Member-only story
Hubble made space beautiful for all of us
When you look up at the sky at night, you see the moon, stars and the occasional red-beacon of a plane flying over head. But also up there, close to Earth but just out of sight are hundreds, if not thousands, of man-made satellites, man-made debris, a couple of space stations and dozens of space telescopes.
The most famous of those space telescopes, as far as Americans are concerned at least, is the Hubble Space Telescope, which has now been in orbit for 28 years. That’s longer than more than one-third of the U.S. population has been alive.
I was close to the end of seventh grade when Hubble was launched April 24, 1990. Of course, being 12, I wasn’t interested in the news too much back then, but I remember some coverage of it. Much of it due to Arsenio Hall deriding it for “taking the same picture” of some far off object which I forget the name of, that looked identical to one taken by a terrestrial telescope.
But unlike the Arsenio Hall Show, the Hubble telescope is still around.
Bringing home the stars
Aside from a few issues in the beginning, particularly that with a flawed mirror, the…
