Charles Orr Jones was born April 26, 1936. He graduated in 1954 from Fayetteville High School in Tennessee. Pursuing a higher education in the sciences, he got his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tennessee in 1959. During his time as an undergraduate, he landed a co-op at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) at Redstone Arsenal from 1955 to 1958. Upon his graduation, he became a part of their full-time staff and later transferred to NASA. He would go on to get his master's degree in higher math from the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). He would later achieve a high honor degree in Optics from Auburn University, where he acquired residency requirements for a PhD. Jones took on many leadership roles for several projects from June 1960 to June 1996 at the Marshall Space Flight Center. A few of his titles included Chief of the Optics Branch, Deputy Chief of the Guidance, Control and Optics division, Chief of Optics and RF division, Chief Engineer for the Hubble Observatory Optical Telescope Assembly, and Chief Engineer for the Chandra Observatory Telescope and Scientific Instruments. While filling these various roles, he worked on many projects relating to dimensional stability with optical and telescopic systems, often being the chief expert on the matter. He received the NASA Exceptional Scientist Achievement Medal in 1988 and went on to receive several outstanding performance awards in the following years. In one of his most notable roles, Jones helped develop, launch, and maintain the Hubble Space Telescope. Technically, when he started working on the project’s prime technology specs and designs in 1969, it was known as the Large Space Telescope (LST). Years later, in January of 1981, he worked on the guide star probabilities for the Hubble Telescope’s guidance systems. He worked on the project and all its various elements up until the final stages of the telescope’s preparation for launch. For the Hubble project, Charles Orr Jones was part of an ST Analyst (STAN) team under Deputy Program Manager Gene Oliver. Each member of the team had varying discipline-focused skills needed for the mission. The other members of this team of five included Gerry Nurre for pointing control, Dave Ikley for data communications, and Jimmy Miller for electrical power. Charles Orr Jones was the designated expert for optical systems. On March 29, 1990, he went to Goddard on a permanent basis to prepare for Hubble’s launch, taking an apartment there in College Park and working full time. Sometimes, this included working seven days a week, 24 hours a day utilizing shifts. Though it was delayed by a few weeks, on April 24, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope launched. By May 19, 1990, Jones and his team had completed Phase A of the Hubble alignment. During the tests of Phase B, however, a problem arose in the form of a spherical aberration, confirmed in a meeting held by Jones on June 25, 1990. Two days later, the public was informed of the situation by Jones and others at a conference. By July 5, 1990, Jones had gathered several independent optical experts to help solve the problem in Columbia, Maryland. Though he would eventually go back to Huntsville, this panel–after meeting for over a year–eventually concluded that the primary lens had spherical aberration, but the secondary did not. The specifics of this issue were then discerned by calculations Charles Orr Jones performed himself. Thus, with his effort and leadership, the source of the problem was discovered. After spending much time at Marshall Space Flight Center, Charles Orr Jones became the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Project Manager for Optics for the Chandra Observatory, another mission he had a heavy hand in. He still had ties with Marshall Space Flight Center, and he was a Pace and Waite consultant for them from 2000 to 2001. He consulted on projects such as Constellation D, Solar B, NGST, and several other microgravity experiments. Though Charles Orr Jones eventually passed away on September 28, 2016, his more than 50 years of work on space flight and optics will never be forgotten.