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After years of delays, the James Webb Space Telescope may actually launch this year, having passed a final mission analysis review, we re told.
Work began on the space telescope, once called the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST), in 1996 with a planned launch date of 2007. That slipped almost immediately due to budget cuts and technological problems. An influx of funding helped get it closer on track, though the project just has this darn habit of blowing past deadlines, even to this day.
In the past year, the mission to launch the $10bn space observatory, the most advanced of its kind, has suffered multiple setbacks amid the COVID-19 pandemic. As the novel coronavirus spread around the world, work on the telescope was paused as scientists and engineers at NASA were sent home under shelter-in-place orders.
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