Fascinating people, fascinating places.

Gide and welcome to the Dan Mainwaring podcast.

This is where we talk to and about the famous and the infamous,

the celebrated and the obscure, the well-known and the undiscovered.

Interviews, articles and discussion from around the globe.

We are go for main entrance start, T-minus 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and lift off the space shuttle discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope on the universe.

The Hubble Telescope, launched in 1990, has forever changed the understanding of the universe

and our own cosmic past. In this episode I explore the extraordinary story of one

astronomer who has used the Hubble telescope for research purposes. But years

before he was among astronauts who launched Hubble into space. It was the third of

five missions the astronomer took part in aboard the

NASA Space Shuttles. Professor Stephen Hawley, now of the University of Kansas, was among

the crew of Discovery when Hubble was launched into space in the 25th of April 1990. I recently had the opportunity to speak to Professor Hawley and began by asking him about his early interest in space and in becoming an astronaut.

It actually started as a kid in Maryland.

I was born in Kansas, my parents moved away for a few years and then we moved back,

but I was in grade school in Maryland when Al Shepard was the first Mercury flight,

and our teacher brought a transistor radio to class so that we could listen. I was fascinated by sending people

into space and the things NASA was doing. The thing I realized, however, was that Al Shepard

was a military test pilot. All the astronauts are military test pilots. In fact, Dwight Eisenhower had sort of

decreed that astronauts should be military test pilots. And consequently, it wasn't something that I

thought I could ever do as a job because I wanted to be an astronomer. I remember thinking that one day we ought to have

big observatories in space because space would be a really good place to conduct astronomical

...