Hubble Space Telescope Structural Dynamic Test Vehicle
Lockheed Missiles and Space Company · 1975, updated 1997
A silver cylinder as long as a bus stands on end in the Living in the Space Age hall, wrapped in crinkled foil, with two solar panels spread like wings and an open door at the top where the light comes in. It is the full size twin of the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been orbiting the Earth since 1990. The real Hubble is six hundred kilometres up and will never come back; this vehicle was built in 1975 to test whether the structure could survive the shaking of a rocket launch, and it never left the ground. Everything about its shape, size and layout is exact.
Hubble is a reflecting telescope with a mirror two point four metres across, and this test article shows how it is packaged: the long tube that keeps stray light off the mirror, the ring of instrument bays at the base, the handrails that astronauts gripped during five servicing missions. Look at the door at the top, which closes to protect the optics from the Sun, and at the gold foil, which is the thermal blanket that keeps the telescope at a steady temperature as it passes from sunlight into shadow every forty five minutes. Nearby the museum shows instruments that were actually brought back from Hubble by Space Shuttle crews, including the camera that took some of its most famous pictures.
The vehicle came to the Smithsonian in 1987, three years before the launch, and in 1997 it was rebuilt to match the telescope as it flies, with the solar arrays of the first servicing mission. It stood for decades in the old Space Race hall and returned in July 2026 as one of the anchors of the new Living in the Space Age gallery, next to the Skylab workshop. Hubble's flawed mirror, fixed by astronauts in 1993, is one of the great rescue stories of spaceflight, and the images it has made since have changed how we picture the universe.
Did You Know? The test vehicle is so exact that astronauts practised their Hubble repair techniques on it before the first servicing mission.
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