hello space fans tonight's news is on the James Webb Space Telescope this is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope and it was announced last summer around August or sep tember that the james webb space telescope project was behind schedule and over budget and not just a little bit either I NASA announced that it was going to cost 1.6 billion dollars more to make than it rigid that initially budgeted it was initially budgeted to cost five billion now it looks like it's going to cost six and a half now this is nothing new in space missions that these things often take longer to build and cost more than were initially that were originally planned but the difference here of course is the scale of the numbers involved 1.6 billion is a lot of money for NASA to come up with and so that means that it's something is probably not going to get paid for so that James Webb can be built but in my mind it's worth it and it also isn't surprising that this is costing so much I mean when you think about it here's another schematic of the James Webb this thing is not only complicated and has a lot it has a lot of brand new technologies never before design for example this segmented mirror here which is coated with gold because it's sensitive to the infrared this is primarily an infrared telescope so it has to be kept cold these heat shields down here have to work flawlessly and this thing is really really big I mean here's a schematic of the James Webb primary mirror compared to the Hubble it's over seven times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope primary this thing is enormous it it doesn't even fit into the rocket very well it's got to be unfolded here's an animation they made showing the James Webb Space Telescope unfolding so all of these things are contributing to the cost and the fact that they are on schedule for the primary components i mean the lot of these really critical components are still on schedule for being finished the end of this year says that they're solving these technical challenges it's just that the managers for whatever and I don't know the details of it weren't keeping very close track of the money or they were they were burning through their their reserves very fast and not letting anybody know I don't know the story they're all I can tell you is that nASA has replaced the project the upper project management to sort of help solve some of the budgetary issues and to answer that report that came out back in August so all of this stuff has to work perfectly the first time around but that's not all another complication is where we're launching this thing it's not going in orbit around the earth it's going out to something called the l2 point which is this point way past the earth million-and-a-half kilometers away it's it's even further away than the moon here's the moon orbiting the Earth we're putting it way way way out here and this is a special spot because it will allow the spacecraft to stay constantly in the Earth's shadow so the earth will always be blocking it from the Sun here's the Sun there's the earth and here is the the Space Telescope and as the earth goes around the Sun in its orbit the Space Telescope will follow behind and stay in that shadow helping to keep it cool because as I mentioned before this is an infrared telescope and it's got to be kept as cool as possible so all of these components have to in addition to unfolding perfectly and working right the first time and being a million-and-a-half kilometers away once it's out there it's all got to work and it's all got to work perfectly and this thing is is one of the most complicated and largest things we've ever sent out into space so they want to get it right the first time because remember with Hubble they didn't get it right the first time it had to be repaired but this thing won't be able to be repaired there's no space shuttle go out and repair this thing anymore so it has to work and with the money involved and the careers on the line i'm pretty sure that i think they'll get it right are not confident that they will so that's a little bit about this so ii so the cost of this thing while it is a billion and a half dollars more the launch date has also been pushed back it looks like the earliest this thing is going to get up into space is going to be sometime around sep tember of 2016 so the Hubble Space Telescope has to work to kind of fill that gap a little bit longer if you'll recall we repaired it back in two 9 and it was supposed to last five years that was supposed to put it to the to the time of the jwst launch date but now it looks like if we can coax hubble to lasting just a few more years longer to kind of you know take up the slack because otherwise they'll be a big gap in there so one more limiting factor to the james webs mission time will be its propellant that's the stuff that uses that we use to point with it would do dual rockets that fire to point it at different areas of the sky and if that runs out too soon if we do too many Corrections then it won't last as long and and just like the Spitzer Space Telescope when it ran out of liquid helium it can't be refilled again so Spitzer can't do the kind of science that we would like it to be able to do because it's out of liquid helium if James Webb runs out of propellant that's it for that too all we're going to get out of it is wherever it happens to be pointing at the time so so the propellant will also limit how long this thing can be operated but they're shooting for a goal of being ten years long so hopefully they'll reach that goal now what it'll be observing is there there's this gap of there's this gap of observations between the cosmic microwave background and the earliest galaxies we've ever seen around 600 million years after the Big Bang we don't really have a lot of data in between that time frame and so James Webb is going to look at that and tell us how galaxies or help us to understand how galaxies form how they cluster into galaxies as well as something about the origin of life itself so this is an exciting project and I think it's well worth the money it's unfortunate that it's costing so much and that something else will probably have to go as a result but it's not surprising and something on this scale this is the largest space telescope ever flown in outer space and it is also the most complicated this is an achievement to me that rivals going to the moon if we can get it up there well that's it for now space fans I hope you're liking these and keep looking up