If that fails, everything might still be up for grabs, I think, except the decision to build such a telescope in the first case. It has taken the best of human beings to build it: collaboration and dedication to knowledge, boldness and humility, respect for nature and our own ignorance, and the courage to continue picking up the pieces of failure and starting anew. And even.
“It is amazing. We’re regarding 600,000 miles from Earth and we actually have a telescope,” said Bill Ochs, Webb’s project manager at Goddard Space Flight Center, when the telescope finally spread its golden wings earlier this month.
We reel under the weight of our knowledge of our own mortality. Faced with the ultimate abyss of destiny, we can find honor and dignity in having played the cosmic game to win, trying to know and feel as much as possible in the short centuries we have been given.
Once, a long time ago in another life, I happened to be sitting next to it Ricardo Giacconi, one of the great captains of Big Science and later winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, on a flight to a conference we were both attending in San Diego. At the time, he was working for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and was excited regarding launching his dream project, a satellite — later dubbed the Einstein Observatory — that would take X-ray images of violent objects like black holes.
dr However, Giacconi had offered to name his satellite Pequod, following the doomed ship Ahab had commanded in pursuit of Moby Dick, much to the amusement and confusion of his colleagues.
So I asked him why he wanted to name his dream creation following a doomed whaler.
dr Giacconi replied that he liked the connection between whaling history and New England. Then he started a dissertation on Dante of all things. During the poet’s visit to Hell in the Inferno part of The Divine Comedy, he finds Odysseus being consumed by flames as punishment for his sins, intrigues and frauds during the Trojan War and his wandering homecoming.
Odysseus tells the story of his life and travels, how he returned to Ithaca but got bored and set out with his men on a journey through the Pillars of Hercules into the great unknown west sea. When his crew got nervous and wanted to turn back, he told them to stand up.
