Why Is NASA's Space Telescope Running a Year Behind?
For the world’s most powerful space telescope, the finish line keeps getting further and further away.
The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the famed Hubble, has been pushed back about a year, from spring 2019 to May 2020, NASA officials said Tuesday.
The delay is NASA’s second in six months for the Webb, an ambitious, $8.8 billion project two decades in the making. And there had been other delays in the past. But this slip in the schedule is the most perilous so far.
The new delay means that the Webb project risks spending more money than it has to spend. When Webb was first proposed in 1996, officials estimated the space observatory would cost between $1 billion to $3.5 should not exceed a total of $8 billion for the development-and-construction phase of the mission. But the longer this phase takes, the more it will cost.
