The Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope: The History of the World’s Most Important Telescopes

On April 24, 1990, the Space Shuttle Discovery lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on the Space Shuttle Program’s 35th mission, but this was no ordinary mission. In its payload bay, Discovery was carrying the Hubble Space Telescope, with the objective of putting the telescope into orbit. By the time the Hubble telescope reached orbit, it was already the world’s most famous telescope, but it was also the most scorned. The telescope cost nearly $2 billion more to complete than anticipated, and to make matters worse, the first images it sent back were skewed.

When the telescope immediately began transmitting defective images, NASA and the telescope became laughingstocks, literally. In the popular comedy movie Naked Gun 2 1/2, released in 1991, one scene in a cafй shows a picture of the telescope between pictures of the Titanic and the Hindenburg, implying it was a disaster.

It would take three years to launch another space shuttle mission to fix the telescope, and that would be just the first of five servicing missions that have been performed in the 21 years the telescope has been in orbit. However, within about a year of fixing it, the telescope captured images of a major event in the solar system. In July 1994, the telescope provided a firsthand observation of a comet, Shoemaker-Levy 9, breaking apart and slamming into Jupiter. The comet broke into about two dozen pieces, some of them more than a mile wide, and hit the giant planet with the force of millions of atomic bombs.In addition to capturing the streaking comet breaking up and colliding with Jupiter, the telescope captured images of the impact marks that were left on Jupiter’s surface, helping astronomers study Jupiter’s atmosphere and debris left by major impacts.

In 2012, the House of Representatives voted to eliminate the budget for NASA’s Webb project, thereby terminating the program. This nearly spelled the end for the telescope that aimed to “rewrite the textbooks” of the next generation. At that time, the project got out of hand, coming in at $1.6 billion over budget, and it experienced “serious management problems.” However, none of the money was wasted, and the technical progress made was of excellent quality. The new telescope had become a “powerful symbol of U.S. leadership in science and space. [Congress] could save a few billion, but to lose it would be wasteful and short-sighted.” Fortunately, the budget was soon recovered.
Several new obstacles delayed the launch, but NASA believed that it was finally prepared to proceed in 2020 after completion of construction four years prior. Then came the COVID pandemic, and 2020 became the year of “delayed events,” with the launch of the most sophisticated space telescope in history proving to be no exception.

The increase in excitement was palpable. Scientists had viewed much of the universe through Hubble, almost as it was when it was formed, but they learned that none of these galaxies were the first ones formed. Then ultimately realized that “Hubble wasn’t the right instrument to detect those first galaxies.” “The farther we can see in space, the farther we can see in time…and that’s not a metaphor. That’s actually literally true,” explained scientist Amber Straughn. The Webb Space Telescope represents “looking in a part of space that we’ve never seen before.” The telescope will be able to detect the earliest galaxies because of its unparalleled sensitivity. Another factor is the kind of light it will collect, “light that our eyes aren’t designed to see.”