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I'm an astronomer who builds telescopes.

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I build telescopes because,
number one, they are awesome,

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but number two,

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I believe if you want to discover
a new thing thing about the universe,

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you have to look at the universe

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in a new way.

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New technologies in astronomy,

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things like lenses, photographic plates,

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all the way up to space telescopes,

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each gave us new ways to see the universe

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and directly led to a new understanding

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of our place in it.

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But those discoveries come with a cost.

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It took thousands of people and 44 years

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to get the Hubble Space Telescope

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from an idea into orbit.

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It takes time,

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it takes a tolerance for failure,

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it takes individual people

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choosing every day not to give up.

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I know how hard that choice is
because I live it.

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The reality of my job is that I fail
almost all the time and still keep going,

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because that's how telescopes get built.

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The telescope I helped build is called

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the faint intergalactic-medium
red-shifted emission balloon,

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which is a mouthful,

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so we call it FIREBall,

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and don't worry, it is not going
to explode at the of this story.

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I've been working on FIREBall
for more than 10 years,

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and now lead the team
of incredible people who built it.

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FIREBall is designed to observe
some of the faintest structures known,

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huge clouds of hydrogen gas.

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These clouds are giants.

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They are even bigger than
whatever you are thinking of.

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They are huge,

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huge clouds of hydrogen that we think
flow into and out of galaxies.

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I work on FIREBall

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because what I really want
is to take our view of the universe

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from one with just light from stars

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to one where we can see and measure

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every atom that exists.

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That's all that I want to do.

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(Laughter)

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But observing at least some of those atoms

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is crucial to our understanding
of why galaxies look the way they do.

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I want to know

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how that hydrogen gas
gets into a galaxy and creates a star.

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My work on FIREBall started in 2008

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working not on the telescope
but on the light sensor,

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which is the heart of any telescope.

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This new sensor was being developed
by a team that I joined

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at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

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and our goal was to prove
that this sensor would work really well

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to detect that hydrogen gas.

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In my work on this,

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I destroyed several very,
very, very expensive sensors

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before realizing that
the machine I was using

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created a plasma that shorted out
anything electrical that we put in it.

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We used a different machine,
there were other challenges,

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and it took years to get it right,

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but when that first sensor worked,

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it was glorious,

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and our sensors are now 10 times better
than the previous state-of-the-art

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and are getting put into
all kinds of new telescopes.

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Our sensors will give us a new way
to see the universe and our place in it.

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So, sensors done,

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time to build a telescope,

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and FIREBall is weird
as far as telescopes go

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because it's not in space
and it's not on the ground.

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Instead, it hangs on a cable
from a giant balloon

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and observes for one night only

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from 130,000 feet in the stratosphere

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at the very edge of space.

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This is partly because the edge of space
is much cheaper than actual space.

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(Laughter)

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So building it, of course, more failures:

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mirrors that failed,

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scratched mirrors that had to be remade;

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cooling system failures,

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an entire system that had to be remade;

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calibration failures, we ran tests
again and again and again and again;

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failures when you literally
least expect them,

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we had an adorable but super-angry
baby falcon that landed

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on our spectrograph tank one day

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(Laughter)

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although to be fair,
this was the greatest day

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in the history of this project.

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(Laughter)

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I really loved that falcon.

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But falcon damage fixed, we got it built

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for an August 2017 launch attempt,
and then failed to launch

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due to six weeks of continuous rain
in the New Mexico desert.

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(Laughter)

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Our spirits dampened, we showed up again,

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August 2018, Year 10,

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and the morning of September 22nd,

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we finally got the telescope launched.

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(Applause)

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I have put so much of myself,
my whole life into this project,

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and I, like, still can't believe
that that happened.

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And I have this picture that's taken
right around sunset on that day

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of our balloon, FIREBall hanging from it,

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and the nearly full moon,

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and I love this picture.

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God, I love it.

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But I look at it,

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and it makes me want to cry,

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because when fully inflated,
these balloons are spherical,

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and this one isn't,

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it's shaped like a teardrop,

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and that's because there is a hole in it.

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Sometimes balloons fail too.

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FIREBall crash-landed
in the New Mexico desert,

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and we didn't get the data that we wanted,

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and at the end of that day,
I thought to myself,

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why am I doing this?

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And I've thought a lot
about why since that day,

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and I've realized that all of my work
has been full of things

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that break and fail,

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that we don't understand and they fail,

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that we just get wrong the first time,

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and so they fail.

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I think about the thousands
of people who built Hubble

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and how many failures they endured.

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There were countless failures,
heart-breaking failures,

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even when it was in space,

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and none of those failures
were a reason for them to give up.

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I think about why I love my job.

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I want to know what
is happening in the universe.

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You all want to know
what's happening in the universe too.

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I want to know what's going on
with that hydrogen.

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And so I've realized that discovery

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is mostly a process
of finding things that don't work,

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and failure is inevitable when
you're pushing the limits of knowledge,

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and that's what I want to do.

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So I'm choosing to keep going,
and our team is going to do

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what everyone who has ever
built anything before us has done.

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We're going to try again in 2020.

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And it might feel like a failure today,

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and it really does,

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but it's going to stay a failure

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if I give up.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)