'Hubble': Heavenly Ticket to Space

NASA/Warner Bros. - The Butterfly Nebula, gas escaping from a dying star at 600,000 miles per hour, as seen in 'IMAX: Hubble 3D.'

* FILM REVIEW
* MARCH 26, 2010

'Hubble': Heavenly Ticket to Space
'Eclipse' shines with sterling cast, shamrock scenery and traditionally gothic ghosts

If you go to the excellent Web site for "IMAX: Hubble 3D" (www.imax.com/hubble) you'll find lots of information on this documentary about the Hubble Space Telescope and where it's playing—40 locations at present, more than 100 theaters by summer. And you'll get some sense of the film from the trailer—about as much as looking at a maple leaf will give you a sense of autumn in New England. On my computer screen the trailer plays in a nine-inch box, measured diagonally. In an IMAX theater the film—43 minutes long and light years deep—plays on a 100-foot screen, supported by as much as 18,000 watts of audio power and dramatically enhanced by the 3-D process. All of that is enough to give you a sense of the soul-filling grandeur the Hubble reveals, and of the space-based observatory itself, one of the glories of our scientific age.

Shortly after the Hubble was launched in 1993 it was famously diagnosed with, and subsequently cured of, an extremely inconvenient case of astigmatism. "Hubble 3D," narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, revisits that first repair mission, which was followed by several on-site service calls over the years, but the documentary concentrates on a final visit by the space shuttle Atlantis in 2009—the end of the line for Hubble repairs and upgrades, a mission that fortunately made room for a 3-D IMAX camera on board.

The launch alone is worth the price of admission. I've been to two launches, Apollo 11 and Apollo 12, and "Hubble 3D" is the first film I've seen—and felt—that does more than hint at the skeleton-rattling power of those stupendous rockets. In orbit, the astronauts of mission STS-125 float off on their extravehicular tasks while the camera tracks their work and, not incidentally, studies the blue planet floating below or above but always beyond them. The spectacle, which puts Hollywood thrillers in the shade, has its own moments of high drama. When failed circuit boards defy all efforts to remove them, the astronauts must take a Zen approach—unscrewing one tiny screw at a time—to what's described as performing brain surgery while wearing oven mitts.

The most spectacular images come, as they should, from the farthest reaches of the cosmos via the Hubble's various sensors. This is a perfect match of medium and subject—or, indeed, of medium and message, since the film tells us bright and clear that there's no limit to what science can do when it's fueled by audacity and a quest for pure knowledge. Our scientific age is also becoming a small-screen age, when people settle willingly for dinky little images like those on YouTube. Yet the heavens defy compression, and here's an irresistible chance to see them as they've not been seen before.

The Hubble provides imagery so dense with data that scientists have been able to put us inside the images on computer-generated fly-throughs. The film's itinerary takes us past Saturn's aurora, past the Helix Nebula in the constellation of Aquarius and the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula. Andromeda looms, a star-packed Frisbee. Gaseous clouds billow while million-mile-an-hour stellar winds blow through a cloud canyon 90 trillion miles across. Ad astra per silica: Computer travel may not be the real thing, but IMAX makes this an astonishing trip all the same.

Related Space Video

• Homemade Photo Kit Captures Earth (03/26/10)
• News Hub: Astronauts Speak From Space Station (03/05/10)
• Base Jumping From Space? (01/25/10)
• NASA Works to Thwart Pesky Moon Dust (07/17/09)

Apollo moon landings

Five Best: Harrison H. Schmitt selects stellar insider accounts of the Apollo moon landings

1. Deke! Biography
By Donald K. Slayton
Forge/St. Martin’s, 1994

Neil Armstrong became the first man to step on the moon 40 years ago because Donald “Deke” Slayton—a former Mercury ­astronaut and NASA’s director of flight-crew operations—assigned him to command Apollo 11. In the Apollo project’s evolving effort to put men on the lunar surface, Apollo 11 was the fifth test flight and the first to carry a ­Lunar Module capable of an actual moon landing. Up to the moment of touchdown, though, a landing ­remained far from certain. “Deke!,” written with Michael Cassutt, gives Slayton’s personal narrative of ­decisions that determined who would fly in space, who would not, and how they would be trained for history’s greatest adventure. Slayton also ­relates how a farm boy from Leon, Wis., evolved into a no-nonsense ­manager of the complex interactions between the technical demands of the space program, the astronauts’ ­necessary type-A personalities, and their personal screw-ups as aggressive ­pilots and generally self-centered ­human beings.

2. Failure Is Not an Option 629.453 K
By Gene Kranz
Simon & Schuster, 2000

Apollo astronauts rode to the moon on the tip of a spear held by thousands of engineers, mostly men in their 20s, who would make up one of history’s most disciplined operational teams. In “Failure Is Not an Option,” Gene Kranz describes his path from flying a F-86 fighter to creating and leading NASA’s flight controllers. Kranz provided the catalyst so that their ­motivation, imagination, competence and courage could be applied to the immense challenge of landing men on the moon and bringing them safely back to Earth. He also prepared these newly graduated engineers to deal with the inevitable emergencies of space flight. Kranz led Mission Control as it guided the crew of Apollo 11 to the lunar surface and nine months later returned a stricken Apollo 13 mission from the brink of disaster to a remarkable triumph of American spirit and ingenuity.

3. Rocket Boys Biography
By Homer Hickam Jr.
Delacorte, 1998

The motivation of many of the young men who ­became miracle workers for Apollo ­began with the launch of Sputnik I in October 1957 by the Soviet Union. I know that my interest in space began at that point. So did Homer Hickam’s. His “Rocket Boys” (later released as “October Sky,” after the title of a 1999 movie based on the book) vividly describes his roots in West Virginia coal-mining country and his post-Sputnik attempts during high school to build and launch small rockets. Hickam went on to become an engineer and was part of the Saturn V rocket team that launched 27 astronauts to the moon. His story was typical of Apollo ­veterans across the country.

4. Apollo Expeditions to the Moon 629.454 C
Edited by Edgar M. Cortright
NASA, 1975

Believe it or not, James Webb, Robert Seamans, Samuel Phillips, George Low, Christopher Craft and other NASA managers were practically household names 40 years ago. They were the core of the effort to meet President John F. Kennedy’s May 1961 directive to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. These men rapidly put together the engineering team and supporting infrastructure leading to Americans walking on the moon on July 20, 1969, and to five additional missions of lunar exploration, ending with my own, Apollo 17, in December 1972. Soon after succeeding in this goal, project managers joined several Apollo astronauts in writing chapters for Edgar M. Cortright’s “Apollo ­Expeditions to the Moon,” explaining “how it was done.” Each chapter ­provides insights fresh from those who did it, ranging from high policy to the human experience of being there.

5. Carrying the Fire Biography and 629.4
By Michael Collins
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974

“I have been places and done things you simply would not believe,” writes Apollo 11 astronaut Mike Collins near the end of “Carrying the Fire.” That observation reflects my own memories of exploring the moon’s Valley of Taurus-Littrow. Forty years ago, ­Collins spent the day alone in lunar ­orbit as the command-module pilot while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin explored the moon’s surface. Collins ultimately gave us arguably the best personal story by an astronaut, capturing all the hard work, family interactions and excitement of being in the group of men who would be the public face of Apollo. They and all with whom they worked believed, correctly, that this was the most important contribution they could make with their lives.

—Mr. Schmitt, a former U.S. senator for New Mexico and, as Apollo 17’s geologist and lunar-module pilot, the last man to step on the moon, is the author of “Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise and Energy and the Human Settlement of Space” (Copernicus/Praxis, 2006).