The Many Resurrections of the Hubble Space Telescope

Laughing stock: In the 1991 comedy Naked Gun 2 1/2, the Hubble Space Telescope (top right, on the wall) was depicted as a disaster on par with the Edsel, Michael Dukakis, and the Titanic. If you are old enough to remember news stories from 1990 (or if you are a devoted student of astronomy), you'll recall that the Hubble Space Telescope was not always regarded as the technological triumph that NASA is loudly celebrating today, on its 25th anniversary. The orbiting observatory debuted as a king-size disaster: the telescope that couldn't see straight, built with a mirror that was ground perfectly...but perfectly incorrect. The story of how the error was discovered and ultimately fixed has been told many times, most recently in a beautiful retrospective by my colleague Ian Sample at The Guardian. But today it is hard to appreciate the magnitude of Hubble's turnaround--the depth of the scientific despair ...