“If you look at those objects before I do, I’ll kill you,” John N. Bahcall, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, once told Eric J. Chaisson, now at Tufts University, who was then in charge of public outreach and wanted to take some pretty pictures.

Image LEGACY Lyman S. Spitzer Jr., a Princeton astronomer, is known as the father of the Hubble telescope. Credit... Don Morton

That tale was news to me. It is recounted in “The Universe in Mirror: The Saga of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Visionaries Who Built It” (Princeton University Press), a breezy behind-the-scenes account by Robert Zimmerman, a freelance writer and space historian.

We hear all the time about the great science Hubble is doing, orbiting high above the murky, turbulent atmosphere, and the astronomers using it to stalk dark energy or planets around other stars. This fall astronauts from the space shuttle Atlantis will be in the spotlight as they perform one last maintenance call on the telescope.

But there is a group less well known: people like C.R. O’Dell, known as Bob, who gave up his research career to manage the space telescope project at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.; Nancy G. Roman, who championed space astronomy to the agency and her colleagues; Lyman S. Spitzer Jr., the Princeton astronomer who thought up the telescope way back in 1946 and then was frozen out of using it; Frank J. Cepollina, the Goddard Space Flight Center engineer who designed Hubble’s servicing missions.

These people spent years trudging the corridors of Congress and NASA, fighting bureaucratic battles, defending budgets, hassling with contractors, making hard decisions that alienated their friends, devising fantastical fixes for fantastical problems, skirting the edge of the law and generally growing old without glory. Isaac Newton once said that if he saw farther than most people, it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. If Hubble sees farther, it is because of these men and women, who come to life, warts and all, in Mr. Zimmerman’s book, and of the process, messy and uncomfortable as it may be, by which dreams are turned into legacies in a democratic society.