Background - I was having an interesting conversation with a dad from my son’s soccer team at our end-of-season party and found out that he and his co-worker were the two guys to put together the repair kit for the Hubble Space Telescope mirror problem a number of years back. “What a coincidence!” I said, my father-in-law was the engineer for NASA who was responsible for discovering that the battery in the telescope was so seriously flawed that it wouldn’t take long after launching it into space for the battery to die and turn the entire thing into orbiting space junk, and an enormous failure for NASA. The PR nightmare alone would have killed funding for numerous future projects.
I told him that my father-in-law had reconfigured the entire power system to extend the battery life far beyond what had originally been projected and hence Hubble went on to be one of NASA’s biggest successes. Although I was preaching to the choir because he already knew most of what I was telling him. We both agreed that most people had no idea what had gone into the Hubble Space Telescope because you rarely hear anything about it, let alone how the battery system exceeded all expectations. Oh well, such is the way of our world. Time to cut the cake!
S.C.O.U.T. - The following night we were watching Jeopardy. One of the categories was “The Hubble Space Telescope”. We had a little laugh about that because of the conversation from the night before. How strange that the Hubble would appear so soon after we’d spent so much time talking about it. We got a shiver though when the answer to the final question in the category was…
“What was the battery that lasted 13 years longer than they expected it to?”!
I looked at my husband, he looked back at me, and then we both looked at our dog Scout. I stand corrected. The contestant got the answer right, so clearly someone has been paying attention to the Hubble Space Telescope… and clearly God and the universe have been paying attention to my conversations!
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