The Ten Billion Dollar Telescope

Astronomers have spent a fortune on the James Webb Space Telescope. Will it be worth it?

James Webb Space Telescope by Kevin Gill. Shared under CC BY 2.0.

When the idea first landed on a NASA administrator’s desk, the project was supposed to be fast and cheap. For $500 million, NASA thought, they could build a telescope to reveal the secrets of the early universe. It should have taken just eleven years to build and launch; it ended up taking twenty-five.

The James Webb Space Telescope — which now has a price tag of over $10 billion— is finally, after years of delay, ready for launch. Sometime this summer the telescope will be packed up and sent by ship to Kourou in South America. In October, if there are no more delays, an Ariane rocket will loft the telescope high into orbit.

Then, in November, the telescope will reach its final destination, a million miles from Earth. By early next year we should get the first pictures back, offering the world an unprecedented glimpse of the infra-red universe.

From the beginning, the telescope has been mooted as a replacement for the aging Hubble Space Telescope. The comparison is nice, but far from the truth. Hubble is an extremely versatile telescope, giving astronomers a wide array of instruments to survey the universe. James Webb, by contrast, is specialised, focusing on…