Telescope launch fitting end to 2021
The launch of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope on Christmas Day was a fitting end to 2021 — and would be to any year, really, as the turn of the annum has always been ripe for reflection. The technological marvel now rocketing toward deep space can gaze billions of years back in time upon the earliest stars and galaxies. For 2021, the capstone seems especially apt.
The instrument that lifted off from French Guiana is almost comically elaborate. Among its features: 18 gold-plated mirrors and a sun shield the size of a tennis court. These attributes will allow it to vastly outmatch in power and sensitivity the spectacularly successful Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990. Scientists hope the Webb telescope can help unfurl cosmic mysteries, such as the formation of supermassive black holes, as well as detect the infrared signatures of oxygen, water and, correspondingly, life. Only such lofty ambitions could justify the effort and resources that reaching this point required.
Mission managers estimated that the Webb would cost $3.5 billion at a maximum for a 2010 launch; instead, it cost about $10 billion and just barely made it into the sky before 2022. A last-minute, four-day delay after a mechanical mishap (not to mention a subsequent one-day weather delay) was only a nuisance compared with a quarter-century of underestimated costs, overly optimistic schedules and glitches that plagued its development. Still, not only did engineers persist with their project but Congress stuck with them, too, appropriating the funds necessary for a moonshot and then some. Now we may finally learn just how we ended up here, in 2022, nearly 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang.
As the calendar turns from 2021, we look back on what was a year of ambition, much of it unrealized, and we had more than our share of mishaps. Many trusted the year would herald a way out of the coronavirus pandemic — but the crisis isn’t quite over, with new variants and disappointing vaccination rates further delaying a return to normal life. President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda remains mired in legislative bickering, putting essential investments in the country’s future on hold. The dreams of racial justice, or of depolarization, or even of restored belief in a single, shared reality, have been deferred.
The year, in short, was disappointing. Yet there was progress, too — from guilty verdicts for killers of unarmed Black men, to a bipartisan infrastructure bill, to a few brave Republicans speaking out against the “big lie” of a stolen election. These glimmers of promise ought to remind those yearning for a better future that the destination is worth all the slogging and stumbling it will take to get there. The Webb Space Telescope has only just begun a 29day journey to its orbit around the sun, with more than 344 possible single-points of failure. 2022 probably won’t be easy, either. But at least we’ve gotten off the ground.