This TED Talk features astrophysicist Erica Hamden, recorded live at TED 2019.

I'm an astronomer who builds telescopes. I build telescopes because, number one, they are awesome.

But number two, I believe,

if you want to discover a new thing about the universe,

you have to look at the universe in a new way.

New technologies and astronomy,

things like lenses, photographic plates,

all the way up to space telescopes,

each gave us new ways to see the universe

and directly led to a new understanding of our place in it.

But those discoveries come with a cost.

It took thousands of people and 44 years

to get the Hubble Space Telescope from an idea into orbit.

It takes time, it takes a tolerance for failure,

it takes individual people choosing every day not to give up.

I know how hard that choice is, because I live it.

The reality of my job is that I fail almost all the time and still keep going,

because that's how telescopes get built.

The telescope I helped build is called the faint, intergalactic medium,

redshifted emission balloon, which is a mouthful, so we call it Fireball.

And don't worry, it is not going to explode at the end of this story.

I've been working on Fireball for more than 10 years,

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