35 years of the Hubble Space Telescope

Decades of toil and trouble—and beautiful pictures of the deep

Image: YouTube / NASA

The Hubble Space Telescope got off to a rough start. When it launched in 1990, expectations were high, but a tiny mirror flaw caused the images it captured to be blurry. Dave Barry called it the "Hubble Giant Orbiting Space Paperweight."

Despite capturing images better than ground-based telescopes, Hubble remained a $2 billion punchl…