A Bargain View of Infinity : With its nearsightedness cured, Hubble Space Telescope comes through

The American public was aghast when the price tag for curing the nearsightedness of the often-maligned Hubble Space Telescope was floated in the early ‘90s. Among other things, the rescue mission was billed as “the $629-million house call.”

In those days, the Hubble, with its flawed hardware, was deemed just another billion-dollar space boondoggle, destined to go down in history with the Mars Observer probe as a symbol of everything that was wrong with NASA and America’s space program.

In reality, fixing Hubble cost considerably less than some estimates of the current cost for just one B-2 stealth bomber (upward of $750 million,) and we haven’t exactly needed one of those yet.

And these days, Hubble has become a household name and a source of family entertainment for just about anyone with a computer and a modem.

In fact, it offers those moments of true joy felt between a parent and a young child. One easily accessible Hubble photograph, for example, shows an enormous, orange-hued and serpentine cloud, illuminated from within. It is, in fact, a foundry many times the size of our own solar system. Hubble lets you turn to your child and say, “This is where stars are born.”

It turns out that Hubble is capable of revealing perhaps unimaginable secrets even when it’s looking at a supposedly blank spot in space. Giddy astronomers announced this week that it had found a glittering mosaic of galaxies never before seen, objects that may date back to the earliest time of the universe.

The Hubble Space Telescope is providing a window on the unknown, at a cost that must now seem quite reasonable from any angle. Heavenly secrets: Distant galaxies in a Hubble photograph.