NASA announced on Wednesday the third delay in nine months in the telescope’s launch date. The space agency is now aiming for March 30, 2021. This time last year, NASA officials were still hoping for a fall 2018 launch.

“I’m not happy sitting here having to share this story,” Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, told reporters on Wednesday. “We never want to do this. We always want to talk about the successes that we have.”

NASA pushed the launch date after receiving a host of recommendations from an independent review board that was convened after the previous delay—from spring 2019 to spring 2020—was announced in March. The board, chaired by Tom Young, a NASA and industry veteran, found 2020 wasn’t realistic. “When we examined [that target] and when we went through risk and threats and issues that existed ... it was our assessment that still too much optimism had been built into the schedule,” Young told reporters.

The delay means that NASA requires more federal funding to finish testing and assembling Webb. The total lifetime cost of the telescope, which includes development, launch, and five years of operation, will increase from $8.8 billion to $9.66 billion, officials said.

The bigger price tag also means that NASA has breached a cost cap imposed by lawmakers. In 2011, Congress told NASA not to exceed $8 billion in development costs. Officials said they submitted a report declaring this breach to lawmakers this week. Now, if NASA ever wants to get Webb off the ground, the mission has to be reauthorized by Congress.

Webb is perhaps the most ambitious astronomy mission in NASA history. It will be 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope. With 18 honeycomb-like, gold-plated mirrors, Webb will survey the cosmos in wavelengths the human eye can’t see. And it will be capable of observing pretty much everything, from the earliest stars, galaxies, and black holes that emerged after the Big Bang, to the planets, asteroids, and comets that formed our solar system billions of years later.

“We’re certainly annoyed that we have to wait,” said John Mather, Webb’s senior project scientist, on Wednesday. “We have already decided what to do with the first half-year of observations.” But the wait, he added, will be worth it.

Webb is also unlike anything NASA has attempted to put in space. Its space observatory—the mirrors, a sun shield, and some boxy hardware housing all the systems to make it run—will launch folded up. As it settles into an orbit nearly 1 million miles from Earth, the observatory will slowly unfurl, piece by piece. The automated sequence involves about 180 steps, and Webb can only withstand about six glitches. Anything worse, and Webb will be dead on arrival, condemned to a lifetime as space junk. Unlike Hubble, Webb was not designed to be reachable or repairable by astronauts.

While mistakes were likely expected, some of them contributed to schedule and cost overruns. These were human errors, and they were avoidable, according to Young’s review. They occurred at Northrop Grumman’s facility in Los Angeles, where the contractor is building Webb’s sun shield, a tennis-court-sized stack of layers that will protect the hardware from the sun, as well as the spacecraft “bus,” which will house the observatory’s communication, propulsion, electrical, and other important systems. (The mirrors and science instruments were completed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and flown to California in February.)

Young said Wednesday that at one point the wrong solvent was used to clean the observatory’s propulsion valves. The substance turned out to be incompatible with the valves, which workers would have known if they’d called the solvent’s vendor to check, Young said. “This is a mistake that really should not have happened,” he said.

A wiring error caused workers to apply too much voltage to the spacecraft’s pressure transducers, severely damaging them. And during an acoustics test, which examines whether hardware can survive the loud sounds of launch, the fasteners designed to hold the sun shield together came loose. The incident scattered 70 bolts, and engineers scrambled to find them. They’re still looking for a few. “We’re really close to finding every one of the pieces,” Zerbuchen said.

These three errors alone resulted in a schedule delay of about 1.5 years and $600 million, Young said.


Here is a nice video of the JWST, compares it to how powerful it is to the other space telescopes out there already...

http://youtu.be/ah6KrqABzmk