NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the space agency’s long-delayed and over-budget jumbo space observatory, now won’t launch until March 30, 2021, NASA’s administrator announced on Wednesday.
The agency also announced the cost to build the JWST would be $8.8 billion, blowing through a $8 billion budget limit set last year by Congress. The space telescope, which will unfold a tennis-court sized observation mirror in space to view the universe’s most distant galaxies, was originally intended to launch in 2013 at a cost of $4.5 billion.The total cost of building and running the spacecraft through 2026 is now $9.66 billion, according to NASA, not counting roughly $500 million paid for by international partners on the mission. The European Space Agency is responsible for launching the telescope on an Ariane 5 rocket.“The complexity and difficulty cannot be overstated,” said aerospace executive Thomas Young, who headed an independent review board established by the space agency in April which recommended the new launch date. “Too much optimism was built into the schedule.”If NASA fixes human errors and embedded problems in the design of the space telescope, such as the difficulty of combining a massive sunscreen with an unfolding 18-mirror observatory, he suggested an 80% chance that the spacecraft will actually launch in 2021.
All of JWST’s parts — telescope mirrors, sunshield, and body — are built, but putting them all together has been the latest source of problems for the mission. Most recently, fasteners and other hardware became loose in the sunshield during a vibration test of the spacecraft. As many as four fasteners still haven’t been found. In a separate incident, the wrong solvent showed up? in cleaning valves, damaging equipment. Delays in launching the spacecraft cost NASA about $1 million a day, according to Young.The delay is “a bigger slip than we had anticipated,” astronomer Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona told BuzzFeed News by email. A recent contretemps in the astronomical community developed over a call by NASA for scientists to delay planning future space missions until JWST launched. And Congress fought off a Trump Administration bid to kill off a separate, smaller space telescope at NASA to help pay for JWST’s extra costs.The report made 32 recommendations, while reaffirming that the mission should continue because of the value of the science it promises: views of the earliest stars and of planets forming around nearby stars. NASA fully accepted 30 of the report’s recommendations.“Make no mistake, I’m not happy sitting here telling you this,” NASA’s Thomas Zurbuchen told reporters on a briefing about the delay. He deflected criticism from spacecraft contractor Northrop Grumman, saying, “we are part of the team that caused this problem and we are going to have to solve it together.”Blowing the budget cap for JWST means that Congress will have to vote to reauthorize completion of the telescope, which has already drawn ire from lawmakers. NASA plans to ask for the authorization and extra money in February.
Original source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/danvergano/nasa-webb-telescope-2021.
