BY THE END OF THE 1960S, ASTRONOMERS WERE FACED WITH increasing blindness. The largest telescope in the world was the 200-inch Hale Telescope on Mount Palomar in California. Since its dedication in 1948, suburban sprawl, with the accompanying light pollution, had made observations increasingly difficult. Moreover, with interest in space science and astrophysics growing enormously, demand for telescope time had far outrun the available supply. No attempt had been made to top Palomar, and with good reason: Building it had taken 21 years and required millions of dollars and numerous advances in design and materials science. Still, somethi-ng had to be done.

To be sure, great advances had been made in astronomy during the 1950s and 1960s, but most’of them had come in the radio-frequency, X-ray, ultraviolet, gamma ray, and infrared regions. Optical (visiblelight) astronomy had lagged behind. “Yet the discoveries in nonvisible wavelengths had unveiled strange new phenomena that optical telescopes-could elucidate: pulsars, black holes, active galactic nuclei, many others. To spur new telescope construction, in 1969 the Academy of Sciences formed what became known as Greenstein Committee, after its chairman, Jesse Greenstein, of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). As Greenstein later wrote, he wanted optical astronomy to regain its importance and stop living on the “borrowed glory” of other types of observation.

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