NASA astronaut speaks to students

Story Musgrave started his distinguished career as a self-described farm boy in Massachusetts with a dislike for book study.

The highly-accomplished NASA astronaut and engineer gave his lecture, "The Beauty of Nature ­- The Art of Technology" as the semester's final event Tuesday night in the Lecture-Concert Series.

"I never finished high school," Musgrave said. "School and me weren't compatible. I had a real world out there with real responsibilities on the farm, and I had nature for exploration and discovery."

Musgrave said he went off to Korea shortly after leaving high school in 1953. There he served as a mechanic with the Marine Corps.

Even though he could make judgments and imagine what was wrong with the vehicles on his own, as he had been doing since he was young, the rules dictated he study and follow the established manuals. As a result, Musgrave said he "learned to read books in the Marine Corps."

He talked at length about his work on the Hubble Telescope. As a designer, Musgrave was charged with the task of making the ambitious project maintainable.

"They told me in 1975 they want to put a big telescope in space," he said. "I was given the test of finding out anything and everything that might go wrong with it, and then I had to be able to fix it during a spacewalk."

Musgrave described to the audience how spending 17 years designing the Hubble forced him to innovate and use his imagination in ways he never had before, whether it was designing new tools to do the work he needed or applying terms like "choreography" in ways they had never been used before.

In 1993, because of his thorough planning and expertise, Musgrave and his team were able to perform repairs on several critical errors on the Hubble, including an incorrectly-designed mirror, which had rendered the telescope nearly useless since its launch in 1990.

Since then the Hubble Telescope has produced some of the most beautiful, inspiring and scientifically valuable pictures in the history of mankind. During his lecture, Musgrave shared some of the Hubble's best pictures and other photos he has collected throughout his career, which demonstrate the role both nature and technology have played in his life.

Slides of Musgrave in his spacesuit, shuttle launches, space walks, the Hubble, T-38 supersonic jets and other technological marvels were included alongside high-altitude and orbital shots of Earth and its mountains, volcanoes, islands, clouds and auroras.

He closed by simply telling the audience the importance of respecting nature and technology as well as each other.

"It's good to be curious, to want to learn about science and the world," Musgrave said. "Whatever we end up doing, we just have to learn to get along with ourselves and with one another."

Musgrave wore many hats before, during and after his 30-year career with NASA. He holds seven advanced degrees from many prestigious schools in several fields of study, including chemistry, surgery, mathematics, biophysics, literature, operations analysis and computer programming.

Musgrave has also been awarded 15 honorary degrees in varied fields and was inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame at Kennedy Space Center in July 2002.

During his time at NASA, Musgrave helped design the shuttle, the modern space suit, the robotic arm and the Hubble Telescope. He participated in six shuttle missions and worked in mission control for many others. He also led the team that repaired the Hubble in 1993.

He retired from NASA in 1997 and has since spent his time as a public speaker, for which he was named the Best Professional Speaker of the Year in 2002 by the American Speakers Bureau, and serves as a consultant to both Applied Minds of California and Disney's Imagineering Group.