The Space Telescope: A Study of Nasa, Science, Technology, and Politics

by Robert W. Smith, Paul A. Hanle (Contributor), Robert H. Kargon (Contributor)

Robert Smith's The Space Telescope sets the fascinating and disturbing history of this massive venture within the context of 'Big Science'. Launched at a cost of no more than $2 billion, the Space Telescope turned out to be seriously flawed by imperfections in the construction of its lenses and by solar panels that caused it to shudder when moving from daylight to darkness. Smith analyses how the processes of Big Science, especially those involving the government's funding process for large-scale projects, contributed to those failures. He reveals the astonishingly complex interactions that took place among the scientific community, government and industry and describes the great range of personalities and forces - scientific, technical, political, social, institutional and economic - that played roles in the Space Telescope's history.

496 pages, Hardcover

First published October 27, 1989

About the author

Librarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Tonya Woodbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a long case study that explored the development of the Hubble space telescope. It’s somewhat telling to note that the book finished before the telescope actually launches because of the grounding of the shuttle fleet after the Columbia accident. So, there’s no discussion of the on-orbit issues that plagued the program and subsequent servicing missions. That being said, you can see that the program had issues getting off the ground, pun intended. The Hubble development program was characterized by overly-optimistic cost and schedule estimates and a vast underestimation of the complexity in developing the technologies needed. In addition, programmatic issues from splitting the work up across multiple NASA centers and contractors, so that everyone would get a piece of the work, led to more delays and communications issues. This was enlightening to read, but didn’t surprise me. Turns out that even though it’s been 3 decades, NASA hasn’t changed, and they still have the same issues developing current major programs and projects. It’s kind of disheartening to realize that no one has learned any lessons from repeated acquisition failures over the decades. I don’t have a solution, but it seems to be a problem of incentives. In the end, Hubble has been the most productive scientific instrument ever created, but I just wish that we could get there without all the angst along the way.