The Hubble wars

by Eric Chaisson

The Hubble Space Telescope is the largest, most complex, and most powerful observatory ever deployed in space, designed to allow astronomers to look far back into our own cosmic past with unprecedented clarity. Yet from the day it was launched in 1990 - and soon discovered to be semi-blind - Hubble has been at the center of a cosmic-size controversy over who was responsible for its notorious failure to function and what could be done about it. In 1987, Eric J. Chaisson, an accomplished young astrophysicist, signed on as a senior scientist with the Hubble project. Drawing on the journals of his five-year tenure, he now re-creates the day-to-day struggle over (and often with) the infamously flawed two-billion-dollar recalcitrant beast in the sky. It's a hilarious and frightening story about a three-way war between science, government, and industry (with the military launching guerrilla attacks from the sidelines). Chaisson probes the politics and economics of astronomy and brings to life