NASA and the astronomy community have poured $10 billion into just one piece of machinery. The moment of truth is approaching.
The James Webb Space Telescope is in French Guiana, ready to leave Earth and begin its journey out to space. It has overcome loose screws, testing mistakes, a Congressional cancellation, and a small risk of being hijacked by pirates on its way to the launch site. The project has shaped the agency as much as the agency has shaped it.
Michael Turner, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of Chicago, told Space.com that you can't do this every five years. It just convulses the agency, and that's exactly what they should be doing every now and then.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope launch: Live updates.
The goal has been to convulse science. The observatory will specialize in studying the early days of the universe because it has a massive mirror and is able to look into the early days of the universe. The two capabilities combined represent a huge step forward.
It's difficult to see the light that doubles as heat. The observatory will be sent to a place called Earth-sun lagrange point 2, or L2, which is 1 million miles away from the sun.
It's very exciting, but in terms of engineering it's very difficult. NASA had never built anything like it before. It's hard to know how long it will take or how much it will cost when you're first doing something.
The Hubble Space Telescope, a smaller telescope but the key predecessor in scale, had a safety mechanism built in that allowed astronauts to visit and tend to its instruments. Not so for JWST.
For the first time on a space telescope, the mirror has to be aligned 18 different times to form one smooth surface.
The sun shield must unfurl in space. It has flown before, but nothing like this.
The European Space Agency's Planck mission to map the Cosmic Microwave Background and the NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe that operated from 2001 to 2010 are the only smaller missions that have gotten a spaceship to L2.
There is no way to get the same science results. "If it weren't complicated, if it weren't at L2, if it hadn't had a sunscreen to keep it nice and cool, you couldn't do all the transformational stuff," Turner said.
An animation shows the trajectory of the James Webb Space Telescope. The image is from NASA.
An ever-growing project.
NASA leadership encouraged the astronomy community to go bigger and bolder when they began toying with ideas for what is now known as JWST.
The ignominy JWST has faced over its ballooning budgets and it may have been inevitable. Frank said that the more you try to do one thing, the more technical complexity there is.
NASA became more determined to make sure nothing went wrong as the JWST became more ambitious.
Frank said that if you have a large, complicated mission, you're going to demand high reliability because it's so expensive and you have so much riding on it. To mitigate the risk of failure, you really need a lot of time and labor, and it's not the materials that drive the cost of missions, it's actually labor. She noted that project management and system management are important for staying on track.
Engineers tested the image every way they could, as NASA's fear of failure may have contributed to the image's troubles. Turner said that when it's complicated, something will go wrong.
Engineers caught issues in the observatory that needed to be fixed as a result of those tests. Turner said there's no such thing as a smart accident. They all involve stupid things. All mistakes are stupid.
30 years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope changed our view of the universe.
There is a moment of truth.
The tangle came to a head in 2011.
The project was still deep in debt and far from the launch pad, even though substantial parts of the observatory were in the late stages of assembly. Turner said that people knew there was a problem, but no one wanted to say it. They'd gotten themselves into trouble.
Congress lashed out. The House of Representatives produced a budget proposal that would have ended work on the observatory, but the telescope survived. Turner said that the vision that saw the telescope spiral out of control may have saved the mission.
He said that it was still worthy of doing during the dark days. It wasn't one of those things, "You know it would've been great if we could have done that, but it's getting pretty tough out there; let's just quit."
Astronomers are aware that it could have gone a different way. Congress canceled the construction of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas in 1993 because of the hard way. Turner said that it was a blemish on American science. It left a blemish on American science, because the dark cloud of SSC still lives over the field of high-energy physics.
The immediate predecessor had faced a similar crisis. Hubble launched in 1990 and began gathering data only for astronomer to realize that the observatory's vision was blurry because of an error in the mirror. There was no guarantee that the telescope would be saved.
Turner said there were a lot of people who left Hubble when it had problems. The tough ones said, "Well, there must be some way we can fix this."
Business that is risky.
Hubble survived and became an icon. It has been a journey with casualties.
William Russell of the federal government's Government Accountability Office said during a House hearing that NASA was forced to reallocate some of the money from other projects to the observatory.
Budgetary discipline is important with big projects. Turner said that the rest of science was damaged when they bled. You have to go in realistic if you want to save other projects.
Frank argued that there must be an opportunity cost in terms of missions that have not been built. What missions haven't been launched because of the budget being sucked up by the JWST? What could we have done with 10 billion dollars? Frank said something. It's easy to say things in the past, but I think these are important questions.
It's a nightmare scenario if anything goes wrong as the JWST launches, deploys and begins operations.
Frank said it was difficult to put so many science eggs in one basket. She said that scientists who have built their research programs to cater to the data that JWST has promised "see their careers literally at stake on the launch pad right now."
Into the future.
Observers worry that the troubles of JWST will affect future mission proposals. NASA is more careful about requiring pragmatic mission schedules and budgets. The experience may have soured the agency on such large projects.
It might be dependent on how JWST fares in space. Robert Smith, a historian at the University of Alberta, said during a webinars that success and failure bring success and failure bring failure. If there is going to be a successor, I think it needs to work.
The new 10-year plan for astronomy was released in November. The report looked ahead to big space telescope projects but emphasized that technology should be used in smaller missions first to reduce risk. Smith said it was a shadow of the report.
Frank is worried that a failure at such a scale could hurt NASA's reputation, since the agency relies on public funding. Frank said that the challenge for NASA was being able to succeed and do good science while avoiding blowback from people who may be unsupportive of failure. Taxpayers are going to react negatively if NASA is perceived to be not good stewards.
That's a different situation than what the company faces. The company leans into its failures with videos of rockets blowing up. Frank said that NASA probably doesn't have the freedom to do that because they can make fun of their own failures.
She said that the agency's culture shapes its projects. There needs to be a set of incentives that make people think that if they don't figure out a cost-effective solution to the problem, there's a real chance this mission could be canceled. She noted that NASA was working to pursue missions of a wide range of sizes, including smaller missions that could be at risk of failure.
Turner said that it's important that NASA succeeds and that it tackles the most ambitious projects. "No one else could have done it, and it's important for all of American science, not just astronomy, that this country can still do things that just dazzle," he said.
The importance goes beyond science as well. Turner said the world is a mess. We are a really good species when we put our mind to it. We need to be reminded that we can do amazing things when we come together and choose a good goal and work hard together.
He said that the launch of JWST is one of those amazing things. Can we use those skills to solve other problems as well?
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