Radical is Temporary

Abstract

I suspect that even if Ken had stayed on, we would have evolved to the state we're in right now. In terms of the nature of the work that we're doing, we've gone from development to maintenance, and so the project team needed to evolve to reflect that change. The analogy I use to describe Hubble is a data factory, and we provide the factory controller. The telescope takes in light and produces pictures, and we're the ones sending all of the control signals and monitoring the temperature, power, and voltages in the factory to make sure the production line is doing its job and that it's not reaching some sort of a stress point. That's basically it. We maintain the Hubble command and control system. I think we're still putting out a good quality product. We still meet our schedule and cost milestones. Every time we make a change to the ground system, we run a suite of tests to make sure that the system still runs as expected, and that it correctly controls the spacecraft. Other than that, provided the interfaces are controlled, everything is okay.