Hey Crazies.
The James Webb Space Telescope, also known as JWST or “Webb” for short, has been giving us incredible images for a little over a year now.
We've seen some of the first galaxies to ever form,
and we've gotten to look at our local space in an entirely new light.
Pun intended.
But between ballooning budgets, a decade and a half of launch delays and a controversy over the name,
getting this thing into space was kind of a nightmare.
[Intro Music]
You may have heard the JWST was meant as a replacement for Hubble, but that's only partially true.
To the timeline!
Hubble was launched in 1990 and the Space Telescope Science Institute, or STScI, was already discussing the next mission seven months earlier in September of 1989.
At the time, it was called the Next Generation Space Telescope or NGST.
We'll get to the whole naming drama a little later.
It was a whole thing.
Anyway, this 1989 meeting was basically just a brainstorming session,
which means they lived by rule number four: Go big or go home.
They imagined a space telescope that had a ten meter wide primary mirror with sensors for all visible, infrared, and ultraviolet wavelengths.
This was way too ambitious and those plans did not last long.
By 1993, the ten meter mirror had already been downgraded to an eight meter one,
which is actually a meter and a half larger than it ended up being.
And, by 1997, NASA had also decided to scale back the sensor range.
That's when it became clear this next generation telescope would not be a Hubble replacement.
Hubble could see slightly into the infrared, but its main focus was visible and ultraviolet light.
The plan for this new telescope was to focus entirely on infrared.
Plus, it was set to launch well before we retired Hubble.
By 1999, NASA had some thorough designs and an estimated timeline.
Launch would happen in 2007 with a total cost of $1 billion (US).
*Laughs* Yeah, neither of those happened.
The cost quickly ballooned.
A year later, the budget had almost doubled.
By 2005, the cost had more than tripled.
By 2008, a year after the original launch estimate, it had quintupled.
By 2011, it had risen to $8 billion (US) and it was nowhere near launching.
This is when US Congress temporary canceled the project.
I thought NASA was part of the executive branch.
Sure, NASA might be run by the executive branch, but Congress controls the budget.
Politics are a recurring theme in this video. Settle in.
Later in 2011, NASA managed to change Congress's mind on the project
by agreeing to limit the total budget to $8 billion (US).
No more ballooning.
Just for some perspective, that's billion with a B, as in a thousand million.
Yeah, the budget cap was eight of those.
Spoiler Alert: They did not keep their promise.
By the time it finally launched in December of 2021,
14 years after the original estimate,
JWST's total cost was about $10 billion (US).
It's not like that was spent all at once though.
That's true. The cost was spread over a couple of decades.
Even at peak spending in the mid 20 teens,
JWST never accounted for more than 4% of NASA's annual budget,
which itself was always less than 1% of overall government spending at the time.
So, while $10 billion (US) seems like a lot to an average person like us, it's not really that much to a government, especially if it's spread out.
But the fact that this project was spread out also made it cost more.
As John Morse would say, the cheapest JWST is the one that launches the soonest.
Nature wasn't exactly on our side, though.
We almost lost the telescope to a hurricane in 2017.
Then a few years later, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and production stalled.
We also had to be absolutely sure this thing was going to work.
When we launched Hubble back in 1990, the first pictures were blurrier than expected.
Luckily, we designed Hubble to be serviceable and launched a repair mission in 1993.
We basically gave it glasses.
Couldn't we also do that with JWST?
Unfortunately, no.
This telescope had to be much farther away.
It's supposed to be sensitive to infrared, but that's the kind of light warm things emit.
If we put the telescope in orbit around Earth, it would be passing in and out of Earth's shadow.
The temperature of the telescope itself would change and the sensors would pick that up.
It would essentially make it blind.
We needed this telescope to be thermally stable and as cold as possible.
So, early on the plan was to launch JWST out to L2,
one of Earth's Lagrange points.
This would keep it out of Earth's shadow and oriented away from the Sun at all times.
All the way out here, JWST would be impossible to service.
It had to work perfectly at launch, or we just wasted billions of dollars and decades of work.
So, most of the delays were justified paranoia.
But then the name of the telescope became an issue.
NASA had renamed the telescope all the way back in 2002.
It was christened the James Webb Space Telescope, in honor of James Webb, who served as the NASA administrator from 1961 to 1968.
Those were the days of the space race,
the era of Projects Mercury and Gemini.
We're talking the first humans in space.
The sixties were a big deal for NASA.
Seemed like an easy sell, but then an inflammatory quote surfaced in 2015.
I'm not going to read it aloud because I can't stomach it. It's terribly homophobic.
But feel free to pause and read if you want.
That's probably not even a real quote.
Fair. Just because you read a quote on the internet, that doesn't make it true. But NASA had to investigate it nonetheless.
You can't go naming your new revolutionary telescope after a homophobe, now can you?
So NASA was faced with two questions.
Did anyone actually say it? And was it James Webb?
NASA thoroughly investigated both questions and released a 90 page report with sources.
Link in the doobly-do if you're interested.
The conclusion of that investigation is that the quote is real, but James Webb didn't say it.
Here's what happened.
This whole thing blew up when Forbes ran a story on it in the summer of 2015.
But the earliest story seems to be from earlier that year in the Stranger, a local paper in Seattle.
Who, in turn, based their story on a quote from Wikipedia.
Yes, that Wikipedia.
Now, just because a quote is on Wikipedia, that doesn't make it wrong, but you should always fact check it.
Come with me down the rabbit hole.
Wikipedia attributed this quote to James Webb and added it to his biography page in 2011.
The source listed for it was a book titled Toward Stonewall, published in 2003.
But the author only says that an under secretary of state testified at a Senate hearing.
And that the quote is from the Senate committee's report, not the under secretary himself.
Though it does say this unnamed under secretary had already fired many State Department employees simply for being homosexual.
That hearing took place in February of 1950 and, at that time, James Webb was the under secretary of state.
Well, there you have it. Time to get angry!
No, no. Sweet summer child.
Allow my friend Mr. Beat to enlighten you on the rankings inside the State Department.
Thanks, Nick.
So the president doesn't have to govern the United States alone.
He gets lots of help and not just from the vice president.
In fact, there is a huge team working with them.
It's commonly referred to as the cabinet.
Today, the cabinet officially includes the heads of 15 executive departments.
No, not just their heads, their whole body.
This isn't a Futurama episode, you know what I mean?
Like heads, like they're in charge of 15 executive departments.
Anyway, they preside over millions of employees and hundreds of billions of dollars.
One of those executive departments, probably, arguably the most important one, is the State Department.
The person in charge of the State Department is the secretary of state, who is currently this dude: Antony Blinken.
Now, under the secretary of state is the deputy secretary of state.
And, just to make this more confusing for you,
underneath the deputy secretary of state
are the under secretaries of state.
And under the under secretaries of state
are the assistant secretaries of state.
I could go into more detail about all of this for the next
15 hours or so.
How does that sound, Nick?
No, no, that's plenty deep enough. Thanks, Matt.
Are you sure?
I've got nothing better to do.
Dude. Go outside and touch some grass or something. Okay?
But I don't have any grass.
Anyway, James Webb held this job.
It's now called the deputy secretary,
but in his day it was called the under secretary.
The titles changed in 1972, I'm guessing to be less confusing.
You can kind of think of him as the second in command.
He was to the secretary of state, what the vice president is to the president.
He was like a backup secretary of state.
So, you remember that Senate hearing back in February of 1950?
Yeah, James Webb wasn't even there.
The secretary of state, Dean Acheson, was there
and so was John Peurifoy, the under secretary of state for management.
That position manages the internal workings of the State Department, especially personnel.
He is the one that fired all those people in the years up to the hearing.
And it was his testimony that made this hearing the start of the Lavender Scare.
What's the Lavender Scare?
Okay. Fair. I guess this calls for some context.
The mid-1900s in the U.S. were kind of a dumpster fire.
There was a lot of social and political turmoil.
It was a time of extreme paranoia, fear, and prejudice.
Isn't that the U.S. all the time?
Well, it was particularly bad in the wake of World War II.
We had something called the second Red Scare, where everyone was afraid of the rise of communism.
Actually, I think I'm underselling this.
Not just afraid. That's been pretty steady since World War I.
We're talking full blown paranoia.
People were accusing their friends, their neighbors, random people on the street.
It was madness and it was bipartisan.
In March of 1947, three years before that Senate hearing,
President Truman had signed Executive Order 9835,
calling for all government agencies to investigate their own employees for possible communist and subversive behavior.
As you can imagine, this order was immediately abused.
Subversive behavior. Unbelievable.
Starting in the late forties and through the sixties,
the line blurred between what was communist and what was morally objectionable.
There was a mass purge of LGBTQ+ people from federal positions.
It's now known as the Lavender Scare.
Were any of them communists? No, they weren't even all LGBTQ+, just suspected to be.
But it was argued that their presence was subversive.
The more I learn about American history, I swear.
Anyway, this Peurifoy guy embraced Truman's executive order immediately and fired over 90 people
between that order in 1947 and the Senate hearing in 1950.
Couldn't James Webb or even President Truman have put a stop to it?
According to the records, neither James Webb nor President Truman even knew about the firings until the Senate hearing.
By then it was too late.
Once Congress knew about it, all Truman could do was react.
He had a meeting with Webb about the issue,
and they did everything they could just to keep the personnel investigations internal to the State Department.
The alternative was the Senate committee getting the records and investigating everyone themselves,
which the president saw as unacceptable overreach.
Congress agreed to the president's terms, as long as they got regular updates,
and as long as John Peurifoy and his successors had full authority to fire whoever they wanted.
After that, Webb's involvement in the matter ends. It was out of his hands.
Ultimately, it didn't even matter that they tried to cooperate with Congress.
Two years later, James Webb resigned and went to work in the private sector.
When Truman's second term was up in 1953, the executive branch switched parties.
The new President Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450,
which lists homosexuality explicitly as a national security risk, though they called it something else at the time.
In reality, the only thing that made LGBTQ+ people a security risk was the Lavender Scare itself.
By the time Webb came back to head NASA in 1961,
that Eisenhower order was still in full effect.
He worked hard at NASA to meet JFK’s goals for equal employment and civil rights.
Unfortunately, due to executive order 10450, that could not include sexual orientation.
This order would be at full strength until 1973, well after Webb came and went at NASA.
This was a terrible time in American history, and these sorts of problems are bigger than one person.
That's why, after reviewing 50,000 pages of documents, NASA's official report cleared Webb of any direct involvement in the Lavender Scare.
In light of that, they chose to keep his name on the telescope.
Anyway, after two decades of budget increases, delays, and a huge naming controversy,
we finally have the most epic telescope ever built.
Four different instruments for detecting infrared light,
18 gold hexagonal mirrors (because hexagons are the bestagons,)
all arranged in a 6.5 meter wide infrared reflector.
I'd say it was a miracle it ever got off the ground,
but a lot of very skilled and motivated people made it happen.
The people at NASA are absolutely incredible.
We'll have to wait and see what else JWST has in store for us.
But I know what's in store for you over on Nebula. Me!
The regular videos I post here on YouTube will also be on Nebula but completely ad and sponsor free.
There's also lots of exclusive content from other creators that you won't see on YouTube.
Like this DnD one shot I was in a few months ago, run by my friend Micah from Neurotransmissions.
You can watch the guys from Extra Credits,
the Roving Naturalist, and me
play a ragtag team of characters
who have to discover why everyone in a town is unconscious.
I played a dark gnome fighter and it's honestly one of the best characters I've ever made.
And at one point during the game, I failed a surprise check and spent an entire round bragging to the other gnome about how I made my hand axes.
It was hilarious.
But like, as far as the temperature goes, I mean, that's where the forges were.
Oh ya, totally, totally. I know ... I forged once.
I feel like I'm watching an episode of Forged in Fire.
If you sign up using my link below, you'll get access to all of it at a huge discount.
A whopping 40% off! That's only $2.50 a month for the annual plan.
$30, and you get everything on Nebula for a year.
And because I'm actually part of the company, signing up through my link directly supports me and my work.
Nebula is a platform built by creators for creators,
and I'm excited to be a part of it.
Huge thanks to Mr. Beat for stepping in and explaining the State Department.
And until next time, remember: It's okay to be a little crazy.
Bastian five nine seven five had an innovative approach to solving the bowling ball paradox.
What you do is make the boat extremely lightweight.
That way it's not even involved after you drop the ball.
Excellent job avoiding neutronium.
Anyway, thanks for watching!