QUESTION:
Did the idea of the Hubble telescope come from Dr. Hubble,
or did somebody else think of it?

ANSWER from Mary Alice Rose on April 29, 1996:
Dr. Edwin P. Hubble lived from 1889 to 1953.  The concept of a Space Telescope
was first suggested during Hubble's lifetime in the 1920's by a German rocket
expert, Herman Oberth, but not by Dr. Hubble.  The deployment of a Space
Telescope was well beyond the technology of the 1920's, and so the astronomy
community did not really pursue it further until the mid-1940's.  At that time,
as World War II rocketry was being studied in the U.S., Lyman Spitzer of
Princeton University became interested in the possibilities of a Space
Telescope and became its chief advocate for the next decade.

In 1962, NASA asked the Space Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences
for recommendations for future astronomy payloads.  After discussions in the
astronomy community and some engineering studies, the Science Board in 1965
recommended a large Space Telescope.  Eventually, Congress approved the Space
Telescope program in 1977. But it was not until the mid-1980's that Dr.
Hubble's name was assigned officially to the Space Telescope.  Hubble has been
so honored because the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is being used to continue,
among other things, the research initiated by Dr. Hubble.

Among Dr. Hubble's contributions to astronomy was the theory of the expanding
universe.  Dr. Hubble discovered galaxies outside our own Milky Way and
observed that they were moving away from us.  Further observations led Hubble
to conclude that the farther a galaxy is from earth, the faster its speed is
away from earth.  His discovery is now know as Hubble's Law and serves as the
foundation of the "Big Bang" theory of the origin of the universe.  There has
been some debate about Hubble's Law and the Big Bang, partly because it has
been difficult to measure distances accurately to very faint, distant galaxies.

Since the HST is above the earth's atmosphere, observations of these faint
objects is much easier with the HST than with ground-based telescopes such as
Dr. Hubble used during his lifetime.

So even if Edwin Hubble did not originate the concept of a Space Telescope, he
almost certainly would support the mission of the Hubble Space Telescope!