Ned Potter

When NASA decided in the 1970s that the Hubble Space Telescope should be serviceable in space, the engineering challenges must have seemed nearly insurmountable. How could a machine that complex and delicate be repaired by astronauts wearing 130-kilogram suits with thick gloves? In the end, spacewalkers not only fixed the telescope, they regularly remade it. That was possible because engineers designed Hubble to be toroidal, its major systems laid out in wedge-shaped equipment bays that