The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, which was scheduled for October 2018, will be delayed five to eight months because integration and testing are taking longer than expected, a NASA official said Dec. 6.
The liftoff of the $8.8 billion, Northrop Grumman [NOC]-built observatory is now expected to occur sometime between March and June of 2019, said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate, who testified before the House Science, Space and Technology Committee’s space panel. The delay is the latest in a series for Webb, which was originally slated for a June 2014 launch.
Cristina Chaplain, director of acquisition and sourcing management at the Government Accountability Office, warned lawmakers that more delays are possible due to remaining technical challenges. The program has already consumed most of the schedule reserve it thought it would have with the revised launch window, she said.
Zurbuchen expressed confidence in the new launch window but said he has asked an independent team to begin reviewing the schedule next month.
Despite the delays, the mission is meeting its required performance levels, Zurbuchen testified. For example, in November at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, the telescope completed months-long cryogenic testing designed to ensure it will work in the extremely cold, airless environment of space. That milestone paves the way for the telescope to travel to a Northrop Grumman facility in Redondo Beach, Calif., to be integrated with the spacecraft bus and tennis court-sized sunshield.
Webb is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency and will lift off on an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket from the European Spaceport in French Guiana. A successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is designed to search for Earth-like planets and increase knowledge of how the universe was formed.