My grandfather worked on the Hubble mirror. It was, at the same time, one of his proudest accomplishments as well as a source of embarrassment. Everybody agree

My grandfather worked on the Hubble mirror. It was, at the same time, one of his proudest accomplishments as well as a source of embarrassment. Everybody agrees that the mistakes with the mirror were a real screw-up, something that should never have happened with better management and organization. However, my grandfather also pointed out that there's another direction to point the blame finger, that actually never enters into the discussions. According to gramps, it was understood that they wouldn't be able to get the mirror perfect (admitting, of course, the actual error was worse than any spec allowed for). Apparently they knew they weren't able to control perfectly for the distortions that would arise from moving the mirror from Earth's gravity to weightless, and perhaps other factors. But the original goal for the space shuttle was supposed to make it relatively easy to bring the thing up into space, try it out, and tweak it or even bring it back for repairs. According to gramps, this was always a fallback possibility, and the fact that it was so difficult and expensive in practice reveals as much about the failures of the space shuttle program as it does about the Hubble mirror - but the latter is always the focus of the discussion. Indeed, the shuttle gets credit as the savior, if anything, rather than any blame for how poorly it served its intended mission (including how many years its own program delays resulted in delays for the Hubble itself). Caveat: this is all completely based on the opinion of one guy as communicated to his grandson, and potentially suffers from all the errors that this might imply. EDIT - fixed mis-wording in para 3.