This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX, I'm Lizzie Peabody.

On Christmas morning, 2021, Samantha Thompson woke up excited.

I woke up very early, I was in California with my family, but it wasn't the presence

under the tree that made her giddy.

It was something even bigger than Christmas, something she'd been waiting for for a long time.

It had been years in the making, it had been years of delayed launches.

The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.

I should mention that Samantha is a curator of science and technology at the Smithsonian's

National Air and Space Museum.

So, this is kind of her thing.

Decorage.

Decorage, liftoff, from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself, James Webb

begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe.

On December 25, 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope began its journey to witness the birth

of the first stars in galaxies, and to explore the outer reaches of space for Earth-like planets.

But for many of the space nerds like Samantha, watching from the ground that day,

it was nearly impossible not to think back to a different telescope launch,

one that happened 30 years before, one that no living astronomer could forget.

In 1990, NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope.

The first large telescope ever put into space.

With the launch of Hubble rose the hopes of astronomers all over the world

that we could finally answer some of humankind's biggest questions.

...