"There was never any doubt that I wanted to be an astronomer, and that's what I set myself up for," NASA astronomer Steven Hawley says, looking back on a fruitful career that included five space shuttle missions. "UC Santa Cruz was fairly young when I was looking at graduate schools, but it already had a world-class astronomy department. By incorporating the Lick Observatory astronomers, it immediately became one of the top schools in the country for astronomy, and I was lucky enough to get in."

Steven Hawley hadn't planned on going into space himself, but the chance was too good to pass up. "You don't know what opportunities will be out there, so you need to prepare yourself as best you can, be alert, and then jump on them when they become available and hope for the best," he comments.

NASA had just started recruiting scientists and engineers into the astronaut program when Hawley was finishing his graduate degree at UC Santa Cruz in the late 1970s. He applied for the program but never really expected to be selected. "The elation of being picked to be an astronaut at NASA quickly changed to apprehension. I had no certainty that it was something I could do, and I knew it would be very challenging," Hawley says.

Hawley wound up serving on several important space shuttle missions - including the one that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope 16 years ago. He returned to Hubble on a maintenance mission in 1997 and performed several major upgrades and repairs. His last space flight was seven years ago, when he helped deploy the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

"For me, as an astronomer, to be able to participate in those kinds of missions was something really special," Hawley said. "To be associated with Hubble and Chandra--you couldn't have written a script that was any better than that."

Currently, Hawley is director of scientific research in planetary and space science at the Johnson Space Center. He helps maintain group of collections featuring extra-terrestrial specimens. However, he still keeps track of important findings from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory and is proud that he was able to contribute to both projects.

So, does he have any advice for budding astro-traveler wannabes? Should they get an astronomy degree? Not necessarily, Hawley says. "A lot of people ask me what they need to do to become an astronaut and if they should take astronomy. And I ask them, 'Well, do you like astronomy?' Because if you don't like it you won't be very good at it...I've been lucky enough to do something I really enjoy."