Hubble Space Telescope be kept in a clean room, powered up and purged with nitrogen, until a launch could be rescheduled. This costly situation (about per month) pushed the overall costs of the project even higher. This delay did allow time for engineers to perform extensive tests, swap out a possibly failure-prone battery, and make other improvements. Furthermore, the ground software needed to control Hubble was not ready in 1986, and was barely ready by the 1990 launch. Eventually, following the resumption of shuttle flights in 1988, the launch of the telescope was scheduled for 1990. On April 24, 1990, successfully launched the
Space Shuttle orbiter Space Shuttle orbiters were assembled at Rockwell's assembly facility in Palmdale, California, at the federally owned Plant 42 complex. In addition to the test articles and orbiters produced for use in the Shuttle program, there are also various mock-up replicas on display throughout the United States: Space Shuttle orbiter The Space Shuttle orbiter was the spaceplane component of the Space Shuttle, a partially reusable orbital spacecraft system that was part of the Space Shuttle program. Operated by NASA, the U.S. space agency, this vehicle could carry astronauts and payloads into low Earth orbit, perform in-space operations, then re-enter the atmosphere