Remarks at KSC-Debus Dinner by NASA Associate Administrator Rex Geveden

Jim (Jim Banke), thank you for that warm welcome and thank you to the National Space Club for inviting me to speak this year. I am delighted and honored to be here with Florida’s space community, especially so tonight, as you have recognized the achievements of a great friend and trusted colleague—Mr. Jim Kennedy. Jim, congratulations on your selection as the Debus Award winner. I could not imagine a more deserving recipient

Folks, what I’d really like to talk about are the greater purposes that have motivated Jim Kennedy and so many of you in this audience to dedicate your careers to the exploration of the final frontier. While NASA has been around for nearly 50 years, it is actually for nearly 60 years that the United States has launched rockets, satellites and spaceships from this unique strip of Atlantic coastal paradise. This is indeed hallowed ground, the place where America’s space exploration dreams take flight.

Of course this week we celebrate what happened 25 years ago, when the eyes of the world were on the Kennedy Space Center for an unprecedented launch event. On April 12th, 1981, two brave astronauts, John Young and Bob Crippen, were strapped into their seats on the Space Shuttle Columbia, for the first-ever manned test-flight of a new American launch vehicle. When Columbia launched that morning, the account in Newsweek put it this way:

“It was magnificent on the pad, a space-age Taj Mahal that leapt into the sky on twin pillars of impossibly bright yellow and blue flame.”

The account went on to state,

“The heroism of commander John Young and pilot Robert Crippen lay less in anything they did on their mission than in their willingness to trust their lives to an untested craft, a faith in technology and sheer scale that many Americans wish they could recapture.”

Except in retrospect, it is hard to really understand how much risk really was involved.

I’ll tell you about something else that happened that morning. A young physics student in Kentucky got up early to watch the launch, and was so taken by the sight of Columbia blasting into the heavens that he resolved to one day become a part of the space program. And there were probably thousands of young people around the country, just like me, who watched Columbia and determined right then and there that there could be no higher endeavor than to work in this nation’s space program. You see my dreams didn’t take flight on Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo with Alan Sheppard, John Glenn, and Neil Armstrong. I was too young. My dreams started with the Space Shuttle.

But the influence of STS-1 extends well beyond its inspirational value and, indeed, beyond the mission’s demonstration of American technical prowess. Because of that Shuttle flight and all those that followed, we now have in orbit a permanently occupied space station. Folks here will remember that three of the four Great Observatories were launched by the Shuttle: the Hubble Space Telescope which has revolutionized our understanding of the universe, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, and the Chandra X-ray Telescope. And the fourth, Spitzer, an infrared observatory, was launched by a KSC ELV launch team.

NASA and this nation are deeply grateful to the engineers, scientists, technicians, crew support people and astronauts who made all this possible, beginning with that magnificent launch a quarter century ago. I suspect that more than a few people in the audience played a significant role in the historic first flight of Columbia. The space program we have today is a child of this rich heritage you created. And I’d like to at this juncture to ask all the people who contributed to the STS-1 mission to stand up and be recognized.

Last year, I had the privilege of being in the control room at KSC as the launch of Discovery marked the Shuttle’s return to flight. As the first step in the nation’s Vision for Space Exploration that was an extremely important flight, and I will count being a witness to it as one of my best life experiences.

Of course due to our Return to Flight rules, we had a requirement to launch Discovery in daylight. But I invite you to imagine for a moment what it looks and feels like from the viewing stand during a night launch of the Shuttle.

If any of you have experienced this, you know how awesome it is to see the Shuttle bathed in floodlights. You may recall that a couple of minutes before launch the lights at the viewing stand are suddenly turned off, and a surreal quiet takes hold while the anticipation for launch builds. In this brief moment, as the countdown continues, if you sneak a glance at the night sky, you will see that magnificent sea of stars under which the Shuttle impatiently sits. And in that instant prior to launch you just might look up at the sky and see among the thousands of visible stars, a faint fuzzy thing known as a Messier object.

Now how many of you have heard that term? Great. Extra credit all around. A Frenchman by birth, Messier was 14 years old in 1744 when he observed a great 6-tailed comet in the sky. This sighting motivated Messier to devote his life to space–in his particular case to discovering and observing comets. Although he acquired little formal education and possessed no knowledge of celestial mechanics, at the age of 21 he landed a job as an assistant to the French Astronomer of the Navy, and he spent essentially the rest of his life observing the sky and chasing comets. And he was very successful. He is credited with 20 comet discoveries overall, 13 of which were his alone. In fact, he earned the nickname “The Comet Ferret.”

But Messier’s story is remarkable in its irony more than anything else. Around 1757 while searching for the return of Halley’s Comet, Messier first reported observation of a “nebulous object” that we now call M32—basically a fuzzy thing that didn’t move. A year later he catalogued another object we now call M1.

In later years came Messier Object Numbers 87 and 16 and others later still. Messier continued to list these objects for a simple reason. He intended to publish a catalog for fellow astronomers of objects that might be taken, mistakenly, for comets. He published a first version of the catalog in 1769. By 1784, the catalog was up to 110 of these “comet deceivers”. And the beautiful irony is that it turns out his catalog of stuff is some of the most compelling matter in the universe—

• M1 is the Crab Nebula—remnants of a supernova observed a thousand years ago
• M87 contains the first confirmed black hole
• M16 is the amazing Eagle Nebula with its pre-stellar gas clouds. It is literally, quite literally, a star factory.

These are a little more interesting, perhaps, than the balls of ice and dirt that fascinated Messier. My point in bringing up Messier is that some of the greatest discoveries in science are made unintentionally. In a word they are serendipitous. And inevitably, the harder we look at the universe, the more mysterious and fascinating it becomes. You see, Messier’s problem was that he didn’t have a great telescope—he didn’t have a Hubble or a Chandra to look through. I compare it to looking at pond water under a microscope. To the naked eye, pond water is uninteresting. But under a microscope, you see that pond water is teeming with life, with microorganisms.

A second point is you can’t make amazing discoveries if you aren’t doing anything. So, consistent with our new plans for the Vision for Space Exploration, we will be doing things, constantly, with regular launches of our Crew Exploration Vehicle from KSC beginning early in the next decade, resulting in missions to the moon, Mars and beyond. And who knows what discoveries will occur, intentional or otherwise.

A second part of this story involves a launch that occurred a continent away two years ago next week. It was the launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base on a Delta II rocket of a scientific satellite called Gravity Probe B. The mission of Gravity Probe-B is to measure two aspects of Einstein’s general theory of relativity by detecting with extraordinary precision how the presence of Earth warps space and time, and how Earth’s rotation drags space and time.

I bring up GP-B because over my years as that program’s manager, I was frequently assaulted by the “who cares” question. Why even test Einstein (he hasn’t been proven wrong yet) and what are the consequences if the theory is validated or invalidated? Well my response to that is: Just about everybody cares, because in the end most of this is about cosmology—about the origin, nature, and evolution of the universe. Cosmology is of such fundamental importance to us that it takes up the first seven verses of the first chapter of our most sacred religious text— and I don’t mean the Da Vinci Code. I am referring to the book of Genesis, the text that our

Apollo 8 astronauts read 38 years ago during their Christmas Eve in the vicinity of the moon. So anybody that cares about where we came from and where we might be going cares about cosmology—about gravitational models, supernovae, big bangs, and black holes.

And we never know as much as we think we do (I offer Messier as Exhibit A). Just as Messier needed a more powerful telescope, gravitational physicists needed more sensitive instrumentation to make the first direct measurements of relativistic gravitational effects. What happens when we look harder at gravity, just as we looked harder at Messier’s nebulae?

When you look beyond spiritually-oriented cosmologies toward the first formal theories, you start with the Aristotelian Earth-centric universe that was our primary cosmological model for nearly two millennia. Then, in the16th century, Nicholas Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei proposed a sun-centered model of the universe. Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s moons (Io, Europa, Callisto, and Gannymede) landed him in jail, by the way, because it conflicted with church doctrine and broke the earth-centric model.

With Isaac Newton and the publication in 1687 of the Principia Mathematica, we thought we had solved for all time the problem of the motion of the heavens. But then, in the last century Albert Einstein came along with relativity, which invalidated Newtonian physics and led us to a new model of gravity and into the possibility of black holes and a Big Bang Theory.

So my question is not: “Why test Einstein?” Rather it is: in what physical regime does Dr. Einstein’s model fail? How long, does Dr. Einstein’s model stand up? I predict it will be shorter-lived than all the others.

The point is that all of this matters. Our Administrator speaks eloquently about the reasons a great nation should explore space. He points out that the Roman Empire was built upon mastery of roads, the British Empire on mastery of the seas, and America’s greatness on the mastery of the skies. By extension, the next great nation likely will master space. There are geopolitical, economic, and strategic reasons to explore space and I believe all of those are valid. But I also believe that humankind would inevitably go there because the mysteries of life are important to us. I believe this is the reason, at least partly, that the Kennedy Space Center exists and why so many people in this room care to be a part of this great endeavor of space exploration.

There is a popular song by an artist named Moby titled “We Are All Made of Stars.” The

chorus goes:

People they come together
People they fall apart
No one can stop us now
‘Cause we are all made of stars

These lyrics can be taken as whimsical or romantic, but you know what? At a deeper level, we are all made of stars. We know that if you have enough hydrogen in a gravitational field, you can eventually create forces sufficient to sustain a fusion reaction at the core of a star. If you bang two hydrogen atoms together hard enough, you get a helium atom, and so on. And from this simple yet complicated sequence, the building blocks of life: nitrogen, carbon, oxygen and so on are manufactured. So, we know how life comes about, but we still don’t know why.

Is it any wonder we feel connected to this business? We are all made of stars, as it happens.

Thank you for listening tonight; I enjoyed being with you.