Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 10, 1990 TAG: 9004100421
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: JOHN NOBLE WILFORD THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. LENGTH: Long
He had a leading role in the development of sonar in World War II and of early concepts for controlled fusion energy.
But what may be his most lasting contribution is sitting on a launching pad here: the Hubble Space Telescope, set for liftoff at 8:47 this morning to an orbit where it will view the heavens almost to the edge of the universe.
The first detailed ideas for a large space telescope were Spitzer's, and over the years his tenacious advocacy won over astronomers, fought off budget cutters and sustained the project through adversity and repeated delays.
This tall, lean professor has never shied away from the big problems of science and technology requiring bold and imaginative solutions.
"I have a weakness of character - a fascination with the spectacular," Spitzer likes to say of himself. "But then I have a sort of theory about our weaknesses being our strengths."
To be sure, the $2.1 billion project, the most expensive and complex undertaking in unmanned space science to date, has grown beyond the embrace of any one person.
It has become a manifestation of big science, involving vast teams of researchers and technicians, enormous costs, fierce competition and bureaucratization.
But everyone associated with the project acknowledges Spitzer as the intellectual and political father of the Hubble telescope.
"He's been the driving force from the very beginning," said Dr. Jeremiah Ostriker, chairman of the astrophysics department at Princeton.
In a history of the project, "Space Telescope: A Study of NASA, Science, Technology and Politics," published this month, Dr. Robert W. Smith, a historian at the National Air and Space Museum, writes that Spitzer's "involvement in arguing for, justifying and then helping to develop the space telescope stretches back longer than the commitment of anyone else."
"Lyman has been the father-spirit of the project," added Dr. Charles J. Pellerin Jr., director of astrophysics for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Forty-four years ago, when the German rockets of World War II had awakened people to the possibilities of space flight, Spitzer elaborated on the value of placing a large telescope in orbit high above Earth's obscuring and distorting atmosphere.
He did this as an addendum, "Astronomical Advantages of an Extraterrestrial Observatory," to a 1946 study of artificial Earth satellites conducted by the Rand Corp. for the Air Force.
"Such a scientific tool," he wrote, "could revolutionize astronomical techniques and open up completely new vistas of astronomical research."
Dr. John N. Bahcall, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., said: "That paper was like Lyman himself. It was simple, very clear but very audacious."
Although Hermann Oberth, a German-Romanian member of the V-2 rocket team assembled by Dr. Wernher von Braun, wrote in the 1920s of the possibility of space telescopes, it was Spitzer who expanded the concept with specific plans.
His outline of the four main research goals for the telescope was especially prescient.
A telescope with a 200-inch mirror, he predicted, could measure the extent of the universe, determine the structure of galaxies, resolve the individual stars now hidden in the hazes of globular clusters and learn the nature of other planets. All four are high on the Hubble's agenda for discovery.
Only in one respect have events overtaken Spitzer's vision.
He predicted the telescope might settle the issue of whether there was intelligent life on Mars. That possibility was ruled out by spacecraft visiting the planet.
But the Hubble telescope, astronomers hasten to add, could help identify planetary systems around other stars and thus encourage the belief in extraterrestrial life far beyond the solar system.
As Spitzer recalls, the evolution of the Hubble telescope occurred in four stages of roughly one decade each.
He worked mostly alone in the first decade, but would come to embody astronomy's struggle to initiate and defend the project through its long, troubled history.
No one paid much attention to the idea at first. Space flight was still futuristic.
But Spitzer left Yale University in 1947 to become head of astrophysics at Princeton, where he had earned his doctorate.
One condition of his employment, he said, was that he be allowed to pursue his vision of a space telescope.
Working with Dr. Martin Schwarzschild at Princeton, he sent telescopes to the fringes of space with sounding rockets and balloons in what was called Project Stratoscope.
In 1957, a 12-inch telescope was lofted by balloon to 80,000 feet to make revealing studies of the sun.
The information gathered by the telescopes, recorded on spectrographs, was recovered when they were brought back to Earth.
That was a few months before Sputnik was launched in October, inaugurating space flight and the second decade of Spitzer's crusade for the telescope.
"The Air Force came to me with an urgent request for ideas about how satellites could be used for astronomy," he said. "They didn't have to twist my arm."
Spitzer has scaled many peaks in his life, and still tries to do some rock climbing once a week.
About a decade ago, he was sighted at dawn working his way up the wall of a gothic tower at Princeton and was arrested by campus police.
By all accounts of his colleagues, Spitzer is a quiet, gentle and modest man.
But he saw the idea through the science and NASA bureaucracies with aggressive vigor that the initials for the Large Space Telescope, LST, were said by insiders to stand for the Lyman Spitzer Telescope.
Reminded of this, he merely chuckled and changed the subject. The adjective "large" did have to be dropped, he recalled, because the telescope was not as large as envisaged and because it was thought to frighten congressional budget makers.
"A friend of mine," Spitzer remarked, "suggested that we call it the Great Orbital Device, which would give it an interesting acronym."
If the success of Copernicus, demonstrating the benefits of a space telescope, and the design studies by NASA highlighted the third decade in Spitzer's chronology, the whole project came close to foundering.
In 1975 and 1976, NASA's budgets were unusually tight, and Congress was reluctant to authorize any new spending for space. NASA was on the verge of canceling the project. Spitzer became a lobbyist.
"John Bahcall and I divided up the names of key congressmen and decided who would see whom," he said.
"We spent a lot of time in Washington. We called on other astronomers, who got their friends to get their friends to put on the pressure. The response was overwhelming."
by CNB