After more than 20 years of planning, development, near cancellation, blood, sweat and tears, the construction of the James Webb Space Telescope is complete; it was was just completed. It took seven years longer than it was supposed to and went seven billion, two hundred million dollars over budget. But in the end, everyone is going to be glad that NASA, et al. stuck with it.
The James Webb Space Telescope is one of the most remarkable things mankind has ever built. Over the last seven or eight thousand years, mankind has built some pretty remarkable things; temples, pyramids, religions, the printing press, the United States, the SR-71, the Ferrari 250 GTO, the Saturn 5, the internet, etc. The Hubble telescope is one of those things, and not too far from the top of the list. The Webb telescope is its successor, and a worthy one.
The Hubble orbits at an altitude of about 350 miles. The Webb will sit at the gravitationally stable Lagrange-point-number-2, a point in space about a million miles away from the Earth, opposite the sun. For scale, the moon’s altitude is only about a quarter that.
Beside being statistically impressive, being so far away from the Earth means that the Webb won’t be warmed by the Earth’s radiating heat. Keeping the Webb’s instruments as cold as possible will help it pick up the exceptionally dim infrared light—which is to say, heat radiation—of extremely distant, extremely old and extremely cold galaxies. The Webb will be sensitive to light as slight as 100 degrees K, which is -280 Fahrenheit.
In addition to its remoteness from Earth, to keep it chilled, the Webb will be equipped with a giant origami sun-shield, which will, unfolded, be roughly the size of a tennis court. The Hubble telescope is almost exactly the size of a yellow school bus; the diameter of its primary mirror is a little less than eight feet. The Webb’s mirror is 21 feet in diameter, and has seven-times the area. And its field of view will be 15 times the Hubble’s.
Because it’s so large, the Webb’s mirror—like its sun-shield—must fly into space folded up; fully spread, no rocket could carry it. To be foldable, the mirror is built from 18 hexagonal pieces. The separately maneuverable mirrors will also allow the Webb to ensure it stays perfectly in focus.
All this will meant that, as remarkable as the Hubble’s photographs are, they will be Chaucer to Webb’s Shakespeare.
It’s also worth noting that the James Webb Space Telescope is named for the right man. Mr. Webb was a Marine Corp pilot in the early 30s; in the mid 30s, he got his JD, passed the bar, and became a lawyer at a firm representing the Sperry Gyroscope Company, which made navigation equipment. Sperry was so impressed by Webb’s intelligence and canniness that it hired him away from his law firm and made him a vice president. With Webb aboard, Sperry expanded from 800 employees to 33,000, and became one of the major suppliers of airborne navigation equipment for the American military.
When the Second World War broke out, Webb reenlisted in the Marine Corps—who refused him, because Sperry was too important to the war effort, and he was too important to Sperry. Nevertheless, Webb persisted in his attempts to get back into uniform, and in 1944, he succeeded. He was given command of an Air Group in the 9th Marine Air Wing.
After the war, Webb moved into Government service, working first in the treasury and then in the budget office, where he so distinguished himself in Truman’s push to balance the post-war budget that Truman made him undersecretary of state, and told him to reorganize the messy and inefficient State Department.
At the State Department, Webb was what you might today call a neocon. He was crucial in persuading Truman in increase the defense budget and support a build-up of NATO forces; he and Dean Acheson were responsible for Truman’s aggressive response to North Korea’s invasion of the South; Webb was also key to getting the unaggressive Defense Secretary Louis Johnson replaced by a called-out-of-retirement George Marshall. And to the development of pro-democracy radio broadcasts over the Iron Curtain.
By 1952, with a lot of good work under his belt and sick of political backbiting, Webb left Washington and returned to the private sector, where he remained, until 1961, when JFK asked him become the Administrator of NASA.
It was Webb who turned NASA into the space-racing program everyone knows it as today; Webb led it into manned space flight, through Mercury and Gemini and the foundation of Apollo. A long time Democrat, he resigned in late 1968 to allow Nixon to appoint his own administrator, stepping away from the limelight just as it was about to become its lime-iest. Less than a year after he left, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon.
Without Jim Webb, there would have been no Apollo 11, no moon landing, no Apollo program, and possibly no NASA—which he protected from a rabid Walter Mondale in the wake of the Apollo 1 fire. Without Webb’s standing up to grilling after congressional grilling, Mondale cohort might have succeeded in reallocating the space budget to social programs.
James Webb is an unsung hero of American exceptionalism. If everything goes as planned, the James Webb Space Telescope will be one of the most exceptional things we’ve ever produced (even if we did produce it in partial partnership with Canada and Europe). If everything goes as planned, it will run though a final battery of tests this year and get shot into space next autumn. It’s a damned exciting time to be alive.
