Through the Eyes of a Lion: Facing Impossible Pain, Finding Incredible Power

by Levi Lusko

When the Hubble Space Telescope first launched, hopes were high that it would return unprecedented images of outer space. The price tag was $1.5 billion, so it really needed to perform to justify the expense.4 Unfortunately, at first it was a billion-dollar disaster. All the images that came back to earth were blurry and useless. The telescope was out of focus. The lens had been calibrated incorrectly. It was a tiny problem, a flaw in a lens only one-fiftieth the thickness of a sheet of paper, yet it caused the soaring spyglass to be nearsighted. Hubble needed glasses. It was the butt of a thousand jokes. It was impossible to take out the damaged lens and far too expensive to bring Hubble home for repairs, so scientists and engineers devised a brilliant solution. They would effectively put a giant contact lens on the telescope. They built an additional optical component with the exact same error—but inverted—and added it to the telescope. Bingo! All of a sudden Hubble could see like a supersonic eagle. It had twenty-twenty vision on steroids. Never in the history of the world have we seen more glorious pictures or had such knowledge of the universe as what Hubble has beamed back to our dark planet.