The Space Telescope; A study of NASA, science, technology, and politics

xviii, 478 pages. Illustrations. Appendixes: The Space Telescope. Short essay on sources. Notes. Index. Format is approximately 7 inches by 10.25 inches. DJ is present. Robert W. Smith is a scholar of history and the classics at the University of Alberta, and he directed the Science, Technology and Society Program in the Faculty of Arts. He researches the history of big science, especially U.S. technology and the history of spaceflight. He wrote The Space Telescope: A Study of NASA, Science, Technology and Politics and he co-edited Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years After the Soviet Satellite. He served as the Walter Hines Page Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 199394. He held the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History at the U.S. National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution during the academic year 200607. He is interested in the technology and politics of the James Webb Space Telescope. Robert Smith's The Space Telescope sets the fascinating and disturbing history of this massive venture within the context of 'Big Science'. Launched at a cost of no more than $2 billion, the Space Telescope turned out to be seriously flawed by imperfections in the construction of its lenses and by solar panels that caused it to shudder when moving from daylight to darkness. Smith analyses how the processes of Big Science, especially those involving the government's funding process for large-scale projects, contributed to those failures. He reveals the astonishingly complex interactions that took place among the scientific community, government and industry and describes the great range of personalities and forces - scientific, technical, political, social, institutional and economic - that played roles in the Space Telescope's history.…