Narrator: The James Webb Space Telescope
wasn't supposed to be
one of the most expensive scientific projects in history.
The estimated price in 2000 was just $1 billion.
But the complexity of the telescope
caught NASA by surprise.
It got so expensive, Congress nearly scrapped the project.
By the time the telescope launched at the end of 2021,
the cost was more than $10 billion.
So why did NASA spend so much
public money on the project?
And why has it taken so long?
Reporter: Décollage, liftoff from a tropical rainforest
to the edge of time itself.
Narrator: The answers lie in the origins of the stars.
Reporter: James Webb begins a voyage
back to the birth of the universe.
Narrator: On December 25, 2021, the James Webb blasted
into deep space orbit.
The destination, a point in space called Lagrange Point 2,
1 million miles from Earth.
That's further than any astronaut has traveled,
and it's also the perfect spot to investigate
the birth of the universe.
Light from the first stars began to travel outward
soon after the Big Bang.
And that light cooled from visible light to infrared light
over billions of years.
That's why the James Webb was designed to collect light
in the infrared spectrum.
James Mather: The James Webb Space Telescope
is designed
to look at our entire history,
from the first objects that
grew after the Big Bang
to things right here
in the solar system
that formed along with the Earth.
Narrator: The Webb is massive.
So it was folded up
in order to fit atop the Ariane 5 rocket before launch
and then unfolded in space after it separated.
NASA's scientists dubbed the million-mile trip
"30 days of terror" because everything had to go right,
with no less than 344 possible points of failure.
One tiny flaw
and the Webb could have ended up a piece of space junk.
Mather: This is one of those things
where if you're spending the public's money,
you're not going to take a chance of,
"Well, why don't you push a button and see if it's OK?"
Narrator: The mission was a success, but 20 years ago,
no one ever imagined it would take so long
or cost so much to get it to the launchpad.
Part of the struggle has been a need for perfection.
We just have to build it and test it
and build it and test it and build it and test it
until we're satisfied.
Narrator: NASA couldn't afford to repeat
the mistakes made on the Webb's predecessor,
the Hubble Telescope.
After its launch in 1990, the first images came back blurry.
The conclusion we've come to from that
is that there's a significant spherical aberration
appears to be present in the optics.
Narrator: So astronauts had to fix Hubble's mirror
while it was in space.
NASA had already spent $2 billion on Hubble at that point.
The repair cost $86 million, versus just $2 million
had NASA caught it while the Hubble was still on Earth.
That taught NASA an expensive lesson.
So with Webb,
they had to get everything right the first time.
This is just so complicated, and it's so huge.
And so that was the part
that I think scared all of us the most,
and we gave it an awful lot of attention.
Narrator: In 2000, the budget was $1 billion,
but by 2005, the budget
quadrupled to $4.5 billion.
By 2010, the year it
was supposed to launch,
none of the main instruments or mirrors
were delivered to NASA.
The estimated budget in 2010
was already up to $6.5 billion.
Cristina Chaplain: Up until 2011, there were a lot of issues
concerning oversight, communication, leadership,
management, cost estimating, overoptimism,
just almost everything you could think of
that could happen was happening.
Narrator: Members of Congress even considered
scrapping the project.
Ralph Hall: Some have argued that we should cut our losses
and move on.
Others have suggested that we're rewarding bad behavior
by continuing to invest in the mission.
Narrator: Instead, in 2011,
Congress decided to cap the budget at $8 billion
and tapped Cristina Chaplain
to audit the project every year.
But nothing could really stop prices from rising,
because nearly every part of the telescope
had to be invented along the way.
Chaplain: Especially toward the end, they thought,
"Hey, the contractor workforce can decrease,
and we'll have money to pay for other things
that we need to pay."
But the workforce stayed high because they had
so many technical issues that they were dealing with.
Narrator: Though it's often compared to Hubble,
the James Webb has a mirror
six times the size of its predecessor
and requires far more advanced technology
and specialized conditions to operate.
It's bigger and needs some of the coldest temperatures
in the known universe.
Paul Geithner: Those two things
together meant this was going to be
a really, really hard problem,
and some of us thought
it was really insane
at the beginning, honestly.
But yeah, very tough,
very tough.
Those two conspired to make
it a really hard problem.
Narrator: And the Webb needs extreme cold
for its infrared cameras to operate.
Negative 388 degrees Fahrenheit cold, to be precise.
To protect these sensitive instruments
from the heat of the sun,
NASA built a five-layer tennis court-sized sun shield.
Think of the most advanced
and complicated beach umbrella you can imagine.
It can withstand extreme temperature swings
and even small meteoroids
that might pierce the thin membrane.
Geithner: The temperatures we operate the
cold side of Webb at
are way beyond anybody's ordinary, everyday experience,
and materials just get really weird at those temperatures.
It's a hard engineering problem.
Narrator: But even that isn't cold enough
for one of the cameras,
which needs something called a cryocooler
to bring the temperature down to negative 447 degrees.
NASA spent more than a decade
and $150 million
developing the cooler.
It was only supposed to cost
$22 million.
In 2018, Congress had to raise
the spending limit set in 2011.
By the time the telescope was ready for launch in 2021,
it had already cost $8.8 billion, making it
one of the most expensive scientific projects in history.
But there was one more challenge:
transporting it from California to a European spaceport
in French Guiana in South America.
Details had to be kept secret because the valuable cargo
would make a lucrative target for pirates.
It traveled 16 days from California
through the Panama Canal to the launch site.
The European Space Agency paid
for and oversaw the launch,
as well as building two of Webb's instruments.
Together, the European and Canadian space agencies
contributed another $1 billion
beyond NASA's $8.8 billion.
And that brings us close to our $10 billion total.
But all of this just gets us to the moment
when the James Webb begins to do science.
Some hope to learn more about the origins of the universe,
while others, like Heidi Hammel,
expect to point it at our own solar system
to learn more about some of Earth's closest neighbors.
Hammel: We haven't had a
mission to Uranus and Neptune,
and we have developed
very sophisticated
space- and ground-based telescopes,
but none of them have the sensitivity
that the James Webb Space Telescope will have.
Narrator: NASA built the telescope to run for 10 years,
but extra fuel left over from a near-perfect launch
is likely to double its lifespan.
NASA will spend over $850 million to run the Webb
for the next five years.
The extra life it may have
would of course require more money.
At the beginning, it was just me and one project manager
and a few people that we talked to,
and it's grown to having needed 10,000 people.
Go, Webb!
(audience applauds)
Narrator: So far, the Webb has little to show
beyond this selfie o its big mirror.
But it's the images it will record
from cameras pointing in the other direction
and send back to Earth in mid-2022
that everyone is waiting for.
It's hoped that capturing a glimpse
of the birth of our universe
will make all the time and expense worthwhile.
Hubble's images led to 19,000 scientific papers,
many of which changed our ideas of the universe.
Just one of those revealed the discovery of water
on Jupiter's smallest moon, called Europa.
James Webb has some big footsteps to follow.
Hammel: And that's a really powerful aspect of this telescope —
Webb and Hubble — that allows these telescopes
to continue to produce incredible science
year after year after year,
even after the telescopes are gone.