Kathryn D. Sullivan

This is a really interesting book about STS missions involving the Hubble Space Telescope. The science and engineering involved in the entire Hubble development, deployment, and maintenance process was fascinating.

I wouldn't call this book a memoir, however. In order to learn about the author, I will have to go to Wikipedia. Reading this book, the author shares more information about fellow astronauts and workers at Lockheed / Marshall / Goddard than about herself. I know she had two parents, and her mother died, and that's about it.… (mehr)

This is a very focused book, telling the story of the origins of the Large Space Telescope, from its first speculative origins in a 1946 paper by Lyman Spitzer through its development as the Hubble Space Telescope, its deployment on April 25, 1990, and a nod to the subsequent maintenance missions.

This is a clear, but somewhat detached, telling of this story, written by one of the astronauts that originally deployed it in orbit. Unlike some of the other astronaut books, there is only a little of her personality in this narrative. She specifically chose to remove a lot of the acronyms and specialty terms that those in the aerospace business use routinely, to make it more readable to a wider audience.

I worked on software for the Hubble’s science operations ground system in the mid-1980s. So as I read, I compared what was going on in the process of developing the hardware and operational questions to what I remember happening in our related project, at that same time. There was some internal translation happening as I read, to put back in some of those technical terms. I smiled when she referred to a “critical design review” – a milestone I know as a CDR. Or when she mentioned that so and so was working on requirements and specifications for this theoretical astronomy satellite – clearly that person was the lead systems engineer, though she never called him that. After the discussion of the Challenger disaster, it seemed that it took forever for her to mention that the Challenger's payload, a tracking and data relay satellite system (TDRSS, in my life), was part of the means used by the Hubble to communicate with the ground. So Hubble could not be launched until after a replacement TDRSS was successfully put in orbit.
Loved the discussions of things I’d never considered – like what variables affect such things as choosing the altitude for deploying the Hubble, or how on-orbit maintenance needs affect various hardware designs (from astronaut foot restraints to bolts).

This book was fascinating from the perspectives of design, engineering, and maintenance of a hugely important scientific instrument and its deployment, but somewhat less engaging as a tale of an astronaut’s journey.… (mehr)