Fulfilling the promise of manned spaceflight

Forty years ago last weekend, when Apollo 11 was midway to the moon, I had my final oral defense for my Ph.D in astronomy.

I was in graduate school at the University of Michigan then. Two days later, a group of astronomy graduate students gathered in my small apartment to watch the televised moon landing on a tiny black-and-white portable TV.

We had potato chips and drinks and watched the grainy, gray image of Neil Armstrong as he stepped onto the moon. We clapped and shouted.

Important as it was, though, this was not a defining moment for us. It would not alter our life choices. Most of us had chosen our career paths many years before. We were the Sputnik generation. We had spent years studying physics, astronomy and math.

But the space program had influenced us, and had provided financial support for some. As the Apollo program came to an end, NASA scaled back considerably. Manned spaceflight appeared to be over. There were big budget cuts, and many fewer job opportunities for people in astrophysics, space physics and engineering fields.

Some of us were seeing the first signs of that already on July 20, 1969, the day humans first walked on the moon. Only a year before, my colleagues finishing their degrees were getting three or four job offers. In 1969, I was lucky to get one.

With the development of the Space Shuttle, we, men and women, returned to space, but not without a lot of criticism. Many scientists and engineers criticized the extra expense and risk of shooting people into orbit only 400 miles above the Earth, compared to the greater scientific return on the dollar from the robotic missions.

In many ways their arguments were correct, and they still are. But those arguments fail to account adequately for what is, in my opinion, the crowning achievement of the post-Apollo space program: The Hubble Space Telescope.

Few people realize that the shuttle and the Hubble were designed around each other. The Hubble just fits inside the bay of the shuttle.

And the Hubble is, in many ways, a manned mission, as was demonstrated so successfully last May with the fourth -- and, unfortunately, last -- servicing mission. I am a user of the Hubble, and during the servicing mission I watched one of the instruments I used removed and two others repaired.

The repair of one of those instruments, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, was risky, complicated and a real nail-biter to watch. It could only have been done by a person.

Some people will say that eventually robots will be able to do intricate repairs like that, and they are right. But the decision-making by the astronauts, and by the scientists and engineers on the ground was human.

For me, the repair of the Hubble was the fulfillment of the promise of manned space flight. So while some among my colleagues still favor a greater emphasis on unmanned missions, I'm in favor of going back to the moon, and to Mars, and beyond. ----

Roberta M. Humphreys is Institute of Technology distinguished professor and professor of astronomy at the University of Minnesota.

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