Customer Reviews

The Hubble Wars: Astrophysics Meets Astropolitics in the Two-Billion-Dollar Struggle over the Hubble Space Telescope, With a New Preface

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Chaisson has effectively been made a nonperson at NASA (one scientist tangentially involved in the Hubble program told me that he "believed" that Chaisson had been a "janitor or maintenance man"), which implies that he's on to something.

Reading this book will teach you something essential about organizational politics, something that is often revealed, but never corrected, and so must always be relearned. It will also make it clear why -- assorted automated go-carts to the contrary -- we're not going to Mars or anywhere else in the near future, at least not with this outfit.

Well, one thing's for sure. I'm sure glad that I am not a member of the Hubble project. If I was, I would be dead already. This book is excellent in providing a very fascinating behind-the-scene details of this project and some portions of the book make me,as a taxpayer, very unhappy (especially with an unnamed scientist-child who opposed releasing any pictures to the public). I found that this book is very hard to put down, which is unusual for me. If you have an interest in Astronomy or the Hubble Space Telescope, this book will not disappoint you.

I read the hardback when it first came out. It was a delightful story of how humans coordinate their individual shortcommings to create really fine disasters. The story of Hubble Space Telescope ranks right up there with 3 Mile Island, The Challenger, and of course, The Titanic!

Don't plan to do anything the weekend you get this book!

If you've ever wondered what went wrong, and more importantly, what went right with the Hubble Space Telescope, this is a book for you. The author describes many of his personal experiences and gives us folks on the outside a peek at how professional astronomers work. Also, he corrects some of the errors that were made by the newsmedia in the early days of the project

Frankly, I enjoyed the atsropolitics perspective of the Hubble Space Telescope [HST] but several people that were associated with the project I have spoken dispute elements of the book on a factual basis. Nonetheless, I see facts as being taken from where one stands especially in political science and the art of spin. For anyone doing an overview study of the Hubble Space Telescope, this book should be among those to be read for insight to the early development issues associated with a 'Big Science' project. The HST has, fortunately, been a significant instrument in astronomy the past decade or so. Hopefully the 2008 service mission will extend its life several more years leaving more to the HST story to be told with many more pictures and words to be written as to its astronomical observations.

An excellent book! It really shows what goes on down in the bowels of another government agency. Really well done. It's really amazing how the press can be lead on by the PR machine and how the PR machine doesn't even know what it's doing in a field a s specific as astrophysics and astronomy. It's really a wonder how hubble even got off the ground, let alone, work. Now, it is finally giving us some really good science and will hopefully continue to do so until the end of its operational life.

``Hubble Wars'' is a great exciting read, but unfortunately it has little to do with anything that really happened. Chaisson's tone reads like that of a classic self-serving political memior, ``I was there. I saw everything. It's a shame that the fools didn't listen to me, because I alone knew what to do.'' In truth, Chaisson gets the details completely wrong in many places, fails to understand what people were really doing to save the mission, and represents a privileged vantage point that he in fact did not have. I have yet to meet anyone who had anything to do with the Hubble who considers this book to be a fair or accurate history. Chaisson's tone is vividly clear in the summary chapter in which he judges the profoundly successful 1993 repair mission to having fallen far short. There is a great history of the Hubble to be written, but this is not it.