Goooood morning dramatards! It's that time of the week again - that is, for long effort posts about really niche space industry shit. This time, there's actual drama. I don't want to hear anything about me posting no drama, this shit is entertaining and I take questions.

This is the story of the Next Generation Space Telescope - later named the James Webb Space Telescope - and the never-ending nightmare it became for the people designing it. This thing was a running industry joke for a while, because it was so heavily delayed, no one thought it would ever launch.

Hey, wait a minute. I know that name!

And you should. JWST was launched on Christmas Day of 2021, over twenty-five years in the making. It stands as one of the pinnacles of global science and engineering projects, and has already produced incredible amounts of cool desktop backgrounds useful scientific data, and will continue to do so for decades. It consists of 18 hexagonal mirrors, made of gold-plated beryllium (it evens sounds expensive), that span 2.4 meters across. The surfaces are so flat that if you were to scale just one of those mirrors up to the size of North America, the biggest bump on them would less than half a centimeter (quarter of an inch-ish) tall. You've probably seen pictures of it before:

It's responsible for a lot of the hexagon-shaped nerdshit that's been coming out for the last few years, in regards to space nerds at least. 3D Printer nerds are another thing entirely.

But this isn't a story about what the telescope's done. This is a story about the absolute nightmare that building this thing was, and the twenty-year dramafest it entailed.

1996-1998: BETTER, FASTER, CHEAPER

ESTIMATED LAUNCH DATE: 2007

TOTAL BUDGET: $1 BILLION

Scientists and telescopes can both really be considered scientific instruments. They're fussy, temperamental at the best of times, expensive to acquire and operate, and usually result in dramatic stories when you know them long enough. The story really begins before the Hubble Space Telescope, the predecessor to our hero, is launched. The project is constantly beset by technical delays, budget problems, and the Challenger disaster. It was famously launched broken in 1990 because the mirror turned out to be ground (sanded) incorrectly, and they had to send a shuttle crew up to go fix it. It took a long time to get going, but the results fascinated the public, and was a great scientific achievement. You have to remember that extremely public science projects like these can result in a huge leap in investment across the board in all types of science, as people see the images and get hyped. There's real astronomy being done, but you can't forget this factor.

Projects like these are planned well into advance, and the scientists working on HST were already starting to think about what their next project would be. Serious planning began in 1994 after fixing the HST, as NASA began looking into the idea of an infrared telescope to see farther back into the past.

Sidebar: Why infrared?

TW: Science shit (skippable!)

Really high end telescopes like these are affected by something called redshift. The universe itself is physically expanding, and as light travels through the vastness of space to hit whatever's looking at it, the EM wave itself will be stretched. X-rays will become UV, UV becomes visible light, and most visible light will drop down into the infrared, microwave, or radio spectrum.

This is all dependent on what the wavelength of the light was when it was emitted, and how far it traveled to get there. When you are looking at a star a light year away, you are looking at light that was emitted a year ago. 10 light years, 10 years. You are literally able to look back in time. There becomes a distance, however, where all light emitted drops out of the visible spectrum, and you can no longer see anything beyond a certain time period ago.

So drop the spectrum you're looking at! Bottom line is: If you look in infrared, you can see millions of years more into the past. You could actually look at the formation of galaxies close to the beginning of the universe. Very exciting!

Back to Hubble

Hubble, unfortunately, was a warm telescope. It can't look at infrared because the heat from its own optics blinds the sensor to infrared light. Not helpful.

In order to actually see all this faint infrared light, the telescope has to be really fricking cold. Waste heat is a pain in the butt on space projects, because the only way to get rid of it is to radiate it out into space. In order to get something that cold (40 deg C/K from absolute 0), you need an enormously complicated cooling system that can suck out almost all of the thermal energy from something the size of a bus and get rid of it in the form of light. And block out the sun.

So in short, you need:

• A giant telescope

• that is close to absolute zero

• that can fold up and fit on a rocket

• that is manufactured perfectly with no issues

It was doomed from the start.

2003-2010: Uncle Sam, can we have a new telescope?

(These just show where the spikes come from on the images, all pictures listed after now will be relevant)

ESTIMATED LAUNCH DATE: 2011

TOTAL BUDGET: $2.5 BILLION

NASA, at this point, had been dealing with a lot of problems with Hubble. No one's exactly happy when you spend a huge amount of money on some really complicated equipment, put it in space, and then have to send up a guy to go fix it. They wanted something "better, faster, cheaper". A telescope that would be better than Hubble, with fewer problems, a faster development time, and at a lower cost.

Let's see how that idea turns out

A few competing bids are put together, and a company called TRW gets the contract. Their bid involves a segmented primary mirror with moving parts, cheaper in theory than building a single massive mirror, but very complicated. The telescope project gets named, and the launch date is set for 2007. They get bought out by Northrop Grumman pretty shortly afterwards, and this is where the drama begins.

Drama starts here: What's in a name?

Setting the tone for the next fifteen years of development, the naming of the telescope was instantly controversial. NASA decided to make an exception to their previous scheme of naming things after famous scientists (usually related to the project) and name it after a bureaucrat instead, which was unpopular among scientists. It was named for James Webb, NASA's second administrator, who lead the agency through the Apollo program.

There was a lot of backlash for this, even internationally, but most of this this didn't come until the telescope was close to completion. An article in Scientific American accused Webb of helping to purge homosexuals in the State Department in the 1950s, and urged NASA to rename it. The source for this turned out to be a wrongly attributed quote from an article at the time. NASA conducted an investigation, and found that Webb had no personal part in any of the firings. Most of this seems to trace back to the firing of one specific accountant, who was fired by a completely different department with control over staffing. Having found nothing, NASA told them to frick off.

This has not, however, stopped Scientific American from continuing to scream about the name of the telescope.

Constantly.

The Royal Astronomical Society (UK) refused to actually use his name when referring to the telescope, even after it launched. They've revised their stance on the name, but they're not backing down on hating James Webb.

I could find dozens of articles on this. They're still being written. Despite the fact that a massive investigation turned up nothing, someone called the guy a homophobe and it just kind of stuck.

I just want to point out that while the rest of the nonsense relating to the design is going on, as NASA is desperately trying to keep the project alive, the only supporters of the telescope are writing hitpieces every single week about the fricking name of the thing. Christ people, it's not like they named it after Von Braun.

2010-2012: Back to the Accounting Books

ESTIMATED LAUNCH DATE: 2015

TOTAL BUDGET: $6.5 BILLION

JWST had an initial budget of about $1b dollars, and this was broken up year-by-year. Northrop pretty quickly discovered issues with this, and they'd blow through their yearly budget fairly quickly. A lot of the expensive R&D takes place in the early years, and suddenly the checks are bouncing.

So they come up with a neat workaround: just push the expensive parts back into next year, and we'll deal with it then.

This makes all the bean counters happy, but is an exceptionally r-slurred way to run an engineering project. Everything is now being done completely out of order, and when you start designing parts that are dependent on ones that haven't been designed yet, you will have to redesign everything anyway when you actually get around to what you should have been doing in the first place. What it results in is a gigantic clusterfrick of a design, on top of what is already one of the most difficult engineering projects ever conceived.

The project gets delayed, year after year after year. It's not unusual for large projects like these to get delayed and cost more than you expect, but this one went very quickly in both directions. NASA does an investigation, and finds out how Northrop has been managing the budget. The massive document (summarized for you, you're welcome) boils down to:

• NASA massively lowballed the budget like r-slurs

• Northrop was fumbling the entire thing to make bean counters happy

• There was a complete and total lack of oversight on the project to stop them exploiting this

• Tacking on yearly additions to the budget like they were doing is not helping, it's just prolonging it

• It's going to be at least another quarter of a billion dollars just to keep going, and we have no idea how much it's going to be total

By now, JWST's main supporters are beginning to hate it. The telescope is massively unpopular, mostly because scientists are whining that it's eating up all their budgets. Nature wrote a hitpiece on JWST, calling it The Telescope That Ate Astronomy.

Keep in mind, this is not too long after the 2008 Financial Crisis. Congress is looking to save some money and a badly run project like this is a pretty easy target.

NASA's budget makes it onto the chopping block when the budget for 2012 starts to take shape. There's a lot of noise about the cost, and the House of Representatives votes to kill it in their proposal. JWST survives the Senate, however, and it gets a reduced budget for the next year. This, however, does not do good things for the launch schedule. It's still optimistically placed at 2015, but no one involved think it's gonna make that. NASA Deputy Admin Lori Gardner said they wanted a budget that would at least "... allow us to launch the Webb telescope in this decade".

2017-2018: Testing Everyone's Patience...

ESTIMATED LAUNCH DATE: 2019

TOTAL BUDGET: $8.8 BILLION

I'm skipping past general construction here. They installed the mirror in 2016. Not much happened that's funny until late 2017, where they began testing and then trying to put the thing together.

The telescope is delayed yet again, after completing a cryogenics test in 2017. This time, it's NASA's doing, in order to stop them rushing the thing into flight and breaking it. It's only six months, we can deal. Test it more, it'll work. Right? God, please let it work. 2018 was a great year for telescope drama, so we're breaking it down by segment. Bear with me, it's worth it. It was also very hard to put in order so you lazy shits better read this.

Oh God, Oh Frick.

The JWST was being built in two halves: the heatshield (which as far as I can tell was being built in southern California, if anyone can find otherwise I will correct this and credit you), and the optical assembly (which seems to have been built in Virginia and tested in Texas, same deal). God, too, is upset about the telescope delays, and as they're trying to test the optical half of the telescope at the Johnson Space Center, He sends Hurricane Harvey to obliterate Houston to let everyone know how much He is fed up with it. NASA scientists continue to work on testing the thing despite the massive storm.

The other half is having problems too: during a heat shield deployment test, the spacecraft manages to tear itself in half in 2018. The heatshield is made of five layers of super delicate material, thinner than a human hair and as large as a tennis court, that needs to unfold while in space. While testing the unfolding, it tore itself in half. There's another pretty comprehensive review as a result of this, and NASA finds no less than 344 single points of failure for the entire launch and deployment process. What that means in practice is that if any one of those 344 items goes wrong, the entire multibillion dollar project goes down the potty. Oh God.

Testing of the individual sections completes in early 2018, and Northrop begins shipping over the remaining pieces to Southern California. It requires a completely unique shipping solution to do this, which basically entailed a 75-ton hovercraft-version of a shipping container being flown on a cargo plane. Can you imagine being the pilot for that? I'd shit myself if I landed hard.

Gregory L Robinson.

In comes the savior of the project, Gregory L. Robinson. You don't need to know much about him, just know that he's an administrative genius (his boss called him "the most effective leader of a mission I have ever seen in the history of NASA") and the project goes from hitting only 50% of deadlines on time to 95%.

The IKEAScope

But enough about him, let's get back to the funny telescope news.

The optical assembly is delivered without incident to southern California in February 2018 without incident. What's that? There's problems putting it together? How unexpected . Technicians at the SoCal facility have just finished putting part of it back together, and found that they have a lot of extra screws and washers lying around..

“Right now we believe that all of this hardware — we’re talking screws and washers here — come from the sunshield cover,” he said. “We’re looking at what this really means and what is the recovery plan.” The problem, he said, was only a couple of days old, and he had few additional details about the problem.

“It’s not terrible news, but it’s not good news, either,” he said.

-- Greg Robinson

Oh shit.

You know how you finish building an IKEA cabinet and there's a bunch of extra stuff lying around that definitely weren't spares? Imagine the cabinet cost $9 billion, and you can imagine what these poor fricks are feeling like.

Thankfully, it seems to be OK, and Northrop begins to wire the two halves together.

Unfortunately, the people paying for the telescope are becoming very unhappy with how the project is going. An independent review of the project by NASA in June of 2018 concluded:

• The project is a fricking nightmare

• It's gone so far over budget that Northrop is officially in the doghouse with the feds over this, no amount of lobbying will save them

• It's a really important scientific mission, it's still worth it

• please please please please just keep paying for the next couple of years its worth it

It's really funny and worth a read if you aren't bored of telescope drama by this point. My favorite section:

This is an important chart to give a macro view of JWST. The statement of incredible capability and awesome scientific potential was initially thought to be “over the top.” After discussion, the Webb Independent Review Board (IRB) clearly believes that “awesome” is a correct assessment of the JWST scientific potential. To achieve this potential requires an observatory with significant complexity and risk. It is easy to defend that JWST has the highest complexity and risk of any civil space robotic system. Clearly, it is in the top few. The complexity and risk must be considered in all decisions that affect JWST mission success.

The observation that there are no small JWST integration and test problems was not initially recognized by the Webb IRB, and this also may be true of others involved with JWST. It is a most important observation that will be apparent in subsequent Findings and Recommendations. It is caused by the complexity and highly integrated nature of the observatory. Specifically, it implies, as an example, that a very small human error or test anomaly can impact the schedule by months and the cost by tens of millions of dollars.

Each member of the Webb IRB believes that cost and schedule are important elements of a space project and must be responsibly managed. Throughout much of the life of a space project, cost, schedule, technical performance, risk and requirements can be responsibly managed without compromising mission success. All projects reach a point in their development where this trade can no longer be made without adversely impacting mission success. JWST has reached this point and must now be completed within the principle that mission success is the top priority and is more important than cost and schedule.

Meanwhile, the CEO of Northrop Grumman is being hauled in front of Congress to explain himself A few of the Congressmen suggested that Northrop foot the bill for the overrun, and the CEO politely told them to go frick themselves.

2019-2021: Is it over?

ESTIMATED LAUNCH DATE: MARCH 2021

TOTAL BUDGET: $9.66 BILLION

Is that a bird? A plane? No, it's the US House of Representatives, here to cancel the project literally at the last minute! The JWST is fortunately saved, and, in a weird stroke of fate, fully funded. The final round of funding comes with a strongly worded letterbasically repeating the sentiment of the report from last year, calling everyone involved an r-slur but continuing to enable them anyway. The letter says that this is it, and that they're not getting any more money after this.

The telescope is finally put together, as the two halves of the spacecraft are mechanically (read: screwed in) together. This was originally scheduled to happen in 2007. The final test on the spacecraft, the thermal vacuum test, passes in May of 2019, and the spacecraft is ready to launch. All that needs to happen now is to ship it over to South America, where it will be launched by the Europeans.

ESTIMATED LAUNCH DATE: OCTOBER 2021

There's nothing really to report here until the telescope is delayed AGAIN, this time by Covid, which I guess is actually understandable this time, and their best bet is October. Basically all that happens through October 2021 is that the scope gets (very carefully) shipped through Panama, without incident. It gets delayed AGAIN because of shipping delays, which makes me laugh, because it's just funny to think that they spent $10 billion dollars on this and then cheaped out on priority shipping. A lot of this involves waiting around for the launch window, because they can only achieve their orbits at specific times.

November-December 2021: They fricking WHAT?

ESTIMATED LAUNCH DATE: 18 DECEMBER 2021

TOTAL BUDGET: $9.70 BILLION

True to the very last minute, the JWST is continually delayed at every possible opportunity. November rolls around, and the Ariane V rocket that the JWST is set to launch on is prepped and ready on the pad. All that's left to do is to attach the thing, launch it, have it transit, and then unfold. It's out of our hands, the Europeans have it, they'll do fine.

So on the 25th of November, the Europeans drop the JWST as they're putting it onto the rocket.

The incident took place as technicians were preparing to attach Webb to the launch vehicle adaptor, which would then be used to fix the telescope to the upper stage of the rocket. According to NASA, “a sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band” took place. The clamp band fixes the spacecraft to the launch adaptor and then releases in orbit, allowing the spacecraft to separate from the rocket. This unplanned release caused a vibration to travel through the telescope.

You've gotta be kidding me. They fricking what? They dropped it? A $10 billion dollar spacecraft and they drop it attaching it to the rocket. The launch is pushed back from the 18th of December to the 22nd, to ensure that everything still works.

ESTIMATED LAUNCH DATE: 22 DECEMBER 2021

They can't get the rocket to communicate with the spacecraft. It's gonna take a couple days to figure out, guys.

Bad weather on the day of scrubs the launch, and they decide to try again when it's cleared up.

ESTIMATED LAUNCH DATE: 24 DECEMBER 2021

All the visiting delegations went home for Christmas. As it turns out, so did a lot of the staff. We can't launch today guys, sorry. Let's try for tomorrow

Merry Christmas!

FINAL LAUNCH DATE: 25 DECEMBER 2021

In a shocking bounce of previous trends, the JWST launches successfully without a hitch. It takes 29 days for the spacecraft to reach it's operation position, unfold, and radio home.

Robinson quits immediately after JWST phones home. It was such a nightmare of a project that he never wanted to deal with the industry again. As far as I can tell, he's now happily retired.

Post Mortem

This was possibly the single most mismanaged project ever concieved, on top of already being one of the hardest too. This whole thing was a clusterfrick from start to finish, until literally the last possible minute. I'm pretty sure 90% of the people who worked on this don't ever want to see what comes out of it.

What a shitshow.