Christmas in the Space Age
The James Webb telescope launched this week. Much stronger than the Hubble, what might it reveal about the nature of faith and the universe?
NASA launched the much-anticipated James Webb Space Telescope this holiday week, to even less fanfare than the Hubble Telescope of yesteryear.
Oh, sure; scientists, astronomers and astrophysicists were excited when the Hubble first launched in 1990 and they weren’t completely alone. Who among the world’s star-gazers can forget the initial problems with the Hubble and the miraculous lengths NASA went to in order to fix it?
Kids in school in 1990 learned about the Hubble, perhaps filing that information away for a future date. It was well-known, to anyone following the launch, that it would be years, maybe decades, before the first pictures might start showing up.
Might.
The Hubble was a tremendous leap of faith. Expensive, with a million moving parts to break, wear down, corrode or come apart. For all NASA scientists knew for certain in 1990, they could have been sending a multibillion dollar…