The Impossibility of Cynthia Hopkins: Or, Can Autobiographical Musical Performance Save the Space Program?

Abstract

Against the background of a highly charged political year—a landmark election in the U.S., another in Iran, and worldwide economic depression, to name a few events—a programmatic and ideological split within NASA may as well exist, well, in a vacuum in space. But a brief piece in the May 23, 2009 Washington Post discusses the simple yet significant dilemma: is money better spent on maintenance or invention. At the center of the debate is the nineteenyear-old Hubble telescope, now in need of a shuttle to make adjustments and repairs. Hubble team leader David Leckrone stirred up quite a bit of controversy, with strong words against his employer, saying, “It just makes me want to cry to think that this is the end of it. [ . . . ] There is no person out there, there is no leadership out there, there is no vision out there to pick up the baton that we’re about to hand off and carry it forward.” NASA, it seems, is at a flash point where it must decide whether to continually reinvent its missions and objectives at the risk of forsaking past achievements, or to slow down and pay better attention to the past, nurture it, and help it survive. All of this rhetoric comes at a vital time, when space exploration has all but fallen out of public and international spotlights. NASA is struggling for visibility and, by extension, survival.