Why NASA is struggling to launch its most ambitious space science project yet
We're all going to have to keep waiting before we see NASA's most complicated space science mission -- the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) -- come to fruition.
The space agency announced Tuesday that the launch of the JWST -- the huge, complex tool intended to succeed the Hubble Space Telescope -- has been delayed by nearly a year.
Instead of launching the JWST in the spring of 2019 (a timeframe that was already the result of numerous delays), NASA is now planning to launch the $8 billion mission in May 2020.
The project has been mired in technical and developmental delays for years, and the most recent delay is the result of numerous challenges that have taken longer to resolve than expected, NASA officials said.
“Considering the investment NASA and our international partners have made, we want to proceed systematically through these last tests, with the additional time necessary, to be ready for a May 2020 launch,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement.
The astronomy community has been waiting for the JWST to launch for just about a decade, eager to get their hands on the data it will provide.
A generation of astronomers are counting on this telescope to launch in the near future in order to answer some of the most important questions about the universe, such as how stars form, what planets are made of, and what early galaxies looked like.
The Hubble won't be around forever -- the intrepid telescope is expected to come to the end of its life sometime in the coming decade -- so having the JWST ready to succeed it is key to the future of space science on a grand scale.
The actual spacecraft is also ambitious.
The JWST is designed to peer into the universe in infrared light, allowing it to cut through dust and see the interesting stars, planets, and other objects beyond it.
The telescope uses huge, gold-coated mirrors necessary to observe distant objects, and it comes complete with a giant tennis court-sized sunshield which should help keep the spacecraft cool as it gathers data on humanity's behalf.
While all of those components are impressive, they have also created some serious technical challenges that need to be overcome before launch.
This most recent delay will likely incur cost overruns large enough to require NASA to ask Congress to reauthorize the project. It's unclear what that possible re-authorization will mean for the program, but either way, Congress probably won't be happy.
Things appeared to be going well since the JWST mission was reset in 2011 after years of prior delays, setting the new, and seemingly firm, funding cap at $8 billion.
Since 2011, JWST was on track for its possible launch in 2018, but when the project moved into integration and testing, things got complicated.
“Webb is the highest priority project for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, and the largest international space science project in U.S. history," NASA's acting administrator Robert Lightfoot said in the statement.
"All the observatory’s flight hardware is now complete, however, the issues brought to light with the spacecraft element are prompting us to take the necessary steps to refocus our efforts on the completion of this ambitious and complex observatory."
Those issues included small tears in the tennis court-sized membranes that make up the telescope's sunshield and other problems related to the integration of the telescope with the rest of the spacecraft.
In the coming years, NASA will need to rigorously test the telescope's deployment on the ground before it ever launches to space.
That level of deployment testing is particularly important for the JWST because NASA won't be able to service it while it's in space, 1 million miles away, unlike the Hubble, which was serviced in orbit several times, most recently in 2009.
But even thinking about what might happen once the JWST reaches orbit might be getting ahead of ourselves.
For now, all of us will have to wait and see as NASA tries to get the project back on track and into space.
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
