There are only two ways to do things

There are only two ways to do things, correctly — or again.

Unknown

The meaning of the quote

On June 27, 1990, NASA scientist Ed Weiler walked into a press conference and admitted that the brand-new Hubble Space Telescope couldn’t take a sharp picture. He later called it the worst day of his life.

The $1.5 billion telescope’s main mirror had been polished with great care, but to the wrong shape. Its outer edge was too flat by about 1/50th of the width of a human hair, and that was enough to blur every image it took.

The quote is funny because it leaves out the option most of us hope for, the one where you do a sloppy job and move on. Work done wrong waits until someone comes back to redo it, usually at a higher price.

Correctly

Hubble’s mirror makers had a chance to catch the mistake. A NASA investigation found that the tool used to check the mirror’s curve had one lens sitting 1.3 mm out of place. The team ran 2 other tests that showed something was off, but trusted the main tool and brushed the warnings aside.

Careful work still needs a check that could prove you wrong. Carpenters say “measure twice, cut once” because a second measurement takes seconds and a bad cut ruins the board. Skipping that second look cost NASA 3 years of blurry pictures.

Again

In December 1993, astronauts on Space Shuttle Endeavour flew up to Hubble and spent 5 spacewalks fitting it with corrective optics that worked like a pair of glasses. The first sharp images came back within weeks of the repair.

That repair mission is the “again” in the quote.

NASA’s second try was smarter than the first. Because the mirror had been ground so precisely, engineers could measure exactly how wrong it was and build optics to cancel the error.

“Again” works best when you study the first attempt before you start the second. When Brandon Webb lost his first startup in 2009, he turned that failure into an equation with reflection sitting right between the failure and the next try.

Action steps

You can put both halves of the quote to work on whatever you’re doing this week.

1. Check your work before you call it done.
   Use a check that could catch you out, like reading your writing out loud or having someone else try what you built.
2. Find the cause before you go again.
   When something comes out wrong, figure out the one thing that broke it, fix that and start your second try today.

Hubble got there in the end, and it has been sending back sharp pictures for more than 30 years.

Both ways in the quote reach the finish line. One of them just costs an extra trip to space.

Resources

• Hubble’s Mirror Flaw (Article)
• Fixing Hubble’s blurry vision (Article)
• The Hubble Space Telescope Optical Systems Failure Report (Paper)
• Failure + Reflection + Another try (Article)
• Pick yourself up, dust yourself off (Article)