Long delays and massive costs aside, this is epic engineering.

In the end the telescope would weigh over six tons and be as high as a multi-storey building. It would detect infrared light and so would need a sunshield which turned out to be about the size of a tennis court.

You can’t fit a double decker bus on a tennis court on top of a rocket. You certainly would also struggle to accelerate it to supersonic speeds and hope for anything to survive. So you need to make the largest, most expensive and complicated origami you can imagine.

It proved to be so complex that in the end there were 344 single-point failures. A single- point failure is one that scuppers the entire mission if the failure occurs. 

Anyone who has seen Don’t Look Up will understand that throwing objects into the air high enough that they don’t fall back is not easy and when you have 24 years of effort and over $10 billion in spending then the reality that just a single electronic bolt release failing would render the entire mission a waste. Quite the responsibility on those building and overseeing it.

Image credit: NASA

Audio credit: NASA