By 2011, the James Webb Space Telescope already had a record of missed dates. Before NASA approved it for development, according to the Government Accountability Office, its cost estimates ranged from $1 billion to $3.5 billion, with launch dates from 2007 to 2011. In 2009 it was baselined at $4.964 billion, including additional cost reserves, for a launch in June 2014. That didn’t hold either.
So in September 2011 NASA replanned the project from the ground up. The new plan put the life-cycle cost at $8.835 billion and the launch in October 2018, a delay of 52 months. And this time it included 13 months of funded schedule reserve: extra time set aside, in GAO’s words, “in the event of delays or unforeseen risks.” By speeding up some work, the project raised the reserve to 14 months in June 2012.
For a while, the cushion did its job. In January 2014 GAO reported that the project was “executing to the baseline schedule commitment,” still with 14 months of reserve. By December 2014 the figure was 11 months. In December 2016 it was 6, still more than NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center required, according to project officials.
Then came 2017. In February, a vibration anomaly during telescope testing used 1.25 months. In April, a contractor technician applied too much voltage and irreparably damaged the spacecraft’s pressure transducers, parts that help monitor fuel levels; that and sunshield problems took another 1.25 months. In September, the last 3.5 months went, because the contractor had underestimated how long it would take to integrate and test the spacecraft.
The reserve was gone. NASA asked for a new launch window, between March and June 2019, which gave the project up to 4 months of fresh reserve. Shortly after, the prime contractor, Northrop Grumman, reported that up to 3 months of it would be needed, based on what it had learned from folding the sunshield for the first time. By February 2018, GAO counted 1.5 months left and called further delays likely.
In June 2018 NASA released the report of an independent review board chaired by A. Thomas Young, and set a new launch date of March 30, 2021, and a life-cycle cost of $9.66 billion. Young later told Congress that five factors had caused the 29-month delay from October 2018: human errors, embedded problems, lack of experience in areas such as the sunshield, excessive optimism, and systems complexity. His examples of human error included the wrong solvent used to clean propulsion valves and sunshield cover fasteners improperly installed. The new date, he added, made no allowance for further errors with “multi-month impacts.”
In July 2020, citing the pandemic and technical challenges, NASA moved the launch to October 31, 2021.
Webb lifted off on an Ariane 5 from French Guiana at 7:20 in the morning, Eastern time, on December 25, 2021. That was more than three years after the October 2018 date the 13 months of reserve had been built to protect.