3 Questions: Jeffrey Hoffman on the Space Shuttle at 30
Thirty years ago, on April 12, 1981, the U.S. Space Shuttle made its first voyage into space. Four years later, on the same date, rookie astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman made the first of his five flights as a shuttle astronaut. MIT News asked Hoffman, now Professor of the Practice of Astronautics at MIT, to reflect on the shuttle’s history and influence.Q. Now that the U.S. Space Shuttle's career is ending, how would you say it stacks up against any other space vehicles so far, or currently on the drawing boards, and what have been the shuttle's greatest accomplishments?A. The shuttle is the most versatile spaceship ever built. It has launched satellites, repaired satellites in orbit, conducted scientific experiments of great complexity (especially with the Spacelab module), serviced the Hubble Space Telescope to repair failures and upgrade the instrumentation so that it remains a state of the art telescope, and enabled the...