Against all odds, it’s 25 years in space and counting for the Hubble Space Telescope this month.

Few icons of science have had such a perilous existence, surviving political storms, physical calamities and the simple passage of time in the service of cosmic exploration.

In 1946, the astronomer Lyman Spitzer Jr. had a dream. A telescope in space, above the unruly atmosphere, would be able to see stars unaffected by the turbulence that blurs them and makes them twinkle. It would be able to see ultraviolet and infrared emissions that are blocked by the atmosphere and thus invisible to astronomers on the ground.

It took more than three decades for the rest of the astronomical community, NASA and Congress to buy into this dream, partly as a way to showcase the capabilities of the space shuttle, still in development then, and the ability of astronauts to work routinely in space. By the time the telescope was launched into space from the space shuttle Discovery on April 25, 1990, it had been almost canceled at least twice and then delayed following the explosion of the shuttle Challenger in 1986.

When the Hubble was finally deployed, NASA’s spinmasters were instantly at the top of their game, hailing it as the greatest advance in astronomy since Galileo.