I feel privileged and honored to have flown. It's been a tremendous ride, looking back on the legacy and accomplishments, like the Hubble telescope and the launching of the International Space Station in 1998.
Alan G. Poindexter
I expect New Horizons will see more that Hubble cannot see.
Alan Stern
I will fight in the United States Senate this year to fund a servicing mission to Hubble by 2008, a mission that would potentially increase Hubble's power and efficiency by a factor of 10 and allow us to look back almost to the beginning of the universe.
Barbara Mikulski
Even Hubble hasn't found yet the end of this universe, and we don't know that it has any end.
Billy Graham
The Next Generation Space Telescope, which will be located much further away from the Earth than the Hubble Space Telescope presently is, will also explore the infrared part of the spectrum.
Claude Nicollier
Hubble is very close to my heart, and going back to Hubble, because I was there once already in 1993, is really a great privilege for me.
That's what Hubble can do for us. It can tell us whether the universe is expanding forever or if one day it's going to come back together.
Duane G. Carey
The Hubble Telescope can see the farthest galaxies. The Webb Telescope will see the farthest stars.
Heidi Hammel
Hubble is absolutely unique; we must have a telescope in space to complement the very large telescopes on the ground.
The Hubble images far surpassed anything taken by any telescope on Earth.
Hubble wasn't designed to look at objects in our solar system, but after it was launched, astronomers realized that with just a little bit of modification to the software, it could look at solar system objects.
Because Hubble's been up so many years now, it's actually given us a window to things like... how planets' atmospheres actually change, evolve... over time.
Hubble made my career.
Together, NASA and Hubble are opening new vistas on the universe.
We don't use Hubble to stare at Jupiter unless there's a special event or some special reason.
When Hubble was launched, it became clear very shortly thereafter that there was a problem with the optics.The mirror was not quite the right shape. And the one program that I had really been looking forward to doing with Hubble was studying outer planets in our solar system, the planets Uranus and Neptune.
I have a little piece of Hubble that someone brought back from one of the repair missions. It's on my desk, where I work. I do feel a personal connection to it. It's been part of my life for 20 years.
Hubble orbits high, outside Earth's atmosphere so it can see a wide spectrum of light our atmosphere blocks.
The thing about telescopes is that the mirror is the main component. Once that's built, you don't need to build new ones; you just need to swap out the instruments. There's nothing wrong with Hubble's mirror.
The whole Hubble program has just been a fabulous testament to the NASA science community and the NASA astronaut community.
The Hubble program has been so fantastically successful. It's more than what anyone expected.
Every field of astrophysics - whether it's our local neighborhood of planets, nearby stars and their attendant planets, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, out to the edge of the universe - every field has questions that are awaiting the power of Hubble.
It's actually very difficult to come up with a new name for something that hasn't already been bagged by someone else, unless you call your new show 'Shubbley-Doobley-Woobley' or something like that!
Hubble knows there is interesting stuff out there, but Hubble isn't quite big enough.
Hubble isn't just a satellite; it's about humanity's quest for knowledge.
The Hubble Space Telescope is more than remarkable. It has answered just so many of those fundamental questions that people have been asking about the cosmos since people were able to ask questions.
When I first went to Hubble, as an astronomer and as a scientist, it was a dream come true. And as an astronaut, the Hubble missions are premiere missions because Hubble is so important to science, so important to humanity, that it's just a very special event. But as an astronomer, it was sort of the holy grail of missions.
There is no stronger case for the motivational power of real science than the discoveries that come from the Hubble Space Telescope as it unravels the mysteries of the universe.
Because of Hubble and other telescopes, we've now discovered that there are probably planets around every star, or virtually every star. There are solar systems around most stars. And the fact that we're here on a planet, Earth, means that it's likely there's lots of other Earths out there.
The only reason Hubble works is because we have a space shuttle.
I can't imagine anywhere I'd rather be than outside the space shuttle in my space suit next to the Hubble Space Telescope.
I got lucky and got assigned to Hubble.
The team at the Space Telescope Science Institute has a demonstrated record of meeting the high-performance challenges of operating the Hubble Space Telescope and preparing for the James Webb Space Telescope.
Hubble showed us the marvel and majesty of stars being born.
I kind of feel like I found my cause in life servicing the Hubble Space Telescope.
The Hubble Space Telescope, which was designed for extreme servicing, you know, we can fix everything. And the James Webb Space Telescope, where we can fix nothing. It has to work the first time. And it's a very complicated telescope.
To help enable the kind of science Hubble is performing makes my life worthwhile.
Hubble uniquely has been able to look in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a nearby star and figure out what's in that atmosphere.
Hubble has really opened our eyes to what the universe is made of, its structure, and has helped us learn how little we know about the universe.
Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.
With the Hubble telescope and all the other things that are out there, I believe something would have come through. Today, I really believe we are unique.
Ironically, it is only when disaster strikes that the shuttle makes the headlines. Its routine flights attracted less media interest than unmanned probes to the planets or the images from the Hubble Telescope. The fate of Columbia (like that of Challenger in 1986) reminded us that space is still a hazardous environment.
The reason we have the stars twinkle at night is because the light is being kind of blurred by the atmosphere around the Earth. That is why the Hubble Space Telescope is so good, because it is above the atmosphere. So it is kind of like looking at the sun from the bottom of a swimming pool, versus looking at the sun above the swimming pool.
The Earth - from our altitude at Hubble, we're 350 miles up. We can see the curvature. We can see the roundness of our home, our home planet. And it's the most magnificent thing I've ever seen. It's like looking into Heaven. It's paradise.
A Hubble Space Telescope photograph of the universe evokes far more awe for creation than light streaming through a stained glass window in a cathedral.
I wondered had I really oversold the Hubble. I have to admit that, since, I have been convinced that I didn't.
The exciting results from the Hubble, other satellites and probes would not have been possible without innovative solutions to many technical problems.
I think probably the discoveries made by Hubble Space Telescope have been very dramatic, very amazing.
Hubble has established for the first time that the distant universe looks different from the nearby universe.
Hubble is the most important telescope in history after Galileo's first telescope.
