A High-Tension Announcement

[krpalmer]

I set my alarm for Christmas morning to get up in time to watch the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. The people in the launch control room, of course, had to get up earlier (along with the people watching from the gallery, who all piled out the exit in the last minutes of the countdown to what I understand is an outdoors observation platform). Although the weather down in French Guiana was cloudy to the point that not much of the launch could be seen live, it seemed to go well. For all of that being a Christmas present of sorts before anything got opened at home, however, I knew a lot of unfolding remained as the telescope coasted out to the sun-Earth Lagrange point. Much had been said in the long build-up to the telescope’s launch about how everything has to work right because it’s going beyond current abilities to send anyone after it. (At the same time, I was stuck being conscious of those who, intent on offering no quarter to the space shuttle whatsoever, kept insisting it would have been cheaper to keep throwing away defective Hubble-type space telescopes and building new ones so long as they were launched by proper rockets.)

One of the big steps in unfolding the new space telescope was “sunshield tensioning,” and the announcement that would be delayed to gather information on how the machine was operating did seem like the sort of moment where certain people could start to let their worries run away on them. I waited, and there were announcements the first of five sunshield layers had been tensioned. After waiting some more, the announcements declared all five layers had worked, and things could move on to moving the mirrors into place in their shadow. That means there’s still the chance of anything happening, but fewer chances than before.