If you aren’t bewitched, baffled, boondoggled, and bedazzled (okay, maybe not that last one) by outer space, then you haven’t been paying attention.

Here’s the story. Of a scope named Hubble.

(Stick with me. This gets fantastic.)

In 1923, a German physicist named Hermann Oberth speculated that it would be possible to send a telescope out into Earth’s orbit. More than two decades later, the American physicist Lyman Spitzer wrote a paper pushing for such an instrument. And nearly twenty years after that, Spitzer was put in charge of developing a plan for this space telescope. Continue reading →