The Hubble Wars by Eric Chaisson

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 435 Similarly, Sagan makes some telling observations about the social reasons for the unique safety record of nuclear weapons technology. For instance, people in positions of power would be much more di­ rectly affected by accidental thermonuclear war than by other kinds of accidents. The chief executive officer of Exxon did not get tar in his house or on his person as a consequence of the Valdez accident. Quality of life for the president of the United States, however, would be severely affected by nuclear war. In the end, Sagan concludes that careful examination of these his­ torical examples has led him to find the normal accidents theory more convincing. While I find his research impressive and his ideas suggestive, as a historian I am deeply doubtful about the enterprise as a whole. Essentially, Sagan is using social science tools of predictive and prescriptive modeling to postulate a counterfactual past. As a political scientist using historical case studies, Sagan is caught between the demands of two disciplines. Arwen Mohun Dr. Mohun is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. She was coorganizer, with Julie Johnson, of a conference at the Hagley Museum and Library on “Danger, Risk, and Safety: Ideas and Practices.” The Hubble Wars. By Eric Chaisson. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Pp. xi + 386; illustrations, bibliography, index. $27.50. Eric Chaisson, former senior project scientist at the Space Tele­ scope Science Institute—the National Aeronautics and Space Admin­ istration (NASA)-funded body that interprets the Hubble’s data— has written a superb (though at times slightly rhetorical) account of the horrific labor pains astronomy’s most expensive instrument un­ derwent over the decade it took to place it in orbit. Although it is the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) that is studied here, no one can read this book and not feel somewhat depressed about the prospects for Big Science in general if the crushing political baggage and puerile internecine turf wars of the Hubble are any indication of project procedure. If the book has a central thesis, it is surely that securing funding for megascience in the United States requires the consensus of so many regions, interests, and institutions that the resulting struc­ ture is monstrous: a hydra of differing, insular, and noncommunicat­ ing cultures, disciplinary identities, and plain big egos. How should the public respond, for example, except with incredu­ lity, when learning that none of the Hubble’s principal investigators would allow press photos of objects from “their part” of the sky for fear someone in the astronomical community might scoop them? Or that most of the technical problems the HST experienced had long been solved by its own contractor, Lockheed, for the Department of Defense’s Keyhole spy satellite program (some would call the HST 436 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE just a Keyhole pointing the other way) but “national security” reasons were used for not sharing information with the HST designers? The Hubble’s flexible solar panels—donated by the European Space Agency and thus inviolate politically—actually flapped in space, im­ parting to the Hubble a periodic oscillation which then had to be removed electronically, at some cost to the instrument’s usefulness. Yet another installment for not-so-great-moments in engineering: the HST’s protective lid, when triggered, slams down like a kitchen gar­ bage pail so hard it disrupts the entire telescope. Perkin-Elmer, contractor for the Hubble’s main mirror, skipped the “thermal-vacuum” test, the preeminent final environmental thrashing all spacecraft typically undergo prior to launch, for “cost­ saving reasons.” Yet if one reads between the lines, one surmises that this decision meshes well with NASA’s desperate search for some­ thing to do with the space shuttle—use it for repair missions. After languishing in warehouses year after year, instruments were hope­ lessly out of date by launch time. “Second-generation” instruments, NASA claimed, would be installed on future shuttle flights, taking the heat off NASA for installing (among other things) the equivalent of a Commodore 64 as the Hubble’s central computer, and in the process giving the shuttle a reason to live. In fact, the...