Kathryn D. Sullivan

In her new book, Handprints on Hubble: An Astronaut’s Story of Invention (The MIT Press), Kathryn D. Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space, recounts her experience as part of the team that launched, rescued, repaired, and maintained the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope has revolutionized our understanding of the universe. It has, among many other achievements, revealed thousands of galaxies in what seemed to be empty patches of sky; transformed our knowledge of black holes; found dwarf planets with moons orbiting other stars; and measured precisely how fast the universe is expanding. In Handprints on Hubble, the retired astronaut describes her work on the NASA team that made all of this possible. Along the way, Sullivan chronicles her early life as a “Sputnik Baby,” her path to NASA through oceanography, and her initiation into the space program as one of “thirty-five new guys.” (She was also one of the first six women to join NASA’s storied astronaut corps). Sullivan describes in vivid detail what liftoff feels like inside a spacecraft (it’s like “being in an earthquake and a fighter jet at the same time”), shows us the view from a spacewalk, and recounts the temporary grounding of the shuttle program after the Challenger disaster.

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