The "first light" image from the Hubble telescope was almost universally hailed as the beginning of a new era in astronomy and cosmology. Upon closer scrutiny, however, a team of experts discovered that the photograph-which showed a star cluster over 1,300 light years distant-was poorly focused, a smudged halo of light rather than the tight image they had expected. The result was a first-order public relations disaster: once the darling of science journalists, the Hubble telescope came to embody everything wrong with the federal government's "big science" projects. Critics charged that not only were these massively expensive ventures available mainly to narrow scientific communities but they were a bad investment: the technology was so complex that failures, sometimes catastrophic, were statistically inevita-ble. The general feeling was that perhaps it was time to return to projects designed for small laboratory settings.

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