The topic I have chosen for my project is the Hubble Space Telescope. I chose it because of my love for astronomy. I have loved astronomy ever since I was born. In fact, my favorite movie back then was WALL-E. Not because of the antics of the robot, but because of the beauty of space itself. Space colonization and exploration are things I know humanity will conquer in the near future. That is why I wish to become an aerospace engineer when I grow up. That is why I want to help humanity on the path to reach the stars above.

I used many secondary sources in order to discover the reasoning and background behind the Hubble Space Telescope. One website taught me about the history of Lyman Spitzer, an astronomer who first brought up the idea of a large space telescope. Another taught me about Edwin Hubble, a cosmologist who discovered the evidence of there being more than one galaxy, and the fact that they were all moving away from each other. There was also a documentary I watched, but the information on that was information I already had.

I don’t have any primary sources other than the ones I used from NASA. However, the quality of the sources used greatly makes up for the quantity I had. All the information I needed was right there in one official article, but I decided to use other sources to add to it.

Every bit of information and formatting done on my website happened part by part, section by section. In the beginning, there was only the home, history, and impact page. I had expected to simplify the entire history, development, launch, and other problems into one whole section. However, I did not wish to make a section the size of a villain's monologue. So I added the Development and Launch section to split up the topics and hopefully make it more understandable. Along the way, I encountered a problem. A couple of problems, but they all fit under the same ruling. There was always some problem with the position of the text boxes, so I had to manually move them. Sadly, this caused another set of problems, as now you can scroll from left to right for seemingly no reason. I had no way to fix the problem, so I had to leave it like that.

The theme of this year’s National History Day is communication in history. The Hubble Space Telescope connects to that theme because it is a spacecraft that has helped us with the discovery and confirmation of billions and billions of stars, galaxies, and beyond. It also greatly impacted human history with the information it gathered, which expanded our understanding of the universe. The existence and success of the Hubble Space Telescope  also led to the development of the James Webb Space Telescope. It is planned to be launched this year, and it is told to be the largest telescope ever put in space.