It doesn't matter that the size of the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror defect is less than 4 percent the diameter of a human hair. For those determined to spot evidence of a debilitating general decline in U.S. scientific leadership and technological know-how, that's more than enough.
Indeed, the distortion troubling the scope has been seized upon by the media, to create another kind of distortion--that of the public's perceptions and attitudes toward NASA in particular and toward Big Science in general.
The reaction in Congress was similarly unrestrained: "I am very outraged at what has happened to Hubble," U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) told the New York Times (June 29, 1990). Mikulski, who chairs a subcommittee that oversees NASA's budget, added, "I think it has seriously hurt the credibility of NASA when they've had so much time and enough money to get it right." And U.S. Sen. Albert Gore, Jr. ...
