There is no crying in space, but Monday was perhaps as close as it gets to a blubberfest in space helmets.
As he headed into the airlock of the space shuttle Atlantis after the fifth and final spacewalk to tune up the Hubble Space Telescope, the astronaut and astronomer John M. Grunsfeld paused to pay tribute to the telescope and the human spirit.
It was snap, crackle and pop in the early days of the universe. You would not want to live there. Astronomers said Tuesday that they had smashed the long-distance record in astronomy when they recorded an explosion, probably a massive early star, that lived and died 13 billion years ago, only about 600 million years after the Big Bang.
John Grunsfeld was sitting in an astronomical meeting in Atlanta in January of 2004 when he got a message to come back to headquarters in Washington to talk about the Hubble Space Telescope.
