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Indeed, we've travel down a significant piece of road with this spacecraft, and it seems like only yesterday they were using the "proposed" space telescope as a selling point for the space shuttle transportation system. Not many remember the latter's cargo bay dimensions were built around what became the HST.

It was supposed to be deployed in 1976, in time for the Bicentennial, but the Shuttle, of course, didn't fly until 1981 (and really didn't get past the experimental stage until it's close out) and HST wasn't deployed (nearsighted as it was) until 1990.

Even so, you could almost credit the Shuttle for fixing and keeping HST working to this day.

Still, in hindsight, I would have reduced Apollo to a single Science mission every 18 months indefinitely, but the gutless post-Watergate Congress insisted on shutting the program down, if we wanted the ST and a Shuttle, and the same crowd wanted everyone to be proud and happy when they spiked the Shuttle, though they was almost matching the forty year promise.

Government. It's no wonder Hubble started out nearsighted.