Hubble Turns 30: How the Famous Space Telescope Went From Idea to Launch

Thirty years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope launched aboard the Discovery space shuttle. An idea almost 80 years in the making, it was finally time to shed the blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere and peer out across the stars unencumbered.

Since it launched in 1990, the $1.2 billion telescope has charted the cosmos, snapped pictures of some of the most distant reaches of the universe, and unlocked secrets about the cosmic bodies in our own solar system. Hubble has made over 1.4 million observations. The telescope has paved the way for a number of other important space observatories like Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Kepler Space Telescope.

Despite technical blunders and numerous repair missions, it soldiers on, destined to reveal even more about the universe with each passing year. Here's the story of how one of the most celebrated instruments in science came to be.