Seeing Through Heaven

I saw in a recent NASA budget announcement that apparently Congress will continue funding the James Webb space telescope, the planned successor to the Hubble. And NASA recently published a beautiful Hubble photo titled “Ten-Thousand Galaxies”. The two announcements reminded me that I wrote the first document on the planned checkout of the Hubble, at the then-intended launch site, Cape Canaveral. (It was actually launched on the Space Shuttle (April 12, 1990) because its final weight exceeded the capacity of the planned unmanned vehicle, the Titan II. That first, early document proved mostly a waste of time and effort for myself and the NASA spacecraft checkout engineer who ordered it and worked with me on it.)

And seeing the photo showing ten-thousand galaxies brought to mind a marvelous 1920s story that beautifully illustrates why I’m an atheist, and why Christian fundamentalists are so sadly, unbelievably mistaken in their faith. But we’ll get to that.

About the time of the last Apollo Mission (Apollo-Soyuz, launched July 15, 1975) I returned to NASA Unmanned Launch Operations on Cape Canaveral. I had worked there through 1966-67, but returned to KSC HQ to work on the Apollo Program. In the long interregnum between that last manned Apollo flight and the first Shuttle launch (April 12, 1981, and remarkable because this was the first time a new and untried vehicle carried a live crew), I spent four years back at my old job as Project Writer for the Atlas/Centaur program. I also did numerous outside jobs, such as science papers for NASA and contractor executives and that Hubble document.

I played no further direct part in the launch of the Hubble, but supported it in indirect ways after I returned to KSC HQ in 1978, as a contractor tech writer in the general support group for the Space Shuttle. I did a presentation on the Hubble at a science fiction convention in Atlanta. I suffered embarrassment, as did everyone else associated with the project, when the main mirror proved to have a flaw, and rejoiced with astronomy fans everywhere when NASA was able to correct the problem with an ingenious fix (STS-61, December 1993). And Hubble went on to become, without much doubt, the most productive single telescope in human history. (Though, hopefully, the Webb will exceed it.)

Those were my major contributions to the Hubble. So back to the photo of ten-thousand galaxies. In 1927 Wilbur D. Steele, a very fine writer now perhaps unjustly forgotten, wrote a story about a young minister who got his first look through a large telescope. Hubble, and others, had recently proven that what had been considered nebulae, gas clouds, or smears on the lens were in fact separate, entire galaxies, incredibly far away and unbelievably numerous (billions and billions, as Carl Sagan would say). The young minister saw, with his own eyes, the true size and scope of the known universe. He had until then accepted the basic Christian tenets that God was omniscient and omnipotent, the ruler of all things. What he saw made him lost his faith. No conceivable being could watch all the sparrows fall in a vastness of that magnitude.

This being 1927, and Steele wanting to see his story published (and draw a nice check), in the end the young missionary regained his faith. In our more cynical time, we are much less inclined to accept the clearly unbelievable. I became an atheist at fourteen, without having read the story. But faith is a form of willing blindness, and those who place faith above reason will not care one whit what the facts prove. And to them I can only say, Go With God.

Photo credit: NASA