Imagine spending decades and billions of dollars building the most flawless lens ever conceived, putting it on, and finding everything blurry because someone put the decimal point in the wrong place. That was the gut-dropping reality when the Hubble Space Telescope sent home its first images: the most precisely ground mirror in history had been ground to exactly the wrong shape.

We follow Hubble’s wild roller coaster, from a 50-year fight to get it funded through public mockery over its famous defect to the daring spacewalks that gave it perfect vision. It is a story of political gambling, a hardware-store washer, and the human perseverance that turned a punchline into humanity’s greatest eye.

• The audacious budget gamble that zeroed out Hubble’s funding to shock astronomers into fighting for it
• How a misassembled null corrector, patched with an ordinary metal washer, left the mirror just 2,200 nanometers too flat
• COSTAR, the prescription eyeglasses built with the exact opposite flaw to bend the blurred light back into focus
• Hubble’s discoveries: pinning the universe’s age at 13.7 billion years and revealing its expansion is accelerating
• The Columbia-era fight to save Hubble from a canceled servicing mission, and the looming question of its fiery reentry