A Space Shuttle Astronaut Remembers

Eyes to the Stars: A Memoir for the Space Shuttle Generation, Steven Hawley, 2026

BookPress Publishing has recently released three books by legendary space shuttle astronauts Susan Kilrain, Hoot Gibson, and Steve Hawley. While these three have much in common career-wise, and make a congenial and entertaining trio as they tour the country signing books and relating stories, their books are as about as different as they could be.

Steve Hawley is best known as one of the original space shuttle-era astronauts, chosen in 1978 by NASA as one of a new generation of spacefarers. The shuttle was designed to carry a wide range of people to orbit to carry out all kinds of scientific and engineering tasks. Most of them, Hawley included, wouldn’t need to pilot the vehicle. Many of this original group, after making spaceflight history, retired and went on to other jobs. But Steve Hawley remained, flying for longer than the others – five times in all – and staying in a NASA management role for many more years. As such, he has a fascinating story to tell of the inner workings of the agency during this historical era, both flying in space and helping to plan and guide missions from the ground. It was a time of great change for NASA, and Hawley was in the middle of it all.

Steve Hawley was on the crew that launched both the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory from the shuttle’s cargo bay, which made sense considering his background as an astrophysicist – as did his revisit to Hubble in space for the second servicing mission of the telescope. Hawley chronicles these missions and the complexities behind them with the detail of a keenly detail-oriented scientist. We gain a sense of the managerial shifts and thoughts behind an ever-changing NASA, through tragedies and triumphs. There are programs such as Shuttle-Mir which few else have covered in this way. We learn more about fellow astronauts and managers such as John Young, with insight into his sidelining that I do not recall in such detail elsewhere.

Along the way, Hawley shares some personal insights, some of which are surprising. He’s already on record, before this book, being gracious about his marriage to fellow astronaut Sally Ride, so it is no surprise he is consistent here. Other details surprised me, however, such as his thoughts on whether it would be worth sacrificing a shuttle and its crew to ensure the Hubble space telescope survived. As an astronomer with a deep love of the telescope, his emotions were quite different to his fellow astronauts.

I’m a geek for this kind of inside-baseball stuff, and I appreciate that Steve Hawley has clearly taken a great deal of time to relate his career in such detail, so historians will always have it as a reference.