The Hubble Wars: Astrophysics Meets Astropolitics in the Two-Billion-Dollar Struggle Over the Hubble Space Telescope, with a New Prefac

by Eric Chaisson

Book Overview

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 its launch in 1990, when it was discovered that a flawed mirror was causing severe "myopia" and sending fuzzy images back to Earth, the HST has been at the center of a controversy over who was at fault for the flaw and how it should...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674412559
• ISBN13: 9780674412552
• Release Date: May 1998
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 424 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

20-20 Vision

Chaisson has effectively been made a nonperson at NASA (one scientist tangentially involved in the Hubble program told me that he "believed" that Chaisson had been a "janitor or maintenance man"), which implies that he's on to something.Reading this book will teach you something essential about organizational politics, something that is often revealed, but never corrected, and so must always be relearned. It will also make it clear why -- assorted automated go-carts to the contrary -- we're not going to Mars or anywhere else in the near future, at least not with this outfit.

A great read!

An excellent book! It really shows what goes on down in the bowels of another government agency. Really well done. It's really amazing how the press can be lead on by the PR machine and how the PR machine doesn't even know what it's doing in a field a s specific as astrophysics and astronomy. It's really a wonder how hubble even got off the ground, let alone, work. Now, it is finally giving us some really good science and will hopefully continue to do so until the end of its operational life.

Great reading for anyone interested in astronomy

If you've ever wondered what went wrong, and more importantly, what went right with the Hubble Space Telescope, this is a book for you. The author describes many of his personal experiences and gives us folks on the outside a peek at how professional astronomers work. Also, he corrects some of the errors that were made by the newsmedia in the early days of the project

A roller-coaster ride!

Well, one thing's for sure. I'm sure glad that I am not a member of the Hubble project. If I was, I would be dead already. This book is excellent in providing a very fascinating behind-the-scene details of this project and some portions of the book make me,as a taxpayer, very unhappy (especially with an unnamed scientist-child who opposed releasing any pictures to the public). I found that this book is very hard to put down, which is unusual for me. If you have an interest in Astronomy or the Hubble Space Telescope, this book will not disappoint you.

Juicy Story of Technological Catastrophe

I read the hardback when it first came out. It was a delightful story of how humans coordinate their individual shortcommings to create really fine disasters. The story of Hubble Space Telescope ranks right up there with 3 Mile Island, The Challenger, and of course, The Titanic! Don't plan to do anything the weekend you get this book!