Stan Love ‘87 Delivers Convocation Address

HMC physics major and NASA astronaut Stan Love returned to Galileo Hall to address the question “Where should we go?” as part of Convocation on 4 September 2008. Dr. Love, who flew on a Shuttle mission earlier this year which included two 7-hour space walks while docked to the International Space Station, spoke insightfully about two approaches to space missions: the Apollo and the Hubble. The Apollo effort was aimed at landing men on the Moon and returning them safely; it was audacious, expensive, and enormously successful. The Hubble has been another spectacular success, although for neither of the two primary investigations for which it was designed. Rather it has allowed scientists to observe that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, an unanticipated but extraordinarily fundamental and (and baffling) discovery that poses exciting challenges for particle physics and cosmology. Love argued that Hubble-style projects are more likely to succeed in future.