Quote:
Originally Posted by drussell
Yeah, it's a bit of a problem when you don't notice your problem until it crashes... 
For Hubble, I'm assuming you're meaning the lens sag issue because they forgot to account for gravity bending the lens while it was sitting on Earth pre-launch? |
That was not the Hubble problem.
The Hubble problem was idiotic stupid pigheaded project leaders.
There were two different test devices used to measure it.
One, the simpler one, correctly said that it was exactly as it was:
very very wrong. The more complicated, expensive one, was simply
wrong. No one ever checked either test device. No one did a trivial
by-eye test that would have verified which was right, for
two reasons:
1) that doing so required a human to climb a scaffold and that was
deemed both too dangerous and too expensive (building the scaffold,
the by-eye test apparatus was free ... several workers personally owned one, as do I).
2) the idiots said that the by-eye test was not sensitive enough
to detect any possible error. That was, however, assuming that their
already-decided idea that the complicated tester was right was indeed correct: they knew that the by-eye test would be sensitive enough to tell
which tester was correct.