The Space Telescope. A study of NASA, science, technology, and politics.

Complete with a new Afterword detailing the project's problems since its 1990 launch, Robert Smith's "The Space Telescope" (for the first edition see 50.003.047) sets the fascinating and disturbing history of this massive venture within the context of "Big Science". Launched at a cost of 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 analyzes 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.