Hubble at 36: The Sci-Fi Films Science Inspired

I remember being a kid and seeing those photos at school. Colourful nebulae, spiral galaxies, stars being born in pillars of gas and dust. I didn't know the telescope's name, but I knew those images were out of this world — literally. Today, 24 April 2026, the Hubble Space Telescope turns 36 since its launch. And as a proper sci-fi fan, I can't help celebrating by looking back at the films this telescope inspired — or even starred in.

24 April 1990: The Day Space Got Eyes

In the late 1980s, NASA and the ESA were working on an ambitious project: putting a telescope above Earth's atmosphere to capture images of the universe without interference from the air. On 24 April 1990, the space shuttle Discovery lifted off from Kennedy Space Center carrying Hubble in its cargo bay.

The beginning, though, was far from triumphant. The primary mirror had been polished with a millimetre-scale curvature error — and the first images came back blurred. A crisis in orbit. In 1993, a servicing mission fixed the flaw, and Hubble became what we know today: the most powerful window humanity has ever had onto the cosmos.

Thirty-six years of images that redefined our sense of scale every time they turned up in the news, at school, online.

Gravity (2013): Hubble as the Stage for Chaos

If you want Hubble literally on screen, Gravity is the obvious choice. Alfonso Cuarón's film opens right there: a team of astronauts carrying out a servicing mission on the telescope in orbit. Sandra Bullock plays Dr Ryan Stone, on one of her first spaceflights. George Clooney is veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski.

Everything goes fine until a cloud of debris — the result of the Russians destroying one of their own satellites — sweeps through the shuttle and turns everything into a catastrophe.

What Cuarón did was use Hubble not as a metaphor, but as a location. The premise is simple and brutal: what happens when you're stranded in space with no way back? The result is 90 minutes of visceral tension. No rogue AI, no aliens, no time distortion. Just unforgiving physics and the human will to survive.

Gravity won seven Oscars in 2014 — including Best Director and Best Cinematography. And Hubble didn't even need to give a speech.

Contact (1997): Carl Sagan's Science That Reads Like Fiction

Carl Sagan wrote Contact in 1985 — before Hubble even existed. But Robert Zemeckis's film, released in 1997, captures exactly the spirit the telescope represents: the idea that the universe is full of things we haven't seen yet.

Jodie Foster plays Ellie Arroway, a radio astronomer obsessed with detecting signals of extraterrestrial intelligence. What sets Contact apart from most alien-contact films is its commitment to scientific method. Ellie isn't an action hero — she's a researcher. And the film's central question isn't "are aliens out there?" but "what would the discovery do to humanity?"

I watched Contact for the first time after seeing Hubble photos at school, and something clicked. Real science and science fiction were drinking from the same well.

Interstellar (2014): Black Holes With Scientific Credentials

Christopher Nolan hired theoretical physicist Kip Thorne as a consultant before he'd even started writing Interstellar. The result was Gargantua, a black hole modelled with real equations — and a visualisation so precise it produced a peer-reviewed scientific paper.

The film draws on concepts Hubble helped us understand better: the sheer scale of the cosmos, the effects of intense gravitational fields, the strangeness of galaxies billions of light years away. It's not a documentary — there's time-space travel and considerable narrative leaps. But the scientific grounding is solid enough that you leave the cinema wanting to read up on general relativity.

I did. Downloaded a few PDFs. Never finished any of them. But the urge was real.

Real Science Is Still the Best Sci-Fi

36 years after launch, Hubble is still operational — now sharing the workload with the James Webb Space Telescope, which since 2022 has been going even deeper into time and space, capturing galaxies from when the universe was less than a billion years old.

And every time a new image comes in from these instruments, I find myself thinking about the screenwriters who'll use those nebulae as a backdrop ten years from now. The best sci-fi hasn't been written yet. But the data to inspire it is already out there, orbiting at an altitude of 547 km.

If you're into sci-fi that mixes science with provocation, it's also worth checking out what I wrote about Lucy (2014) — where science works more as a pretext than as a foundation, and that has its own charm too.