The James Webb Space Telescope, fourteen years later than planned, gets a mechanical edit

The US Government Accountability Office (NASA) has been on NASA's high-risk list since 1990, because of persistent cost inflation and the fact that its programs have not been programmed.

Long before banks and General Motors intended to become "too big to fail," NASA had made it a fundamental value. There is no better example of the distance NASA fell from the group that gave us the Apollo program than the James Webb space telescope fiasco.

Proposed and funded for the first time in 1996 to succeed Hubble, they informed Congress in 2002 that 11 years – more time than it took for the Apollo program to put man on the moon – would not be enough time to send a mirror outside our atmosphere.

Then he was delayed again. And even. And again, spending billions of dollars in cost overruns that prevented funding for smaller experiments that were likely to succeed.

Credits: NASA / Chris Gunn

Northrop Grumman engineers in Redondo Beach, California, said they assembled the two halves of JWST. Everything seems to match, so at least one group did not use metrics and a standard like other NASA programs. They simply do not know if it works, there is no electricity. But at least

If JWST is actually launched in 2021 and it works, it will see light 200 to 300 million years after the Big Bang, and this at a much higher frequency than Hubble's.

Hubble is now 30 years old. It was 6 when JWST was approved. With all the money spent on JWST, we could have created one and maybe two tentative programs that match what JWST will do and the 800 million years that follow the Big Bang "sees".

By making smaller programs, JWST would have a much better chance of working in 2021.

Here it is hoped that it will work, but if it does not, the era of Big Science in America may be over in space as well as in physics. Europeans do not have their version of the GAO that tells the EU that it needs to keep an eye on ESA as their program managers will say no matter what for it. Money like America. They approach projects that have a level of confidence that they can carry out.