Marshall Space Flight Center of the launch vehicle. Finally, on April 24, 1990, on Mission STS-31, Shuttle "Discovery" launched the Hubble telescope successfully into its planned orbit. Almost immediately it was realized that the optical performance was not as expected; analysis of the flawed images showed that the primary mirror had been ground to the wrong shape, resulting in spherical aberration. Fortunately, the Hubble telescope had been designed to allow in-space maintenance, and in December 1993, mission STS-61 carried astronauts to the Hubble to make corrections and change some components. A second repair mission, STS-82, was made in February 1997, and a third, STS-103,
Space Shuttle program from the two destroyed orbiters. The Space Shuttle program was extended several times beyond its originally envisioned 15-year life span because of the delays in building the United States space station in low Earth orbit—a project which eventually evolved into the International Space Station. It was formally scheduled for mandatory retirement in 2010 in accord with the directives President George W. Bush issued on January 14, 2004 in his Vision for Space Exploration. A$2.5 billion spending provision allowing NASA to fly the Space Shuttle beyond its then-scheduled retirement in 2010 passed the Congress in April 2009, although neither NASA nor