The Telescope That Needed Glasses
On April 25, 1990, the Space Shuttle Discovery's robotic arm lifted a 11,110-kilogram barrel of mirrors and instruments out of the payload bay and released it into orbit. Six weeks later, the first images came back badly out of focus. The Hubble Space Telescope had been ground to the wrong prescription, and America had just spent $2.5 billion on what the press was calling a 'technoturkey.'