NASA delays James Webb Space Telescope launch by seven months
NASA recently announced that it is delaying the launch of its largest-ever space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, by seven months to address both technical issues as well as the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Agency officials said in a media teleconference that the launch of JWST is now projected for Oct. 31, 2021. The agency had previously scheduled the launch for the end of March 2021.
Greg Robinson, the program director for JWST at NASA, said that “three-plus” months of the delay is caused by the pandemic, including effects on the program to date as well as declines in efficiency in future activities because of new procedures that slow down the pace of work on the telescope at a Northrop Grumman facility in Southern California. That work briefly halted in March because of the pandemic, then continued at a slower pace for a couple months before the company was able to resume “near-full” shifts. Another two months of the delay is to add schedule reserve to the program. Robinson said that the mission, which had two months of schedule reserve remaining at the beginning of the year, now had three months to comply with agency best practices for program management. “We think we have a robust reserve,” he said. The rest of the delay is to provide additional time for remaining test activities, including acoustics and vibration testing and a deployment test of the spacecraft’s sunshield. That additional time, Robinson said, was based on “learning how to do certain activities” from earlier phases of the program.
Agency officials emphasized in the media call the valuable science that JWST will perform is worth this delay, the latest in a series of delays that pushed back the launch of the space telescope by several years. “We’re opening up an entirely new horizon of discoveries about our universe with the Webb Telescope,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said. “Our important work provides inspiration to everyone.”