Ed Weiler, NASA’s chief of space science, has gotten used to wearing lapel pins. Commemorative pins are a ubiquitous part of the space agency’s culture-contractors hand out these mementos like cigars before every launch, and multiyear missions earn serial souvenirs.
After 25 years, Weiler has many more pins than he has lapels. So he divides the real estate this way: left lapel available for the mission pin of the moment, right lapel sacrosanct, reserved for his Hubble Space Telescope pin, a rare silver one, given out almost two decades ago, before the Hubble was even named Hubble. At the time it was simply the most complicated telescope ever designed, not the most important one. But all that has changed.
“I’ll never take off my Hubble pin,” he says. “I’ve never been to a launch without it.”
Weiler is a big part of why the Hubble is alive and well today. A spectroscopist by training, he served as the Hubble’s chief scientist from 1979 until 1998. During the 1980s, when the program was plagued by technical challenges, delays, and cost increases, he defended the imperiled concept that the scientific instruments on board should be regularly upgraded and replaced. The memo he wrote in 1983, proposing that NASA build a backup wide-field/planetary camera, proved prescient in 1990, when it was discovered that the telescope had been launched with a flaw in its primary mirror. In 1993 astronauts brought the backup camera with corrective optics to the telescope and installed them in a legendary feat of spacefaring. The fixes worked.
