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

About this book

Robert Smiths 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 governments 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 Telescopes history.