Hubble survived a botched mirror and a NASA official who deliberately defunded it
The Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990 with a main mirror ground to the wrong shape, blurring its vision until astronauts fixed it in 1993. Years earlier, a NASA manager had zeroed its budget on purpose to provoke astronomers into lobbying. The gamble worked, and so, eventually, did the telescope.
The idea is older than NASA. Hermann Oberth wrote in 1923 about lofting a telescope into orbit by rocket, and in 1946 astronomer Lyman Spitzer laid out why it mattered: above the atmosphere, sharpness would be limited only by optics, not by the turbulence that makes stars twinkle, and ultraviolet and infrared light blocked by the air would become visible. Ground telescopes then managed 0.5 to 1.0 arcseconds, against a theoretical 0.05 for a 2.5-metre mirror in space. Nancy Grace Roman, later called the Mother of Hubble, promoted the project in public lectures and then as program scientist spent the 1970s defending it before Congress.
Money nearly killed it. Congress deleted all funding in 1974. In 1977 Administrator James Fletcher offered a token $5 million, but associate administrator Noel Hinners cut even that, betting the shock would rally astronomers. It did: letter campaigns and meetings with legislators followed, and the Senate agreed to half the original budget. The mirror shrank from 3 metres to 2.4, the European Space Agency joined in exchange for at least 15 percent of observing time, and in 1978 Congress approved $36 million. Its name, chosen in 1983, honours Edwin Hubble, the astronomer credited with confirming Georges Lemaître's discovery that the universe is expanding.
Delays, budget troubles and the 1986 Challenger disaster pushed launch from 1983 to 1990, aboard mission STS-31. Then came the spherical aberration, corrected by the STS-61 servicing flight. Hubble remains the only telescope designed to be repaired by astronauts in orbit; five Shuttle missions replaced all of its main instruments. The last, cancelled after the 2003 Columbia loss, went ahead in 2009 after Administrator Michael Griffin approved it.
Its five instruments cover ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light, and its observations helped pin down how fast the universe is expanding. It passed 30 years of operation in April 2020 and may keep working until somewhere between 2030 and 2040, alongside its successors, the James Webb telescope and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
Source: Hubble Space Telescope
