(dramatic music)
Humans have been looking at the stars
since the start of mankind.
For me and I think for an awful lot of people,
we wanted to know where did we come from?
(dramatic music)
When humanity invents a new way of seeing,
we see things we never imagined.
(dramatic music)
The invention of the microscope
revealed the realm of the very small.
The invention of the telescope revealed the realm
of the very large.
(dramatic music) Lift off.
But now, the new James Webb Space Telescope
could reveal the origins of everything there ever was.
It's going to stare 13.5 billion years back in time.
This is going to see things that we couldn't imagine.
Pushing the limits of technology,
this revolutionary telescope could change what we know
about the universe forever.
But building it was fraught with technical
and financial difficulties.
When you're talking extremes like we are,
everything is a challenge.
Politics always plays a role.
Incompetence and mismanagement.
The program was on the rocks.
On a scale such as we are talking about today.
And the committee said, nah, let's kill it.
It's not a favor to the taxpayer.
People were talking about, well,
do we even want to do this thing or not?
It's not a favor to the American space program.
It was very stressful being part of a crisis like this.
But we learn, we move ahead and ultimately, we succeed.
This is the story
of the James Webb Space Telescope,
told by those who built it.
We're going to see this to the end
because we have a duty to do so.
We started on a path of a decade long of invention.
We had to invent a lot of new technologies.
Technologies that have never been done before.
You have no choice but to get it right.
There were those that argued that it couldn't be done.
But we've done it.
We'll enable humankind to unlock the mysteries
of the early universe.
This is a milestone for mankind.
(moody music)
(dramatic music)
For millennia we have looked at the stars
and wondered how big is the universe
and where did it come from?
What is our place in it and are we alone?
The answers would remain a mystery
to almost everyone who ever lived.
Then, less than 500 years ago,
the invention of a simple device began to open our eyes
to the extraordinary reality that surrounds us.
(dramatic music)
Galileo in 1610 sees moons orbiting Jupiter.
He sees mountains and craters on the moon.
It's a tectonic event in human understanding.
Just this little crappy little telescope changed so much.
(dramatic music)
And then the 1920s, when Hubble comes along,
makes observations that say, whoa.
The Milky Way galaxy is not the universe.
(dramatic music)
It's one little island in a vast sea of galaxies.
The universe is huge and it's expanding.
Edwin Hubble's discovery
that the universe is expanding, had enormous implications.
If things are expanding, let's put it in reverse.
(dramatic music)
Holy cow!
These things all come to a point.
(eerie music)
The start of our universe and the start of time.
That was the first time in history
that people had scientific proof that time had a beginning.
(eerie sounds)
Looking at very distant objects,
we see them as they were in the past
because their light takes time to reach us.
If a telescope like the James Webb telescope
could see the very farthest objects,
then we could see how the first stars and galaxies formed.
Telescopes are amazing time machines
because they can let us see into the past.
But for most of the last century,
we still had little idea of the early universe
or how it evolved.
(soft soothing music)
We had a period where we started to make real advances.
We built a telescope technically better.
We made them bigger.
Put them higher.
We could see more, we could learn more,
but we were still bound by limitations on our planet,
Space is the place to be.
And lift off of the space shuttle Discovery,
with the Hubble Space Telescope on window on the universe.
(dramatic music)
Discovery is then, performance is nominal.
With the launch of the $1.5 billion
Hubble Space Telescope in 1990,
hopes were high that this instrument
would be able to see farther and therefore,
further back in time than ever before.
The Hubble Space Telescope was going to be a game changer.
At the time Hubble flew, we barely knew galaxies
even half the age of the universe.
Standing by for a separation.
The very early times were just unknown to us.
(people clapping) (moving music)
This is what we really get excited about.
We're going to discover, we're going to explore.
We're setting out across the ocean to find something new.
(dramatic music)
Trying to boot, we're go, go.
Eagle. Go.
We're going to look at things we've never seen before.
Peter S. -: Go flight.
EVA. -: We're go.
Discovery Houston.
You have a go to open the doors.
Roger Houston.
But Hubble would prove just how difficult
building large scale space telescopes can be.
It would come to haunt the men and women
who were tasked with building its successor, the James Webb.
(dramatic music)
And we see first motion, looks good.
(dramatic music)
Good clearance, still looks good.
The excitement has been slowly building up.
(dramatic music)
(people clapping)
Discovery Houston,
congratulations on a super mission.
And the world is looking forward
to reaping the benefits of your good work.
Okay, thank you Steve.
But 25 days later, dreams would be dashed.
(somber music)
Then we got that first image from Hubble.
We've gotten the image down here, Lauren.
We knew that Hubble had a truly serious problem.
(somber music)
It was discovered that there was something
really wrong with the optical prescription.
(somber music)
The data was was blurred.
Cable news network, I don't know exactly who to ask.
As far as you know, what happened?
(somber music)
Okay, the bottom line is
we have a major problem with the hammer.
There was a mistake or an error made somewhere,
that resulted then,
in the mirror being made to the wrong figure.
It turns out the mirror was ground
to exactly the wrong shape.
We feel right now,
that there's probably no real science
that we can do with the wide field camera
and I'll stop there.
(somber music)
Young lady first and then we'll come to you, okay.
I'm Mary Wolf with NBC,
some people will say that not all the testing
was done on the ground.
Yes?
If this wouldn't have happened,
had the test been done on the ground ,
with possibly some of the problems wouldn't have occurred.
Is there a reaction to that?
Well, we did not
test the two mirrors in combination.
To test the total telescope,
is an extremely costly process.
We would have to do something dramatic to recover Hubble.
But even as teams struggled
with Hubble's troubles,
some were already thinking about a successor.
(moody music)
In 1989, even before Hubble was launched,
astronomers were already thinking
about what would come next.
They said that you guys really need to start thinking
about the next mission.
Our reaction was,
you really want us thinking about something else?
And they said, you should.
So we said yes, sir.
We'll do it.
And so we went off thinking about
what would one really like to do after Hubble?
The James Webb Telescope
started off being called the NGST,
for next generation space telescope.
(moody electronic music)
For the next space telescope
we thought we could go bigger.
We thought we could go further, we go deeper, we do more.
But we just wouldn't know
until we recover the results from Hubble.
So work pretty much stopped at that point.
Chimp and the Los Angeles Times.
NASA had to focus on Hubble.
But I think the point I want to make
is that NASA prides itself in responding to challenges
and overcoming the challenges.
I was the telescope scientist on Hubble.
It was a great responsibility that we have to now figure out
how to make this telescope work.
The first solution was to suggest
replacing the camera with one that had optics
to correct the fault, but a different solution was needed
for the other science instruments.
Put it in a box that had little arms
that extended up and put an optics in the light path
that would correct the other instruments.
It had to be precisely located, perfectly spaced.
Lift off of the space shuttle Endeavor
on an ambitious mission to the Hubble space telescope.
To have that done in space is amazingly hard.
It is a gamble.
Hello Houston.
We are ready, let's go fix this thing.
Because you're dealing with something that it has to work.
Houston Endeavor.
Why don't you go ahead and open the doors,
yes, please.
Just do it nice and easy
It would have been very much harder
to move forward on JWST if Hubble could not be fixed.
Okay, let's watch what happens now.
I think everybody would have been well,
that was a failed experiment.
Okay, I'll push it out to you.
So, there was a awful lot riding on that.
Looks like it's in there.
Well, I think we better use this beautiful thing.
Looking forward to seeing the pictures.
(majestic music)
(cheering)
Right there! -: Oh!
Hallelujah, this is a magnificent.
This is what we've been waiting for.
(dramatic music)
The images Hubble sent back
enthralled the world
and provided us with a staggering look
at how the universe itself was farmed.
(ethereal music)
After the Big Bang the universe grew,
but there were no stars in it
for probably a hundred million years.
It was just gas,
cold gas.
The gas might start to condense a little bit
and we start to form a star in the middle of it.
(ethereal music)
And the stars then burst forth out of the gas and dust.
(dramatic music)
And the light now make these wonderful nebulae.
We see all these wonderful colors
that come out of this hot gas.
(dramatic music)
Hydrogen is nice red.
Oxygen, the green and blue.
What we're really seeing is the birth of stars.
This is really fundamental stuff.
(dramatic music)
And the stars themselves, as a form,
just to eventually build up these galaxies.
Those images are amazing.
That basically, I think sealed it.
Now, people were willing to think about
what they would do for the future.
(spacey music)
The space telescope brings completely new knowledge.
With telescope, size matters.
The 92 inch telescope mirror
has been finally buffed and polished.
Hubble, even though its mirror was state-of-the-art
for the time, it's 2.4 meters in diameter,
but that's pretty modest by ground-based standards.
It limits what the telescope can do.
With the space telescope,
will be able to look much further back into time.
I wanted to go back and look to the very beginnings
of the universe, when you start seeing the first galaxies
and stars being formed.
The space telescope will find many new things.
We'll find exciting things.
Hubble can't quite get there.
(lively music)
The dream of seeing back to the formation
of the universe came a step closer in 1996.
I'm proud to announce
the next generation of space telescope.
Named after the Apollo-era NASA administrator,
the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST for short,
demanded an astronomical leap in technology.
(lively music)
JWST is gonna look at things we've never seen before.
We hope to be able to figure out
how we got here in the universe.
Imagine that; that is mind blowing.
Committee have said, we need to see all the way back
as far as we can,
to see those first galaxies being born.
The big question first though, was how do we do that?
(somber music)
It was obvious we needed 10 inventions
and we didn't have them.
But meanwhile, Hubble was still taking spectacular images.
We have one image,
which we have taken 2 million seconds worth of exposures.
(dramatic music)
Thousands of galaxies, as they would look
8 billion years or so ago.
We look at the colors.
We can actually tell how far away from us it is.
You really are going back in time.
(somber music)
9 billion years.
Back a little more than 10 billion years,
11 billion years.
That is absolutely amazing, that we as human beings,
looking back through 97% of all time.
And then finally, we go back to 13.3 billion years ago.
We have found this one galaxy just 400 million years
after the Big Bang.
(somber music)
But one galaxy does not a story make.
(laughs)
No, there's still more to see.
You know, the age of the world
is still a little further away.
We've got to keep going on the ship.
(uplifting music)
There's a simple reason why Hubble
can't see the earliest galaxies.
They're invisible.
Space has been expanding
since the beginning of the universe and so,
light gets stretched out.
And so this light that was emitted
over 13.5 billion years ago,
finally arrives here as infrared light.
Infrared light is heat radiation.
It comes out of objects like us.
We're all giving out heat,
but if we turn all the lights off,
you wouldn't see us in the visible,
but you would see it in the infrared.
But harnessing infrared light
has been challenging astronomers for decades.
You're trying to use an infrared telescope
from the ground, you're extremely limited.
You take an infrared camera and you put it
in an empty glass, it sees right through it.
Put water in that glass and you won't see anything.
Water absorbs infrared light
and our atmosphere is full of water.
So, you know, if you want to do really, you know,
intensive infrared astronomy, you want to be in space.
And this is exactly
what the JWST team planned to do,
put the largest infrared telescope ever built into space.
The instruction book said, build us an infrared telescope.
That means it has to be cold.
(low eerie music)
Because this is an infrared observatory,
we're very sensitive to tiny amounts of heat.
We're sensitive to like,
the resting energy of a body of a flea.
(eerie music)
We very immediately recognized
that telescope close to Earth will be warm.
The Earth is so big and so close,
that it's shining heat radiation in all the time.
So the logical end point of this
is to put a telescope a long way away from the Earth,
in what we call the Lagrange Points.
Known as L2,
it's far away from the heat of Earth
and has an orbit that would keep JWST
pointing out into deep space.
But at L2, JWST is in the direct line of fire
of an even bigger source of heat.
The sun is always hitting.
(eerie sounds)
It gets to plus 200 degrees Fahrenheit,
which is very close to the boiling point of water.
To try to cool the telescope down in proximity to the sun,
that's like trying to keep a beer cold
next to a blast furnace.
We had to invent something that would keep it really cold
and basically, we do it by never let it see the sun.
We can see every star in the universe
and there's only one star we'll never look at, ours.
We won't look at our sun because if we do we'll melt.
(dramatic music)
So we have developed a deployable sunshield technology
that's never been done in space before.
Five layers of precisely engineered,
thermal insulating materials
create this incredible component.
Between each layer is a vacuum of empty space.
The space can not conduct heat
and the sun's rays are bounced away from the layers
until almost none of it remains.
But it's not just the sunshield that's taking technologies
to new heights on this telescope.
The mirror is another game changer.
(soft eerie music)
Hubble has a single piece of 2.4 meter glass as a lens,
and it sits in a can and then goes into its orbit
and does its mission.
Now, imagine you're the generation of engineers
that gets told, "not good enough".
I can't handle just one, 2.4 meter diameter piece of glass.
I want a six and a half meter optic.
(spacey music)
But as an engineer, you know that the top of the rocket's
only five meters wide.
So, they basically told you build something bigger
than what you can fit in a rocket.
And then we say, okay, that's really hard.
So, we put out the call and engineers around the country
said, well, I can do you that.
And we said, okay, prove it to me.
And most of them couldn't, but nevertheless,
we got one design that could.
Hexagonal in shape,
made up of 18 different segments,
the mirror is almost 15 times bigger
than Hubble's and it's designed to fold.
We build a telescope on the ground.
We align it, we test it.
We say we got a telescope that works.
And then we bust it apart.
(dramatic music)
We bust it apart, we fold it up
and we have to actually rebuild it,
maybe a half a million miles from the Earth,
robotically in space.
(dramatic music)
That is a challenge.
With that, we started on a path
of a decade long of invention.
So that really was the start of the mission,
but that also was the start of its problems.
And the reason was they said
it was going to cost a billion dollars.
Nobody believed it was going to cost a billion dollars.
But we all wanted to go forward and people did.
And we say, okay, we'll try,
we'll do our best and see how it comes out.
It's been three years since JWST was announced.
Budgeted at a billion dollars,
the build was due to have started.
We had a very eager and demanding boss, Dan Golden,
and he was really hopeful that we could do this quicker
if we would really try,
but it's easier to command something
than to achieve it.
(somber music)
It didn't take long before people realize
a billion dollars is not going to be enough.
It was just too little money for a project of this scale.
We were discovering that this is harder and that is harder
and this takes longer and that takes longer.
(dramatic music)
Things weren't going as smoothly as one would like.
(dramatic music)
This was a challenge to our engineers,
to think of how they could produce the technology
that the scientists needed.
(dramatic music)
For years, things were done to keep the project moving,
but it, you know, had many problems.
(dramatic music)
In 2003, at nearly five times
the original budget and nearly five years behind schedule,
the team has not finalized designs.
(slow music)
But by 2004, the design process is finally finished
and the build begins.
Thousands of components begin manufacture,
from the largest scientific instruments,
down to the smallest of screws.
(fervent music)
JWST will be equipped with four main science instruments
that will be able to image the universe in stereo
throughout the entire light spectrum
at resolutions never seen before in a space telescope.
The spacecraft will be protected
by the enormous tennis court-sized sunshield.
This alone will take six years to manufacture.
But the biggest engineering feat for JWST
is going to be the centerpiece, the mirrors.
One of the hardest things engineers have had to do
on Webb is with the mirrors.
(fervent music)
The mirror is made out of beryllium
and beryllium is one of those early elements that, you know,
on a periodic table, that is really strong and stable
at cryogenic temperatures,
but beryllium doesn't reflect infrared light that well.
So, we coat the mirror in gold
'cause gold reflects infrared and it looks gorgeous, right,
but we didn't build it to look gorgeous.
It's actually functional.
Even before it gets to space,
the mirror is well-traveled.
It's this epic journey from digging beryllium powder
out of a mine in Utah,
coarse machining it in Ohio and an Alabama,
coating it in gold in New Jersey,
then to polishing it here in California,
to putting it in a thermal chamber in Alabama.
These mirrors got a lot of frequent flyer miles.
It took eight years just to make the mirrors on Webb.
(low dramatic music)
The perfection of our surface is so accurate,
it's like only 15 nanometers of error.
What's a nanometer, right?
You know, a nanometer, it's the size of a bacteria.
That's so precise that I could find the heat signature
of a bumblebee on the moon
if I was using this telescope from Earth.
Which means in our case, we can find a star
that a photon came off 13.5 billion years ago.
(soft slow instrumental music)
Just incredible.
When the mirrors were done,
it was a wonderful accomplishment,
but then they weren't just done.
They were done as 18 individual mirrors, right?
Then we had to put the optics together in an assembly.
That would be another three, four years.
(upbeat music)
It's like building a Swiss watch,
where you're putting all the little pieces together
that have to work so precisely,
and we're doing it on a scale of something
that's 80 feet long by 40 feet wide by 40 feet high.
(low dramatic music)
The sun shield has been
a tremendous engineering challenge.
The sun shield is made up a five layers
of a material called Kapton.
Each of those layers is a little bit less
than the thickness of a human hair.
They're very fragile.
If you walk underneath them,
just the movement of the air from your body
will cause them to move.
We need to move methodically,
move deliberately and take the time we need to do it.
You run the risk of failure.
There's always a risk.
Take a look at what happened with Hubble.
(dramatic music)
We had all these new technologies coming up
and we learned as we went along how much this would cost.
Seven years into the build,
and the challenges for the team were mounting.
(low dramatic music)
We knew we weren't going to meet our launch date
and we're going to cost more.
It is expensive.
Webb realized that it was going to take
significantly longer to complete the mission.
The launch date had been slipping
and Congress had been noticing that.
So they're going,
we have to send more and more money to this project.
(dramatic music)
Certainly, it looks foolish to keep asking
for more money all the time.
Space may be a vacuum, but it doesn't take place in one.
By which I mean, politics always plays a role.
It was impossible.
The James Webb Space Telescope is another case study
of NASA's mismanagement of a flagship mission,
where original cost and scheduled estimates
are grossly understated.
One of the committees said, ah, let's kill it.
The project execution is a litany of missed signals
and deferred work.
Whoa, that just came out of the blue.
Incompetence and mismanagement on a scale
such as we are talking about today.
There was not enough money to do what needed to be done
when it needed to be done.
It's not a favor to the taxpayer
and it's not a favor.
It's just killed.
To the American space program.
So that was really a rough time.
We're not just talking about balancing the budget here.
We're talking about having a viable space program
for the United States of America.
I don't think that we can just have three priorities.
The program was on the rocks.
We at NASA, recognize that we made
your already difficult task of funding important programs
in these distressed fiscal times,
even more difficult through our poor,
past performance on JWST.
Folks were sort of unhappy depressed about, you know,
the fact that this has happened.
Angry that it happened as well.
All those emotions played a role.
I've learned not to take it personally.
You always have a different perspective about something
when you're an insider compared to an outsider
and I can understand why people were upset,
especially in the political arena,
where that's a whole different objective than like,
actually fixing a problem with, oh NASA's got this program
that it turned out it's harder and it's going to take longer
and be more expensive than anybody
wanted.
We're going to have to defund
all of that great STEM program
and all of this education because of the $7 billion overrun
that we're talking about today.
Honestly, it didn't hurt my feelings that much,
that people were saying that we were lousy at our jobs
or something, 'cause I knew we weren't.
I'm ignoring the fact that this cost overrun
may cost us that program.
(soft dark music)
The scientific investment in this mission is decades long.
It's been a part of almost all of my career.
I'd been on this project a long time.
I started in April of 1997.
(somber music)
I actually got involved in it in 1995.
I actually started working on James Webb 32 years ago.
You know, I have 24 years.
I know people that have 27.
We're going to see this to the end
because we have a duty to do so.
We all know of Hubble and the amazing things
that it has done.
You immediately go into fighting mode.
Launching James Webb will demonstrate again,
our leadership in science and technology.
That was the important thing, not to give up.
People get involved now,
in a way that they never did before.
There was this groundswell of support.
This is becoming crucial to have these results out there.
School children were writing in saying, ah,
we want JWST, this is going to be,
you know, an amazing mission.
And here they were being told that it may just die.
Orange honeycomb shooting through outer space.
This telescope is really important.
It gives us our origins
and it tells us something about where we came from.
You are a carbon based life form.
You breathe oxygen.
You use the materials and the minerals
that are on our planet to survive.
(dramatic music)
None of that existed until a star formed.
We only had elements one and two
and that fusion reactor fused the way
hydrogen and helium as a fuel
and it built up a periodic table,
all the way up to like iron.
And then those stars exploded
and they created golds and platinums and all these elements.
We're going to see how that happened.
(dramatic music)
So why would we stop that?
(baby cries)
We're the generation that has taken a leap frog step.
So I'm proud of that, right, and that sets us up right,
for generations to come.
(slow piano music)
School children across the world
wrote to Congress,
urging them to continue with JWST
and late 2011,
Congress agrees to continue funding the mission.
That coming together of public support
played a huge role in getting Congress to change its mind.
Additional money was granted to JWST,
bringing its budget to $8 billion.
The launch was scheduled for 2018.
The draw of the science was so strong,
so compelling, that people realize it's worth it.
Having had that experiences was good.
Let's just get to work.
(dramatic music)
Yeah, what's so technically challenging about Webb?
There's a whole bunch of things that individually,
are very hard.
JWST has 155 motors.
We have 1,300 feet of cabling,
1,600 cables,
1,600 electrical connectors,
26 miles of wire harnessing.
All this has to be tested.
It's really important that we prove it's gonna work.
(dramatic music)
Humankind has never been further than 250,000 miles
off of our planet.
The backside of the moon,
the furthest a human has ever left Earth.
We're going four times further than that.
It's going a million miles away, right?
So, nobody's going out there to fix it.
There's no Hubble repairmen, right?
(dramatic music)
So, you have no choice, but to get it right.
There's many a slip between the cup and the lip.
(dramatic music)
For the first time ever,
the 18 individual segments are assembled together
to hopefully, make one huge optically perfect mirror.
(dramatic music)
It went through vibration testing
to simulate the vibration that it sees in the rocket.
(dramatic music)
This is the most violent part of the ride,
is that ride in the rocket.
(dramatic music)
All testing is stressful.
When the mirror is shaken and vibrated,
will something breaks when this happens?
So, it's a very stressful moment.
(dramatic music)
When it went through its acoustics test,
when they finished up, they did find
some loose nuts and screws
laying on the floor below it.
(somber music)
Let's take a pause and let's figure out what's wrong.
We traced it back to basically, a human error.
(somber music)
People are going to make mistakes
and you have to try to catch all those mistakes
and occasionally, something will slip through.
The dangers of human error
with thrown into sharp relief in November, 2020.
An entirely different mission took off from French Guyana,
carrying two Earth imaging satellites.
(somber music)
Eight minutes into its flight,
the upper stage began to veer out of control
and the mission was declared a failure.
(somber music)
The cause was traced to cables plugged into the wrong ports,
human error.
(somber music)
But it's just, it's a lessons learned that,
you know, when you have something as complex as this,
it's not just the hard things,
but you have to pay attention to every,
the most simple thing that you would think
is we do every single day.
You don't want to mess those things up.
No, we made sure that the external pressure
that was on the project did not affect the engineers.
(suspenseful electronic music)
By 2018, the individual parts of the telescope
have all been completed.
But spread across the United States,
they have to be packed up to be assembled in California,
(dramatic music)
a nerve wracking process for the delicate mirror.
(suspenseful music)
For the very first time,
the James Webb Space Telescope is assembled as one unit.
When the mirrors were assembled
and then the instruments attached,
that was an absolute crucial step.
Three,
two,
one.
We've been doing launch simulations.
So, we pretend we actually launched.
Lift off.
(rumbling)
Lift off, 30 minutes top of the hour.
We're launching into space.
This is risky.
(rumbling)
After we launch,
our solar array comes out
so we can get solar power to our batteries.
(slow somber music)
Several hours later,
our antenna comes out that we communicate to the Earth with.
From there, we have a complicated
and very choreographed dance of deployment.
We deploy the tower.
(slow music)
That's when it gets really exciting.
We deploy the sun shield.
(inspiring instrumental music)
Pallets fold down.
We have about 107 release mechanisms
that release the sun shield.
(inspiring instrumental music)
Get pulled out, arms push out the sun shield.
(inspiring instrumental music)
Then they get tension, just like you would tension
up a sail on a sailboat.
(inspiring instrumental music)
Now, the passive cooling
that's really going to start dropping the temperature.
The sun is hitting at +200 degrees Fahrenheit
and on the other side of this five layer umbrella,
it gets to -388.
We create a 600 degree Fahrenheit differential,
which would be like putting sunscreen on at 1.2 million SPF.
(inspiring instrumental music)
Then we start deploying the optics.
(inspiring instrumental music)
There are two wings with three mirror segments
on each side.
They have to fold in and click into place.
(inspiring instrumental music)
That, of course, is a crucial step.
At that point, secondary mirror has to pop out.
So it's that point where we have a complete telescope.
(inspiring instrumental music)
All the mirror segments, 18 of them.
are released and we can now begin to move them around,
come into focus.
(inspiring instrumental music)
James Webb is so powerful that sure,
few hours is going to be better
than the whole 2 million seconds
we put together with Hubble.
This is such a game changer.
(inspiring instrumental music)
This is going to see things that we couldn't imagine.
(inspiring instrumental music)
Once we get that deployed,
a very exciting moment,
(inspiring instrumental music)
'cause that will be really seeing the fruits
of all your efforts
(inspiring instrumental music)
and seeing those first images,
(inspiring instrumental music)
we will then take a sigh of relief and say we did it.
(dramatic music)
After all these years, we got it to work.
(dramatic music)
We've made an astonishing machine
that was a fantasy 23 years ago.
We're going to be able to rewrite our science books
with the knowledge that we're going to get from James Webb.
(dramatic music)
It has the ability to create a global understanding
of who we are and where we are in a universe.
Webb, in my opinion, is a technological wonder.
It is a testimony to the ingenuity
and creativity of the human mind.
(inspiring instrumental music)
We'll just demonstrate that if you put your mind to it
and you stick the course,
you can achieve astonishing things.
In late 2021,
the completed telescope is packed up for the last time
and starts his million mile journey to space,
with a long earthbound trip from California
to the launch pad in French Guyana.
All being well, it will launch into space
and began its voyage of discovery.
Our future generations will be able to say,
look at what those people did way back then
and how they worked out this amazing story
about the beginning of everything.
I think that's my job that I'm proud to do.
(inspiring instrumental music)