James Webb Space Telescope Launch Postponed

[xattt]

Saving you a click: it’s the weather.

I’d be excited about it if it wasn’t taking this long. My friends and I were talking about this telescope in high school physics class in 2004.

The hype around the telescope is to the point of a down-on-his-luck divorced dad that consistently overpromises and underdelivers. (Remember that Sega Dreamcast I promised you when you were little for Christmas one year? Well, here it is now that you are all grown up.)

It’s an exaggeration, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

[thereddaikon]

I still don't have faith in the absurd origami sun shield they've built. I think there is a very real chance it gets to its largange point and then runs into a problem deploying. They will spend months trying to fix it and finally give up around this time next year with all of that time and money pissed away.

At this stage I think it would have been faster, cheaper and lower risk to have either developed a launcher that could have fit it inside a fairing with a more conventional and less compact shield......Or would have been acceptable to take the performance hit to either stick this thing in Earth orbit so it could be serviced.....Or have given it a less effective but much safer and more conventional chassis so it could have gone to L2 without the massive risk of failure.

EDIT: I know that those alternatives would yield suboptimal results but you have to balance capability and cost with risk. JWST is 20 years in the making and very very expensive. This thing will only have an operational life of 10 years even if everything goes to plan. So under the best case it wont have the staying power and upgradability of Hubble unless someone figures out a cost effective way to get astronauts to L2 and back.

[hidden-spyder]

Suggestion to append "to December 25" to the title.

[gaius_baltar]

I second it.

Specially because it is literally news from yesterday, already published in a better source: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/james-webb-space-telescope-laun...

Leaving the title as is may trick people into thinking it was postponed again.

[danvk]

Postponed by one day due to weather. New launch date is Christmas Day.

[baq]

don't get your hopes too high up, forecasts for the next two weeks are basically the same

[DrBazza]

That article had the most click-baity title. Here's why.

[science4sail]

At this rate I half expect the telescope's rocket to collide with Santa Claus on ascent.

[gremlinsinc]

xkcd should do a comic about that....

[rich_sasha]

At least the delays are decreasing.

Let's just hope the series converges.

[me_me_me]

Oh no, are we in Zeno's paradox, each time we halve current delay, but never reaching the launch

[gwerbret]

As usual, there's an xkcd for that: https://xkcd.com/2014

[yardshop]

This device represents so much hard work in pursuit of new technologies and new capabilities, it is absolutely worth taking an extra day or however many more to make sure things go correctly.

[Mountain_Skies]

They've gone this long, hopefully there won't be Challenger type pressure on them to launch instead of waiting until conditions are right, even if that ends up being two weeks.

[ianai]

With how long this took and it’s expected lifetime, I wish it had been something like a pipeline for building these every 5 or X years that was built.

[rotub]

Sad to see it postponed but what is another day when it has been so many years waiting! :) Will be great to see it launch when it does

[dogma1138]

How long can we delay before they’ll need to take it off the rocket for inspection?

[anotherhue]

I stopped breathing until I reached the end of that headline

[deepsun]

Never happened before, and now again!

[Out_of_Characte]

The amount of delays is comical. Ofcourse the launch day itself would be subject to a few bad weather events. Lets hope for the best.