On 24 April 1990, at 8:33:51 a.m. EDT, Space Shuttle Discovery pierced a Florida sky to carry humanity’s most ambitious observatory into orbit. Commanded by Loren J. Shriver and piloted by Charles F. Bolden Jr., the crew of STS-31 included astronauts Steven A. Hawley, Bruce McCandless II, and Kathryn D. Sullivan. Their charge was to place the Hubble Space Telescope into a 330-nautical-mile orbit, high above the veil of Earth’s atmospheric distortion. Hubble, 43.5 feet long and 14 feet in diameter, represented the largest and most complex optical telescope ever built for space. On the second day of the mission, the crew used the Remote Manipulator System arm to lift Hubble from the payload bay; after a tense moment when a solar array balked at deployment, the telescope was released to begin its 30-year vigil over the universe. The mission lasted five days, one hour, and sixteen minutes, landing at Edwards Air Force Base on 29 April. Though Hubble’s early images would later reveal a spherical aberration in its primary mirror, the deployment itself was flawless, and the telescope’s very design—built for on-orbit servicing—would prove its salvation. From that April day onward, humanity gained a window into the deep past, peering across 14 billion light-years of cosmic history.