[kabdib]

Regarding Hubble, the intelligence community knew of significant design flaws in Hubble based on their experience with similar hardware, and did not communicate the problems to the Hubble team, for security reasons. This was much more about solar array flex and the Southern Magnetic Anomaly (high radiation zone that is often transited by Hubble, and which tends to crash the processors running the scope); the mirror flaw wasn't known by the TLAs.

The book _The Hubble Wars_, which describes most of this, made me pretty angry that an important scientific instrument was nearly crippled by the "national security" mindset.