Several weeks ago, NASA officials announced some distressing news: The country’s next great space telescope, the successor to the famed Hubble, won’t be launching next spring, as they had hoped. Engineers needed more time to finish it. Their new deadline, they said, is 2021. To explain the delay, officials brought in Tom Young, a highly respected engineer who has been involved with NASA since the 1970s. Young ran through a litany of problems, each more groan-worthy than the next. Engineers had used the wrong solvent to clean the space observatory’s propulsion valves, damaging them. They had applied too much voltage to the spacecraft’s pressure transducers, damaging those, too. When they shook the spacecraft to test whether it could withstand a rocket launch, dozens of bolts broke free and scattered into the hardware, leading to a weeks-long effort to find them. There was more. Unlike technical errors like damaged valves or scorched transducers, this problem was intangible, invisible. The tremendous schedule delays and cost overruns of the James Webb Space Telescope, Young said, were also a result of “excessive optimism” from the mission’s engineers, scientists, and program managers. NASA had aimed high to build the world’s most powerful space telescope, capable of seeing the faint light from the most distant stars and galaxies, of detecting hints of life-giving molecules in the atmospheres of faraway planets. The nearly finished result is a tremendous finished feat of engineering and scientific prowess—but it exceeds an initial price tag by billions of dollars, and the… [Read full story]
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