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In this selection from " column of universe : How the James Webb Telescope Unlocked the mystery of the Cosmos " ( piddling , Brown Book Group , 2024 ) , source Richard Panek look at the jaw - dropping story behind the launch of theJWST — and how it almost fall at the final vault .
In November 2011 , Congress delivered its verdict on the fate of Webb . Yes , they would extend to fund it , but they would do so with a caution , an inviolable budget cap :
The Ariane 5 rocket with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope onboard.
Eight billion buck or fizzle .
" If they ’re going to set off , that ’s fine , " Mike Menzel would tell his crew over the come yr . " Do n’t worry . Do n’t even listen . "
On a fair veritable basis , Menzel would have to appear before a reappraisal table — exercises that his longtime Hubble telescope confrère and Webb collaborator Peter Stockman once likened to Kabuki theater — to excuse why the project was demand so long or costing so much . His answer was pretty much what he said when Frank Martin first present him the plans for the observation tower at Lockheed Martin back in the late 1990s :
A concept illustration of JWST in space.
Relying on psychoanalysis — completing a numerical model for the part of the satellite on one side of the sunshield , then discharge another mathematical mannequin for the part on the other side of the sunshield , and then insure if the mannikin might match — contained a greater capacity for human mistake than putting the whole outfit and caboodle in a several-story - high chamber and shaking it as if there were no tomorrow ( which , in the case of stress-test failures , there might not be in term of the mission ’s future ) .
What he postulate , Menzel would secern the recapitulation boards , was " margin " — stenography not just for margin of error but for margin of error beyond the tolerance of error . " The normal regulation do n’t apply here , " Menzel liked to say . " This is virginal territorial dominion " — a landscape painting of foreseeable challenge but , more important for his purposes , also unforeseeable threats . " unidentified unknowns , " as the Webb crew came to call the job they could n’t imagine .
" How much margin do you need ? " one program coach or another would sporadically ask Menzel .
Teams monitor the JWST launch.
" As much as I can get , " he ’d resolve .
Budget overruns , bureaucratic malfeasance , congressional supervision , review-board reckonings , the whole process of rethinking how to test a space telescope from the ground up : Webb had hold up them all . One other ingredient , however , continued to create havoc with the budget and the launch timeline deep into the 2010s — what Menzel call " stupid mistakes . "
One such mistake was miswirings that had fry some of the prototypes ' electrical factor — for instance , the pressure transducer for the propellant ( the transducer being , more or less , the gasolene gauge).Do we take flight without pressure transducers?Menzel ’s team had to debate the question . The verdict : No . So they had to replace them .
Another stupid error : the lotion of an inappropriate solvent that damaged the lookout station ’s propulsion valve .
And another : seven tears in the sunshield .
Another : a vibration test for the sunshield that ended with dozens of bolts blowing slack and bouncing around the test chamber . The problem turned out to be that the bolt had too few threads . ( squad members were angle bolts out of far crannies of the facility for months afterward . )
Partly because of these accidents , the launching day of the month slip from October 2018 to June 2019 . The U.S. Government Accountability Office , after acquit an investigation into the time lag , liberate an analytic thinking monish that even a launch particular date in June 2019 was likely too affirmative , and indeed a calendar month after the Accountability Office had release that analysis , NASAannounced a further delay , to natural spring 2020 . It also recognise that Webb had reached Congress ’s $ 8‑billion‑or‑bust budget cap … and would need to exceed it , if the telescope was ever to get off the land .
In January 2019 Congress O.K. a further infusion of $ 800 million , bringing the total expenditures to $ 8.8 billion . An accompany account was beastly . " There is fundamental dashing hopes with both NASA and its contractors regarding mismanagement , complete lack of careful oversight , and overall misfortunate basic workmanship on JWST , " the story said . " NASA and its commercial partners seem to trust that congressional funding for this project and other development efforts is an entitlement , untouched by failures to stick around on docket or within budget . " And once again Congress threatened the existence of the project : " NASA should purely stick by to this jacket crown or , under this agreement , JWST will have to come up cost deliverance or offset the delegacy . "
" Just forget about them , " Menzel would tell his squad . " I do n’t care what they say . If you see a problem , just say so , and if we ’ve got to delay , we ’ll delay . " He compared the final prep for launch to the folding of a chute : " One little error and we ’re dead nub . "
Then came Covid , and with it a work retardation , prompting the proclamation , in July 2020 , that the scope would launch no earlier than October 31 , 2021 .
For two years the components of Webb had been amount together at NASA ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory , just outside Pasadena . Now the metre for the telescope to begin its journey from Long Beach to the launchpad at the European spaceport off the northeast coast of South America , near Kourou , French Guiana . The whirl of the Earth help add impulse to a rocket launch , and that spin is greatest at the equator ; Kourou is only three hundred or so miles northward of it . But the telescope could n’t be ship as if it were simply one more piece of cargo aboard a freighter . It required a limited temperature- and humidity-controlled container . ( The freight itself had the opposite essential : It demand to be as non‑special , as anonymous , as possible , so as to defend against the possibility , however remote , that sea rover might clutch the ship and hold its $ 8.8 billion cargo surety . )
The lookout station exist the sixteen-day , 5,800-mile passage down the west coast of Mexico , through the Panama Canal , up the Kourou River to the Port de Pariacabo , and into a processing facility near the launch site in French Guiana without incident — but then it suffered a saccade . A high tenseness clamp band snapped off , shaking the observatory . An inspection revealed no hurt , but the late-December launch slipped another few days .
Even the name of the scope , in those final weeks , became a misdirection , albeit of the public-relations form . The land tenure of the historical important person of James Webb as the second in command at the Department of State in the late 1940s and former 1950s and then as the headspring of NASA in the 1960s coincide with what historians have come to call the " lilac scare " — a hunting for and purge of LGBTQ employee at Union initiation ( ostensibly because they might be subject to blackmail and therefore posture a surety risk ) . investigation had turned up scant specific evidence of James Webb ’s affair , but the association between bureaucratism and dogmatism was close enough that some astronomers decided they would give lingual wash room and thereafter refer to the telescope not as " Webb , " a one-syllable nibble , but only as " JWST , " a six-syllable Dagwood sandwich .
Despite the foreign mission ’s history of nonlinearity over the premature decades , it could n’t have reach this net stage without a passel choke right on . You could miss that linear perspective if you were in the eye of the whirlpool or even closely observing it . Even so , no one involve in the undertaking could knowhowmuch had belong the right way until the Ariane 5 rocket bearing Webb had not just lifted off but survived " six months of terror " ( as the media liked to say ) . During those months the observatory would face 344 " single points of failure , " in NASA nomenclature — executions of engineering that would reveal whether the miracles of invention and ingeniousness that were unique to this mission actually worked on‑site ( that is to say , in space ) , the failure of any one of which would scuttle the full project .
Those first six month , though , were n’t what the scientists at the Institute and NASA were most concerned about . It was , or else , the first thirty days . Or maybe even the first two weeks , the period during which Webb would execute some of its most intricate exercises .
With a prognosis of high wind instrument for December 24 , 2021 , the launch fall away one last time . On the morning of December 25 , in the second-story command center at the Institute , in the auditorium downstairs on the main floor , at look at party at aerospace facilities around the world , and in front of estimator screens on every continent , world gathered to see and hold off .
At 7:20 a.m. Baltimore prison term — Baltimore time thenceforth being the prescribed timestamp for the receipt of Webb ’s nonterrestrial communication — the countdown to the launching reached that token from the 1960s Space Race : the backward count to blastoff .
Dix …
— James Webb Space Telescope smash its own record to discover the other wandflower that ever existed
— Space exposure of the week : James Webb telescope spot a secret star factory in the Sombrero Galaxy
— James Webb Space Telescope discovers mysterious ' red monster ' extragalactic nebula so prominent they should n’t subsist
Neuf …
Huit …
Sept …
Six …
Cinq …
Quatre …
Trois …
Deux …
Unité …
…
Décollage !
Excerpted from PILLARS OF initiation by Richard Panek . Copyright © 2024 by Richard Panek . Reprinted with permission of Little , Brown and Company . All rights reserved .
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