CNN news 2011-11-25
ZARRELLA: This is the future outside the Maryland Science Center. It's a full-scale model of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Scientists believe the real thing will redefine our understanding of our place in the universe. It will be so unique it can look further back in time than the Hubble telescope, almost to the dawn of creation.
JOHN MATHER, SENIOR PROJECT SCIENTIST: The James Webb telescope is to help us find out entire history from the first days after the Big Bang to how the first galaxies are born.
ZARRELLA: And, astronomers say, if they look in just the right place and get just a bit lucky.
ADAM REISS, ASTROPHYSICIST: This may give us our first clues about the existence of life in another solar system.
MATHER: If we can see a planet like Earth with an ocean I think that would be really cool.
ZARRELLA: Webb will orbit about 1 million miles from Earth. It's instruments are designed to image primarily in the infrared range, light we can't see. Webb's capabilities will allow it to literally look where Hubble could not: into gas and dust clouds, at the birth of the first stars and planets.
Sounds incredible, right? Webb might get us another step closer to solving the puzzle: are we alone?
REISS: I don't even know how you would put a price on being able to answer questions like how old is the universe, how did this all start? Where is it going? What is it made of? Are there other people out there like us? These are questions just so intrinsic.
ZARRELLA: But there is a price tag. When Webb is finally launched in 2018 it will be years behind schedule and cost about $8.8 billion, $6.5 billion more than the original estimate. At one point, Congress came close to killing it.
So what happened? How did it end up astronomy at an astronomical cost?
RICK HOWARD, WEBB PROGRAM DIRECTOR: When you're doing inventions and things for the first time, you don't know exactly what you're going to run into. And we found several things that we had to work around.
ZARRELLA: And it better work from the get-go.
When Hubble ran into problems, space shuttle astronauts came to the rescue. But Hubble was only 300 miles up. At one million miles away, even if the shuttle was still flying, it couldn't get there to fix Webb.
ZARRELLA: Now, the U.S. space agency itself even tried to come up with alternatives to web, because of all the problems they were having. They changed the management team out. But what it came down to at the end of the day, T.J., was, they were so far downstream already, that it made more sense and was going to cost less at the end of the day to continue with the program rather than just gutting the whole thing and trying to start over with something else. So -- the promise of web is supposed to be absolutely incredible. We'll see if it ends up worth the price.
HOLMES: This better work, John. It sounds like a lot of ifs and certainly a lot of money. John Zarrella. Always good to see you. Thanks so much.