James Webb Telescope: A picture worth a billion dollars

The James Webb Telescope has been three decades and billions in the making. As the first pictures were published, many have said the wait and cost were totally worth it. Getting the project off the ground (pardon the pun) wasn't always a sure thing.

It's impossible to talk about Webb without talking about Hubble. The Hubble telescope was conceived as early as the 1920s, given a green light in the 1970s, and launched in 1990. It has been in orbit for 30 years, maintained and serviced by astronauts. But Hubble is humble.

Hubble orbits very close (relatively speaking) to Earth. It mostly looks at the universe around us with optical or ultraviolet light. But light of more distant objects in space can't be seen at optical or UV wavelengths. Infrared is needed.

Many talk about Webb succeeding Hubble, forgetting the Spitzer! Launched in 2003, it was built to see in infrared and similarly trail Earth just like Webb. But the design required a coolant that meant it would have a short lifespan. It exceeded expectations through 2020.

Even as NASA was building and launching Hubble and Spitzer, they were planning Webb. First discussed in the late 80s, Webb was officially proposed in 1996. Not a mere update, Webb was conceived as a distant orbit scope that would see in infrared.

While Hubble orbits about 340 miles (547 km) from Earth--just above it's atmosphere--Webb orbits 1 million miles away from Earth. And unlike Hubble. It doesn't even orbit Earth. It's set to orbit the Sun but keeps in line with the Earth, using it as a sun shield to hide behind.

A shield is important as infrared detects what is sometimes transmitted as heat. So Webb needed to weed out the Sun's heat in order to 'see' the rest of space. Only a small portion of light is visible to the naked eye. The rest must use special instruments to measure it.

Webb has four such instruments. One of them, a mirror, was damaged in a micrometeoroid shower soon after launch. It was expected Webb would encounter an event like that, but the modeling didn't anticipate it happening so soon or so often. Unlike Hubble, it can't be fixed.

Thankfully it still works or it would have been a true waste of taxpayer dollars. Like any construction, NASA projects are always over time and over budget. It was projected to be done in 2014 for $5 billion. It finally launched seven years later for double that.

But the world is grateful it launched at all. The images coming back are truly out of sight. Ethereal but crisp swirls of galaxies far away are sure to inspire a new generation of astronauts, engineers, and astrophysicists.