Hubble's Flawed Mirror and the 1993 Mission That Saved It

In 1990 the Hubble Space Telescope reached orbit with a mirror ground to the wrong shape by a fraction of the width of a human hair — and returned blurred images to a watching world. This is the story of how the flaw happened, how engineers designed optical glasses for a telescope, and how the seven astronauts of STS-61 spent five spacewalks in December 1993 repairing it. It ends with the discoveries that flowed from a machine that had almost become a failure. Sources in the video. All imagery is AI-generated for illustration.