We know that there are plenty of planets around other stars. We can predict with the right technology we’ll be able to see these individual planets, to separate the light from the stars, to study their atmospheres, to see if they have got oxygen, water, the kinds of things that we know is evidence of life on earth, and actually find out if there are nearby planetary systems with evidence for life like our own. That is remarkably exciting, overwhelmingly exciting. But that will require space telescopes, new space telescopes. The James Webb won’t quite be able to do that, Hubble can’t quite do that, but with a little bit more oomph we’ll be able to. So I think that’s an example of why everybody would be excited about another generation.

Ultimately they got the thing built. The launch date was scheduled for the summer of 1986. In January of 1986, the Challenger — the Space Shuttle — blew up, just after launch, the first real tragedy of the Shuttle Program, and the space telescope was meant to be launched on Challenger and so that completely put the program back. Nothing was going to be launched until they figured out what the problems were with the space shuttle. As you know there was a big investigation that took four years, before there were any more launches, and so everything, including the space telescope, was delayed.

Finally in 1990 they started launching shuttles again, they believed they’d solved the problems of the launch, Hubble was launched, and it was a fantastic thing. Hubble weighs 25,000 pounds. It’s about the size of a school bus. So imagine putting a rather heavy school bus in orbit, and then being able, once it’s in orbit, to point it anywhere in the sky to a tiny fraction of a second of arc, and stabilize it for an hour as it’s whizzing around, or more as it’s whizzing around the earth at 17,000 miles an hour. That was a remarkable technological feat.