The Hubble Space Telescope is the largest, most complex, and most powerful observatory ever deployed in space, designed to allow astronomers to look far back into our own cosmic past with unprecedented clarity. Yet from its launch in 1990, when it was discovered that a flawed mirror was causing severe "myopia" and sending fuzzy images back to Earth, the HST has been at the center of a controversy over who was at fault for the flaw and how it should be fixed. Now Chaisson, a former senior scientist on the HST project, tells the inside story of the much heralded mission to fix the telescope. Drawing on his journals, Chaisson recreates the day-to-day struggles of scientists, politicians, and publicists to fix the telescope and control the political spin. Illustrated with "before and after" full-color pictures from the telescope and updated with a new preface, The Hubble Wars tells an engaging tale of scientific comedy and error.

In this new edition, coming at the half-way point in the HST's planned mission of fifteen years, Chaisson has brought the Hubble story up-to-date by sorting out the spectacular from the mundane contributions the HST has made to our knowledge of the Solar System, the Milky Way Galaxy, and the distant galaxies of deep space.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 7 reviews)

Good background read on HST

Frankly, I enjoyed the atsropolitics perspective of the Hubble Space Telescope [HST] but several people that were associated with the project I have spoken dispute elements of the book on a factual basis. Nonetheless, I see facts as being taken from where one stands especially in political science and the art of spin. For anyone doing an overview study of the Hubble Space Telescope, this book should be among those to be read for insight to the early development issues associated with a 'Big Science' project. The HST has, fortunately, been a significant instrument in astronomy the past decade or so. Hopefully the 2008 service mission will extend its life several more years leaving more to the HST story to be told with many more pictures and words to be written as to its astronomical observations.
January 06, 2007

20-20 Vision

Chaisson has effectively been made a nonperson at NASA (one scientist tangentially involved in the Hubble program told me that he "believed" that Chaisson had been a "janitor or maintenance man"), which implies that he's on to something.

Reading this book will teach you something essential about organizational politics, something that is often revealed, but never corrected, and so must always be relearned. It will also make it clear why -- assorted automated go-carts to the contrary -- we're not going to Mars or anywhere else in the near future, at least not with this outfit.
April 11, 2004

A Great Novel

``Hubble Wars'' is a great exciting read, but unfortunately it has little to do with anything that really happened. Chaisson's tone reads like that of a classic self-serving political memior, ``I was there. I saw everything. It's a shame that the fools didn't listen to me, because I alone knew what to do.'' In truth, Chaisson gets the details completely wrong in many places, fails to understand what people were really doing to save the mission, and represents a privileged vantage point that he in fact did not have. I have yet to meet anyone who had anything to do with the Hubble who considers this book to be a fair or accurate history. Chaisson's tone is vividly clear in the summary chapter in which he judges the profoundly successful 1993 repair mission to having fallen far short. There is a great history of the Hubble to be written, but this is not it.
January 03, 2003

A great read!

An excellent book! It really shows what goes on down in the bowels of another government agency. Really well done. It's really amazing how the press can be lead on by the PR machine and how the PR machine doesn't even know what it's doing in a field a s specific as astrophysics and astronomy. It's really a wonder how hubble even got off the ground, let alone, work. Now, it is finally giving us some really good science and will hopefully continue to do so until the end of its operational life.
February 18, 2000

Great reading for anyone interested in astronomy

If you've ever wondered what went wrong, and more importantly, what went right with the Hubble Space Telescope, this is a book for you. The author describes many of his personal experiences and gives us folks on the outside a peek at how professional astronomers work. Also, he corrects some of the errors that were made by the newsmedia in the early days of the project
February 20, 1999

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