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In the event of failure, I believe everything could still be up for grabs, except for the decision to build such a telescope in the first case. Building it required the best of people: cooperation and commitment to knowledge, audacity and humility, respect for nature and our own ignorance, and the courage to continue picking up the pieces from failure and start again. And again.
“This is incredible. When the telescope finally opened its golden wings earlier this month, we are about 600,000 miles from Earth and we actually have a telescope,” said Bill Ochs, project manager at Webb’s Goddard Center for Space Flight.
We falter under the weight of our knowledge of our own mortality. In the face of the vast abyss of destiny, we can find honor and dignity in the fact that in the short centuries we have been given, we have played to win the cosmic game, trying to know and feel as best we can.
Once, long ago in another life, I sat next to you Riccardo Giacconi, one of the great captains of Big Science and later on in flight to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics, to a conference we both attended in San Diego. He was at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics at the time and was looking forward to the launch of the dream project, a satellite later called the Einstein Observatory that would record images of X-rays from violent objects such as black holes.
However, Dr. To the great amusement and surprise of his colleagues, Giacconi suggested naming his satellite the Pequod after the cursed ship Ahab commanded to track down Moby Dick.
So I asked him why he wanted to name his dream creation after a cursed whaler.
Dr. Giacconi said he liked the whaling story’s connection to New England. He then launched an all-people investigation into Dante. During the poet’s tour of hell in the Inferno section of the “Divine Comedy”, he finds Odysseus being consumed by flames as punishment for his sins, intrigues and scams during the Trojan War, and then on his journey back home.
Odysseus tells the story of his life and journeys, how he returned to Ithaca, but later got bored and set off with his men on a journey through the Pillars of Hercules to the great western sea, unknown. When his crew got nervous and wanted to turn back, he told them to hurry.
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