The airport administrator who I am standing next to, bunch of V.I.P.'s, I got lucky enough to get over there and see this thing."Īllen explained that the tension was warranted: It was built in the 1940's and everyone is a little nervous. "People were so nervous because runway 2-3 at Danbury Airport is not a long runway. This thing is so loud, you had to scream at the top of your lungs to to have the person next to you have a chance of hearing what you were saying."Īllen explained that there was tension in the air that day, people were worried about transporting such sensitive equipment.
"Get it down to the airport, there is a C-130 transport plane at Danbury Airport waiting for this. Mike was at the airport the day the Danbury Hubble component would take flight, recounting: Then the other part they drove down to Danbury Airport." Military.Īnd, but they needed a longer runway than what Danbury had, so they took it over to Beacon, that took all day. Ten miles an hour, military escort, got it over there and flew on what was called a "guppy." There are only two "guppy" airplanes in existence at the time, both owned by the U.S. They had to basically create and build a clean room on the back of a truck, put the mirror in that and drive it to Stewart Air-force base over in Beacon-Newburgh, over the Beacon-Newburgh Bridge. So, they had to build, I don't know if you know what a clean room is when they make computer chips, you know absolutely dust free. The big mirror itself was too big for the plane that they had to use, to use Danbury Airport. Now there were two parts to the telescope, one was the big mirror and one was the very, extremely sensitive guidance equipment inside the mirror. "So they get it done, 1985, and I was actually for I-95, covering this at Danbury Airport when they went to fly this from the Wooster Heights facility out to California. When it was time to transport the pieces of Hubble out of Danbury, Mike was in attendance and shared that experience saying: When they were ready in 1985, Mike Allen was covering the story for I-95 as the News Director.
NASA and the U.S, Government put the pressure on Perkin Elmer to finish the project and they did. Mike told us by the mid-1980's the project was 50% over budget at 1.2 billion dollars and "people were starting to point fingers." The project started to go way over budget and take a lot more time than anyone intended. No matter how brilliant the people were, they were assigned to a government project. They lived in towns right here in the Greater Danbury area, all the while keeping their mouths closed about the top-secret projects they were assigned to. It's about this time when we stopped Mike and asked him, who does this work? He explained that most of these folks either are, or were our neighbors. This thing was eight feet wide, this mirror weighed two thousand pounds and had to be ground specifically into a particular curvature." Telescopes work on mirrors and you have to refract and reflect light precisely, absolutely precisely to get the right measurements. So, Perkin Elmer had a pretty good resume when NASA said, will you do this Hubble space telescope. You could see on military bases, if a trash can was two feet tall or three feet tall from 90 miles away. This thing was the size of a school bus, weighed 30,000 pounds, had two cameras on it, so you could have two eyes and launched this thing into space. What Perkin Elmer essentially did was build the first, the world's first stereo satellite. If you close one eye, you stop seeing three dimensional, you only see two dimensional, right? That's because you have stereo vision with two eyes open. They built something called the Hexagon Spy Satellite. and built something, this just became declassified a couple of years ago. Inside that building is some of the most sophisticated, top-secret equipment known to humankind.Īnd, in fact, a story that most people don't know was in the 1960's, Perkin Elmer got approached by the C.I.A. Very nondescript building, United Technologies is in there now. He continued, "Now you might say why Perkin Elmer? They have an optical systems division and if you know this big white box looking building on Wooster Heights Road in Danbury near the airport.
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