One Last Ride to the Hubble

Next August, after 20 years of hype, disappointment, blunders, triumphs and peerless glittering vistas of space and time, and four years after NASA decided to leave the Hubble Space Telescope to die in orbit, setting off public and Congressional outrage, a group of astronauts will ride to the telescope aboard the space shuttle Atlantis with wrenches in hand.

That, at least, is the plan.

“It’s been a roller coaster ride from hell,” Preston Burch, the space telescope’s project manager, said in his office here at the Goddard Space Flight Center of the controversy and uncertainty.

Here's an interesting article about the Hubble Space Telescope for us "materialists."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/science/space/04hubb.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin