Original subtitles

[whooshes]

[slow, dramatic synth music playing]

[Amber Straughn] After the Big Bang, the universe was just filled

with this sort of cosmic soup of hydrogen and helium gas.

[mysterious music playing]

Eventually, those hydrogen and helium atoms

started to form together to fuse stars.

The stars were probably grouped into galaxies.

That was what we call the first light.

[Thomas Zurbuchen] To see first light, the first, uh, galaxies in our universe,

that distant past is where creation happened.

[Amber] When we look at the sky, beyond the stars in our Milky Way,

we can only see darkness.

We've never had the technology

to see that first part of the story of the universe.

To be able to look back in time

to see the very first light,

you need the most complex telescope in history.

[Thomas] Webb, in the whole history of NASA,

is the riskiest mission ever done.

[reporter] This mission could be a technological triumph

or a heartbreaking disaster.

[Mike Menzel] We're putting the largest telescope in space,

a million miles away.

You know, you can think of a thousand things that can go wrong.

[Thomas] It's the largest number of single point failures

of any mission ever done.

[Amber] To try to think the unthinkable of, "If it doesn't work…"

[radio controller speaking indistinctly]

[Amber] It's a scary thought, for sure.

[Mike] Any successful mission systems engineer

who doesn't think there was luck involved is either a fool or a liar.

-[metallic ringing] -[dramatic music playing]

[Amber] Those first images will help us get closer

to answering those questions of,

"Where do we come from?"

"How did we get here?"

"Are we alone?"

That's our history, right there.

-[Bill Nelson] It is our whole history. -[Thomas] Our whole history right there.

[Amber] I have no doubt that this telescope is our next giant leap

in our search for life.

The universe is so big,

there's got to be evolved conscious life out there.

The James Webb Space Telescope

will fundamentally change the way we understand the universe.

[music fading]

[mysterious music playing]

[adventurous music playing]

[dramatic synth music playing]

[reporter 1] There's a new telescope in town.

[reporter 2] The James Webb Space Telescope,

named after the second administrator of NASA, is about to become a reality.

It's going to be launching from French Guiana, a spaceport there,

which is a reminder that this is not just a NASA mission.

It is a joint mission with the European Space Agency

and the Canadian Space Agency.

[music intensifies]

Three decades and ten billion dollars in the making,

the project hasn't been without controversy.

Multiple mishaps, budget crises,

even a threatened congressional cancellation.

The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope

is about as high stakes as it gets for NASA.

If something goes wrong, that is about ten billion dollars,

more than two decades' worth of work, down the drain, just like that.

[Thomas] Hey.

-[woman] How you doing? -Well.

[female reporter] Thomas Zurbuchen is the head of science at NASA,

or Dr. Z, as we can also call you.

The day has come.

All these decades, all this time,

all these people working on this telescope,

and here we are, minutes to launch.

[Thomas] We have this telescope on top of this rocket.

A telescope that 10,000-plus people have worked on in many ways.

And together with that telescope,

all the hopes and dreams of those individuals,

and also tens of thousands of scientists, some of them not even born,

that will benefit from this data, are there with them,

waiting for these last minutes of countdown

for its journey to-- to space.

[engineer] Thumbs up, all systems are go.

T-minus 30 seconds and counting.

[Thomas] Webb, in the whole history of NASA,

is the toughest mission ever done.

There were manufacturing issues, planning issues, system issues,

personnel issues.

Sometimes it looked hopeless to me.

[engineer] Standing by for terminal count.

[man in French] Ten, nine, eight…

[Thomas in English] I've often thought of Webb as the Apollo of science.

It is a super hard thing that's almost impossible.

And we do it despite it.

[man in French] …three, two, one, liftoff!

[whooshing, rumbling]

[sounds fade]

[footsteps approaching]

[Amber] It's been a really long road to get to this launch.

I've worked on the project for 15 years.

I feel like such a core part of my identity as a person

is my-- my job, my work.

I love it, I'm passionate about it, that's why I do it.

To try to think the unthinkable of, "If it doesn't work,"

like, and then I've poured my entire career into this,

it's a scary thought, for sure.

[dreamy synth music playing]

I mean, from the time I was six or seven,

I decided that that's what I want to do. I want to be an astronomer.

I grew up in rural Arkansas on a little farm, middle of nowhere.

There were no city lights around.

It was very dark. The sky was beautiful.

And I was just enthralled by the night sky from the time I was a kid.

[whooshing]

I was in fourth or fifth grade, went up and watched.

[commander] We have been given the go-ahead to begin commanding

a release of the forward latches.

[dreamy music continues]

We're seeing both blankets unfurl on the solar array.

[engineer] Looks good.

I want to wish Hubble its own set of adventures,

that it may unlock further mysteries of the universe.

[Amber] They decided to point it at a blank piece of sky,

nothing there, just to see what happened.

Like the rest of the world,

I remember just being stunned at what we saw.

The nothing turned out to be filled with thousands of galaxies.

It really gave us a sense, for the very first time,

just how old the universe is.

[music fades]

It's a really cool, sort of, trick of physics…

[chuckles] …uh, that we can literally look back in time, uh,

with these massive telescopes.

Telescopes are really like time machines

in that they let us see the universe as it was in the past.

This sounds like science fiction,

but it's actually just due to the simple fact

that light takes time to travel through space.

If you look at a streetlamp, the light from that streetlamp

takes a teeny, tiny fraction of a second to cross the street and get to your eye.

Light from the Sun takes about eight minutes to get to Earth.

Think about stepping that out further and further into the universe.

Things that are much further away,

the light takes more time to travel to our telescopes.

And so we are literally seeing them as they were in the past.

With Hubble, we've been able to look back into the distant past

and see some very early galaxies, some very young galaxies.

But… we're missing the beginning.

We're missing the first bit in the first chapter

of this 13.8-billion-year story of the universe.

[Dan Goldin] We want to look out into the vastness of space

and back to the beginnings of time to answer the questions,

"How did, and how do, galaxies form?"

"Are there other habitable planets outside our solar system?"

"Is life unique to planet Earth?"

Hubble and ground-based telescopes have given us an important start.

But we must go farther,

and the Next Generation Space Telescope,

NGST, will be the next great step taken.

[Amber] That's what ended up being the James Webb Space Telescope.

[Thomas] Webb is such a leap.

It's the biggest leap of any mission,

in terms of just the magnitude of improvements in all dimensions.

This is like the mother of all telescopes.

It was clear that there's ten miracles that needed to happen.

Entirely new technologies that nobody had ever done.

[whirring]

A totally new detector,

totally new electronic system that focused the mirrors,

ten of those.

One of the most important numbers is,

"How many single point failures do you have?"

A single point failure is a single thing that needs to happen

that, if it's not happening, the whole mission is a failure.

[radio controller] Navigation confirmed that the parachute has deployed

and we are seeing significant deceleration.

[Thomas] Landing on Mars is something like 80 to 90,

which is one of the riskiest things we've ever done.

Webb is three to four times worse.

[astronaut] Oh, it's beautiful, Mike, it really is.

They've got the flag up now, and you can see the stars and stripes.

[Thomas] In terms of the single point failures,

worse than Apollo.

So, how many single point failures do we have?

The answer is 344.

It's the largest number of single point failures

of any mission ever done.

It's like, you know, just an impossible project.

[Mike] There's always unknown unknowns in this business, we know it.

In the end, you know, technically, it will all fall on my shoulders.

You just make the best decision you can with the data that you have available,

but you recognize that… there's always a bit of risk to some of these decisions.

-[Mike] Cat? -[Cathy Menzel] Yeah.

[small dog barking]

Oh, lighten-- lighten up, killer.

[Mike] For the past 24 years, I've been focused on this mission.

It's like a, you know, a second child in a-- in a way.

My children have known nothing but the James Webb Space Telescope

since they were about nine or four.

My son is 30 now, and my daughter's 28.

The fear that-- that you have to have is, if something goes wrong,

there's going to be the press,

there's going to be the, you know, the politicians, whatever.

They're gonna drag your name through the mud.

He worries about everything. It's a-- It's a Menzel gene, actually.

They worry about every little thing.

He's not sleeping well at night.

All these single point failure things that could go wrong,

you do worry about those, and, you know…

[Mike] Damn right, I do. Damn right, the team does, so…

That's why we put vigilance on 'em, we put focus on 'em.

[opening briefcase]

These are some of the original concepts

on, uh, what was then called the Next Generation Space Telescope.

The bigger the mirror, the more light you're collecting.

So, to actually see first light, you're going to have to be big.

We had five-- five concepts that we looked at.

This was, uh, an original one.

The devil in these designs are in the details,

so it isn't until you get to, you know, some detailed engineering

that looks like this, that you find the problems.

The most obvious problem,

its-- its diameter is bigger

than the diameter of the rocket that carries it.

So you have to fold it up.

We had deployments that had the primary mirror segments stacked,

almost like a record player.

And then one of the concepts that we had was, uh, to deploy the primary mirror

using two leaves that look like a drop table,

which is what we're doing now.

Our preliminary design review was 2008,

and that's where the telescope starts really looking like what we have today.

It's not one of the best models of Webb,

but it's good enough to show most people the features.

There's the primary mirror. Starlight comes in,

hits the primary mirror, gets focused down to the secondary mirror,

and gets sent into this, uh, black pyramidal structure.

After that, it goes back here where the instruments are.

The cameras, the spectrometers…

[foil rattling]

I'm sorry, the-- the glue is coming a little loose on this,

but this right here is the sunshield.

The sunshield blocks out the light from the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon.

We want our telescope to be cold,

so that it doesn't glow brighter than the faint stars it's looking at.

Of the 344 single point failure items,

225 are associated with the sunshield deployment.

That is a never-before-done deployment.

The first thing that happens,

those two big pallets that you see on each side,

fold down one, then fold down the other.

They're holding the folded layers of the sunshield.

Then a very complex system of pulleys and tensioning motors

expand the sunshield at each of the six vertices.

And we will individually tension each of those five layers

to get not only the right shape,

but the right position, relative to each other.

There are 34 single point failure items

associated with the tensioning of the five layers.

[radio controller] Layer two, on three, two, one…

[clicking]

[Thomas] The thing that's really different from this space mission

to pretty much any other space mission ever done, is how flimsy it is.

It's not a piece of metal.

It's more like a folded-up umbrella.

[Mike] We did three full-scale deployments,

and the refolding put wear and tear on the sunshield.

The tearing of the sunshield that we were seeing

got to the point where we said, "No."

"It's time to stop testing and overtesting."

When you're doing things like, you know, large sheets,

it's miles of cables, things that can get tangled,

can go in places you don't want them to in zero-G.

You can think of a thousand things that can go wrong.

We bust it up, fold it up, we're going to put it on a rocket,

and then we're going to literally rebuild it robotically in space,

and that's, uh-- that's never been done before.

Fourteen days after launch, we latch both sides of the primary mirror.

There are ten single point failure items associated with the primary mirror,

five for each wing.

[intriguing music playing]

Having 18 individual segments was a good way to build the mirror.

Each individual mirror's movable.

That helps us to position each of those hexagons

to robotically focus our telescope.

It's going out about a million miles away from the Earth,

four times farther than the Moon.

You don't want the telescope cracking, breaking,

when it gets down to cryogenic temperatures.

[Amber] NASA actually retrofitted

the biggest Cryovac chamber down at Johnson Space Center.

It was used for Apollo era.

It took years to be able to accommodate this huge telescope.

[air hissing]

[Mike chuckling] It's the size of a three-story building,

tested at temperatures, you know,

at 50 degrees above absolute zero, and it worked great.

That's almost miraculous.

[Amber chuckling] There was this awesome day at Goddard

that people have been looking forward to for years, really.

They raised it upright and rotated it towards the viewing area,

and we all got to see that mirror.

And that was just a, like, "Whew, don't start crying" moment.

[laughs]

I mean, because you're-- you're seeing your own reflection

in the same mirror that's going to detect light

from infant galaxies and distant planets.

And to think that it's also seeing me? Like, that was-- that was really cool.

We've designed this telescope

specifically to see the universe in infrared light.

The most distant galaxies are so far away

that they are emitting all of their light as infrared light,

light that's a little bit more red than what your eyes can see.

Even if we had a telescope like Hubble, a visible-light telescope,

that was much, much, much bigger,

we still wouldn't be able to see the light from these first galaxies.

While we designed this telescope to primarily study early galaxies,

the fact that it's so big and so powerful

means that it will have unprecedented capability

in helping us learn more about exoplanets, about planets orbiting other stars.

[dreamy music playing]

In particular, about whether or not any of the nearby planets

might be potentially habitable.

The way it will do that

is by looking at the molecules that are in that planet's atmosphere.

It would be able to detect methane, carbon dioxide, water vapor.

Where there's water, there's usually life.

It's not a stretch to say that this telescope

is our next, sort of, giant leap in our search for life in the universe.

I mean, how amazing would it be if I said, "Look, here are five planets,

it looks like there is life there"?

Can you imagine? That changes everything.

[footsteps jogging]

Webb is humans at its best,

a selfless pursuit of what's really out there.

Learning more about ourselves, our history, about the world itself.

I think it's incredibly amazing.

[gentle music playing]

I grew up in Switzerland.

My father was an evangelist pastor in a fundamentalist church.

We hardly ever heard about science.

I was taught all my youth

that the whole universe was built in seven days.

And then I went to one class.

The teacher explained how science changed the trajectory of history.

And I thought, "That's the job I want."

"I can do science, and through it, change the course of history."

I've been in the job for five years.

Many people think of me as not patient enough.

My way of accountability sometimes can come across as harsh.

But suppose it failed.

It would set the whole history of world science back

by one to two decades.

I track all my miles.

The whole year… A thousand is the goal every year.

Depending on how stressful the year is, it's more or less.

The more stress, the more miles.

Closing in on 1,200.

NASA, right? This is the agency that has coined the… the tagline,

''Failure is not an option.''

It's a tagline that sounds really good,

but every time we do a mission, failure is an option.

[intriguing music playing]

There are all these challenges from the very beginning.

This institute will be managing a telescope

with a launch projected for 2007.

The target price for doing this will be 500 million dollars.

[Thomas] The first time somebody talked about the price of that telescope,

everybody who had-- had worked on-- on the Hubble Space Telescope,

which was close-- more than six billion dollars,

knew it's total bullshit.

As the project grew,

all of a sudden, the cost went to six billion dollars.

Mr. Howard, did you ever see the movie called The Money Pit?

[Howard] Yes, absolutely.

I think the standard line in that movie was, ''It's only two more weeks.''

Mm-hmm. Now, how can we justify this to our constituents?

[Thomas] There was an investigation by Congress.

And they basically said, "Let's kill that thing."

It felt like it wasn't going to happen.

Congress was going to cancel us.

It was a shock.

I'm a-- a young scientist anxious to do science with this telescope,

and now we're stopping after all this time?

[Thomas] Congress said, "We'll give you the money," and that's when I came in.

Nobody wanted to talk about it.

It's like, "Oh, it's-- it's not-- it's fine."

It's like, "Well, how are you performing?" "We're losing time, but it will be fine."

It was not fine.

I remember it getting ready for vibration and acoustics.

[men speaking indistinctly]

[Thomas] What you do is you try to break the telescope.

Of course you want it to survive, but you shake it

just like it will be shaken in the rocket.

And we blasted sound at it, just like it will see during a launch.

[high-pitched ringing]

[low humming]

[rattling growing louder]

[Thomas] The first test went really, really well.

Then, when we tested it with the spacecraft and the sunshield,

the fasteners started falling down.

There's 10,000 screws on that thing.

Now, if you've ever fixed a bicycle,

you realize if you put the fastener on, you need to tighten it, so it locks.

The fasteners were not locked.

How can that be?

It needs to go to space. The fasteners need to be locked.

So we had to redo all the fasteners, find all of them.

It took six months

and cost 150 million dollars to fix the problem.

Frankly, people are making more mistakes than they should.

It's embarrassing.

[dramatic synth music playing]

In the meantime, we got the largest number of negative news stories

of that mission, as compared to any and all of them.

Nobody wants to be part of a stinker.

Everybody wants to be part of a success, just like any sports team.

You need to turn it around. You need to stop losing.

The team, they were always amazing people.

I consider it a leadership issue.

We run the risk of scratching and damaging the mirror,

so we have to be very careful about that.

[Thomas] What I needed to do is replace leaders

to bring that team together

and create the attention that it requires to do something this magnificent.

Right, so you want the energy, "Yes, we're going to do this."

And then I think that's what happened.

I remember the day where I basically…

For the first time, I was really surprised.

The two halves,

the primary mirror and the sunshield, they had to come together.

I knew that was going to be really hard.

They had never seen each other, those two halves.

All the systems, all the cables, everything had to work.

[suspenseful music playing]

When the two halves came together…

it worked the first time.

The team were just barely where they needed to be,

and they were not ahead, and all of sudden, they got ahead.

They were better than what people had expected them to be.

That is amazing.

We have a mission that's basically ready.

If somebody asks me, "How certain are you to launch Webb right now?"

I'm betting my house.

-[whirring] -[music continues]

[truck beeping]

[Amber] All of these years we've put into getting this telescope

to the launchpad.

Part of me is like, "Is it really here? Is it really happening?" [laughs]

[music continues]

[sirens wailing]

I feel excitement and-- and, uh, happy nervousness.

[suspenseful music building]

[Mike] Do I like launches? Well…

[chuckling] I like-- I like them when they're over.

It's like jumping with a parachute, right?

[chuckling] When the parachute opens, it's always a nice-- a nice ride.

[music continues]

We are just about 12 hours from launching. Fingers crossed that the weather holds,

and we'll be able to launch this telescope tomorrow morning.

I can't believe… I can't believe that we're almost here.

I'm so excited. I can't wait to get this telescope into space.

[tense, droning synth music playing]

[Thomas] I write both speeches by myself.

I think it's absolutely critical that they're authentic and personal,

uh, especially in a time of disappointment,

frankly,

that I'm there authentically as a human.

So that's important.

The positive speech, nobody will remember.

It won't matter. I can say whatever I want to.

The negative speech really matters.

So, it's really important to think about it carefully.

[man in French] Seven, six, five,

four, three, two, one, liftoff.

Ignition.

[Thomas in English] I remember the first Ariane 5 failure.

I still remember how it looked.

[man in French] Liftoff.

[Thomas in English] I still remember it, burned in my-- in my head.

[man in French] All propulsion parameters are normal. Trajectory is normal.

[Thomas in English] "Today's launch was not successful,

and Webb did not reach the orbit as planned."

[explodes]

[morose music playing]

"This is a setback for all of us,

and for science and exploration of our universe."

"We surely are disappointed."

"However, as difficult as the setback we're experiencing right now is,

there's one thing that will not change."

"Our commitment to the scientific exploration of space."

[woman 1] The coolest thing of the decade, possibly the century,

is about to happen.

The successor to the Hubble,

three times as large and way more technologically advanced,

is about to be launched. I'm going to start crying.

[woman 2] Feliz Navidad. I got up at 4:50 a.m. this morning

to watch the JWST launch.

[man] Just praying to all the science gods that everything goes without a hitch,

and that in six months, we'll be able to get this wonderful data.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

[controller] From the Jupiter Control Center here in Kourou, French Guiana,

you are looking live at an Ariane 5 rocket on its launchpad,

ready to send the James Webb Space Telescope

on the initial phase of its journey.

[Thomas] Tens of thousands of scientists are watching this launch right now.

Their entire future depends on the success of that launch.

Merry Christmas!

We're here and ready to watch the James Webb Space Telescope launch.

[controller] Right now, we have a green board,

no issues as the countdown proceeds.

No issues again being tracked by the flight control team here in Kourou.

I'm not a very superstitious man,

but I am going to take

three, uh-- three lucky charms with me today.

I have my old man's taxi license.

I have my grandfather Menzel's bow tie

and my grandfather DeLeo's logbook

from his, uh-- when he was a private pilot.

[female reporter] It's all looking very good here at the spaceport

for a Christmas Day launch.

Operations running smoothly, the countdown ticking over nicely,

all the systems are green, and we are go for launch.

[speaking French]

[male reporter] The weather is go.

NASA officials carefully, uh, watching, uh, the telemetry,

standing by for terminal count.

[man in French] Ten, nine, eight…

[in English] Seven, six, five,

four, three, two, one…

[rumbling, crackling]

[clattering]

[clanks]

[cheering]

[cheering]

[man] Whoo!

[man in French] ESC shutdown.

All onboard parameters are normal.

[male reporter in English] And we're about 17 seconds away from Webb separation.

Springs will gently push Webb away from the upper stage of the Ariane 5.

[man in French] Separation of the Webb Telescope.

-[in English] Go, Webb! -[applause]

[people cheering, applauding]

[both chuckling]

-Thank you. Yes! -[Thomas] Congratulations, eh? My gosh.

[male reporter] We do have confirmation of observatory separation,

that will lead, uh, to the deployment of Webb's solar array.

Webb will remain on internal battery power until its singular solar array unfurls.

[people speaking indistinctly]

[male reporter] Webb now, uh, has its array out,

confirmation that it is power positive.

-[engineer] Solar array is out. -[applause]

[laughing] All right! All right!

[people cheering, whistling]

[engineer laughing] Now we're talking!

[dramatic music playing]

[reporter 1] As it moves to its workplace about a million miles away from Earth,

it will be deployed by the telescope controllers

at the Mission Operations Center, the MOC, as it's called.

[music intensifies]

[reporter 2] Over the next few weeks, Webb will continue deploying

its antennas, sunshield, and mirrors.

Each procedure, a critical and complicated step

to fully assemble the seven-ton telescope.

[reporter 3] The Webb Telescope is created

by some of the brightest minds in the world,

and all of them are gonna be watching at the edge of their seat.

[reporter 4] Anything goes wrong at any point,

there's basically nothing humankind can actually do about it.

[Mike] Everybody's congratulating people here about the launch,

and we're all-- we're all very happy for the congratulations.

But we all know that, you know, the hard stuff is yet to come.

Deploying this telescope is like rebuilding an IKEA desk

from a million miles away, robotically.

[humming]

Webb's going about a mile a second.

We'll be passing lunar orbit pretty soon,

so we're close to 230,000 miles away from us right now.

Webb is traveling to the L2 point,

a million miles away from the Earth.

If you're here on the Earth and want to see faint stars,

you don't look at them from the city, you go out to the country.

So going out to L2, for us, represents going out to the country.

And it's a place where the gravity of the Sun

and the gravity of the Earth can combine

to form a stable orbit around the Sun.

It took the Apollo astronauts roughly three days

to go from the Earth to the Moon.

To get out to the L2 point, it takes us about 30 days.

And on its way out there, we're deploying.

[man speaking indistinctly]

[Scarlin Hernandez] This is my first deployment.

I feel nervous.

Especially with this mission. It can't be serviced, right?

So any problems that arise, any challenges,

we have to take them head-on.

There are hundreds of us working, uh,

in the Mission Operations Center around the clock,

especially the flight operations team.

We're able to communicate with the telescope

via this Mission Operations Center.

We send commands to the telescope, or blocks of code,

to tell it what to do, what activity to perform.

We can't actually see the telescope in space, it's too far,

so we have a tool that's an animated model of the telescope,

where we can see the telescope unfolding.

As a woman, being Latina,

it makes me a unicorn in this industry.

And I didn't have anyone like me to look up to in this space.

I got my NASA badge when I was 19 years old.

I didn't expect to get there that fast, to such a big and prestigious place.

But as soon as I got there, I knew I was going to make my mark.

I develop code and procedures for the deployment system.

No matter what activity we're performing on orbit,

all of those systems combined have to function and flow as one.

[controller 1] Dep OC, that CR is pulled up.

You have first command during the window.

[engineer 1] Proceed. We are good to go.

[engineer 2] Copy that. Code execute.

[controller 2] The command line looks good. You're a go to execute.

[Scarlin] Execute.

[intriguing synth music playing]

[Mike] Most of the single point failures reside in the sunshield.

-If these mechanisms don't release… -[mechanism releasing]

…that's a bad day.

[intriguing synth music playing]

[clanks softly]

[controller 2] Okay, Dep Lead, your motor has moved to the hold state.

-And you're go to continue. -[Scarlin] Executing.

[dramatic synth music playing]

[controller 2] Copy that, boss. I am happy with that move.

Continue.

[Mike] No matter how many tests you do, just like a parachute,

it's only going to be as good as the last time you fold it.

And you're never gonna know how good that is

until you jump out of the plane and pull the rip cord.

[music continues]

[controller 3] Go to proceed onto step 031 for the group six.

[controller 2] Copy. On the wing.

[controller 3] And OC, that looks good. You are go to continue.

[controller 2] Good to go. Proceed. Go ahead and continue with a go.

Proc looks good. You're go to execute.

[Scarlin] Executing.

[controller 1] You are go to fire.

[controller 2] Good to go. Let's see how they both fire.

And OC, you are go to execute deploy.

[Scarlin] Execute.

[controller 4] I can confirm that all five layers of the sunshield

are fully tensioned.

[cheers and applause]

[man] All right!

Thank you, Dep Lead.

Significant milestone accomplished. Job well done, sunshield team.

Job well done.

[Mike] All right, congratulations, everybody. Congratulations.

It was a good day.

You know, it was hard-- hard to predict, and there it is.

Cooling the telescope, just the way it should.

It is a beautiful thing.

As of right now, we, uh-- we have eliminated 266

of the 344 single point failures.

They can't fail because they're no longer needed, they worked.

But you got to maintain the sense of caution,

because there's still some stuff to go.

[dramatic synth music playing]

-[man] Morning, Thomas. -Hey, everybody.

-[man] Morning. -[woman] Good morning.

[Thomas] Good to see you.

[controller 1] Stations at Madrid are green and standing by for handover.

[controller 2] And OC, Dep Ops on ops.

Dep Lead has verified those parameters. We are go with the motor move.

[dramatic music playing]

[Mike] If the wings of the primary mirror didn't latch,

they would actually vibrate in ways that we didn't want them to.

And that vibration would actually show up as a blurring of the image.

[controller 3] We have reached our full preload, so at this time…

-[man] Oh, wow, that's it. -…we are go to proceed onto step 046

to enable and activate SCS-256.

[controller 4] Dep Ops, this is Dep Lead on deployment,

and those parameters look good.

[controller 5] Copy, proceeding with motor move.

[Thomas] Come on, ball. Pitch it in there.

-Look, it's starting to come out. -[man] You can see it moving. Yeah.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Thomas] All right, we're almost halfway there at 54.

Look at that.

-[man] It's coming in. -[Thomas] Yeah. Keep going.

[music continues]

-Ninety-five now. Ninety-six. -[man] Yeah.

[Thomas sighs]

-There we go! -[man] Alright.

[all] Four…

three, two, one.

[controller 4] And we have a fully deployed JWST observatory.

[cheering]

-[man 1] Whoo-hoo! -[man 2] Primary mirror.

-[Thomas] We're there! -[man 2] That sure looks beautiful.

[man 1] Yeah.

-[man 2] Whoo! -[man 1] Wow.

[man 1 exhales]

[Thomas] God Almighty.

[man 2] How hard was that?

-[applause] -[laughing]

-[Mike] I was looking for you, first. -[laughing]

[Thomas] Talk to me. How are you feeling?

[Mike chuckles] How the record is,

it's been going smoother than we ever thought.

So to actually see it-- see it come together

the way it did was beautiful.

[Scarlin] Everything went so smoothly, just really exciting.

Wanted to pop some champagne, but unfortunately, I didn't have any so…

[laughs]

[Thomas] I want to tell you just how excited and emotional I am right now.

We have a deployed telescope on orbit.

I personally appreciate your sacrifice

that you've given to this magnificent telescope,

the likes of which the world has never seen.

So how does it feel to make history, everybody?

[man laughs] It feels awesome!

[gentle piano music playing]

[music continues]

[woman] JWST has completed all of its major deployments.

Things are going spectacular.

We have the biggest, most complex observatory

we've ever sent to space, and we can expect some awesome images.

Y'all, we did it!

[Amber] It's hard to conceptualize what those first images will be.

I study how galaxies change over time,

so I'm interested in how stars form in galaxies,

and how black holes form, and how those processes change over time.

So, I am most excited for the deep field images.

It's in these deep fields that we will be able to see

the most distant galaxies.

But it's about a million miles from Earth,

and there is definitely still a lot that could go wrong.

There always is.

[Mike] There are still 49 single point failure items that never go away.

And if any of those single point failure items fails,

we can lose the mission.

[suspenseful string music plays]

[announcer] An embarrassingly blurred Hubble Telescope.

One of the telescope's two mirrors is thought to be defective,

blurring its images.

The Hubble Space Telescope, we turn it on, it was out of focus.

The primary mirror, the focal length was wrong.

It was a disaster for many scientists that had counted on these images.

[Amber] To the astronomers working on it at the time, I can't imagine what--

what a letdown that was.

It was bad, you know?

Even for me as a kid, I remember.

Like, "Oh, no!"

[man] Jeff, you'll have your hands full.

You might wanna go ahead and put your helmet lights on.

Good idea.

[Thomas] Astronauts went up there and included a little optical piece.

Almost a little-- Like, glasses, right, that fixed that focal length.

[cheering]

-One bright pixel. -[man 1] Right there!

[man 2] Oh! Ho-ho-ho!

[man 3] There, there, there.

-[man 2] We can see the pixels. -We did it!

[Thomas] The hard part about Webb,

it's too far away.

If there's any problem, we cannot send astronauts to fix it.

[controller talking indistinctly]

[Mike] We'll align the telescope.

Essentially, refocusing it.

That's a complicated process.

[Amber] The ghost of Hubble definitely haunts this team and has for decades.

[Mike] Many of my mentors were involved in Hubble.

They all warned me about what that bad day is like.

That it's public, it's visible, it's ugly, and you don't want to live through that.

[indistinct chatter]

So over the last few hours, we have taken a bunch of calibration data

to measure the state of the telescope.

Literally none of us have looked at this yet.

There we go.

[all exclaiming]

[man 1] Galaxies all over.

[woman] Galaxies.

[man 2] There are a lot more galaxies than there are stars.

It is just gorgeous and sharp.

This is how it's supposed to be.

[man 3] He's correct.

[reporter] Six months after the most powerful telescope ever made

launched into space,

the team inside the Webb Space Telescope's flight control room is preparing

to reveal what astronomers all over the world

have been waiting for for decades,

the telescope's first full-color images.

You think this is, like, the best, sort of, orientation for this…

-For this grouping? -Yeah, you know…

I've tried different rotations,

but because it is, like, basically a square,

-we can do whatever we want. -Yeah.

[Alyssa] That infrared information is giving us so much more detail

than we could get with the Hubble in the visible.

But to actually see it,

and you're like, "There's just no… There's no doubting it now."

[DePasquale] The raw material we get from the telescope

starts out as a black-and-white image.

Then I dive down into the pixels

and make the color image pop as much as possible.

Because really, the-- the job is trying to unearth

the-- the richness and the complexity of the data

without changing anything in the data. It's all there.

The universe is, sort of, hiding in the darkness,

and we have to bring it out.

The colors in the image are really important.

They have astrophysical meaning.

We work with the scientists directly on this

and-- and get their take on what they're seeing in these images.

This is the red channel of the image, although it's black and white. This is--

When I combine everything in color, this will be red.

And so every distant galaxy in here, all these faint fuzzy objects,

these are gonna be the ones that show up and really pop as red.

Then I can bring in the green channel here,

and now you're seeing, as color comes to life,

just red and green.

And the greens are confined more to the, sort of, nearby galaxies,

and, of course, the stars.

And then, when I bring in the short wavelengths in blue,

the image comes to life.

These images have been so precious. They're like our children.

And, like, we've been, like, you know, nurturing them,

trying to get them ready for when they're revealed to the world.

I think that's just an important moment,

because it's not just an important feat for science.

I think it's-- it's an important feat for humanity.

And I think it's, like, a very exciting time.

And to be a part of something I think is so important

is just a huge honor.

[reporter 1] Today, our understanding of the universe is about to get clearer.

[reporter 2] It is. President Biden's going to unveil

the much-anticipated first full-color image

from NASA's Webb Space Telescope.

[Klaus Pontoppidan] I think we should start with the image the President

is unveiling tonight.

-If that's okay? -Perfect.

This is what we call Webb's first deep field.

Uh, this was the original reason for the observatory.

And we think this is the deepest view of the universe so far.

So…

-Please. -Wow.

-[Pontoppidan] So… -Wow.

So the deepest Hubble images took weeks to do.

We did this in a few hours.

-What you see is a… -[Bill] Beautiful.

…is a massive galaxy cluster.

When we look at a swirl like that, is that an entire galaxy?

[Klaus] An entire galaxy.

Every point you see here, almost, is a galaxy.

There's more than 7,000 in this picture.

Galaxies that we did not--

-Seven thousand in this picture? -Mm-hmm.

The size of this field is if you take a grain of sand,

and you hold it out--

-Yeah. -That's the angle.

It's a tiny field in the sky.

And everywhere else we have looked, the sky is filled with galaxies.

We see them immediately.

-See the little red dot there? -[Bill] Yes.

-It is the most distant one we found. -[Bill] My goodness.

-[Klaus] That's 13.1 billion years. -[Bill] Wow.

[Klaus] We're going to show that--

-The universe is 13.8 billion years old. -[Klaus] That's right.

When I describe this to the President, what do you want me to tell him?

What you're looking at is our own origin

and the origin of every galaxy and star in the universe.

-That's our history, right there. -[Klaus] It is-- It is our whole history.

[Thomas] Our whole history is right there.

The more that we find this cosmos is so large,

I want to know who I am and what I am.

And how do I fit in all of this?

[Biden] Today is a historic day for America and all of humanity.

We're gonna get a glimpse

of the oldest documented light in the history of the universe

from over 13 billion--

Let me say that again, 13 billion years ago.

It's hard to even fathom.

And now let's take a look at the very first image

from this miraculous telescope.

[dreamy music playing]

[applause]

[dreamy music continues]

Oh my gosh!

The first image from the James Webb Space Telescope.

And here it is.

Uh, galaxies to the edge of time.

Oh my gosh.

[laughs] Okay…

[exclaims softly] Ooh!

Wow.

It really is amazing.

Oh, my God.

I have no words.

The whole thing is a bit mind-boggling, everybody.

It's just-- It's just fantastic.

-Ah! Can you see the arcs? -[woman] Yeah.

-It's… It's max clusters. -[man] It's amazing, right?

It's a pretty cool photo. It's just gorgeous.

Oh, my gosh!

[in Arabic] Another message they're trying to convey through us,

is that this type of research is called...

[in Russian] …with the space telescope James Webb…

[in Spanish] We have never seen it before and we owe it

to the James Webb Space Telescope.

The reaction of myself and all my colleagues

was of sheer joyful amazement.

That image made us giddy when we saw it.

We knew in our hearts that whatever's out there,

we're going to see it.

[people chanting] JWST!

JWST! JWST! JWST!

[people cheering]

[female reporter] So, let's get ready to reveal our image.

There it is.

-It's called Stephan's Quintet. -[man] Oh!

-And it's wondrous. -[man] Oh!

-Giovanni, what do you think? -[applause]

The rays coming through.

It's like fog.

[dreamy synth music playing]

[Amber] The Pillars of Creation is a star-forming region

within our Milky Way galaxy.

Each of the dots of light that we're seeing in this image

is a star not unlike our own sun.

We, our own solar system, and even ourselves,

were born out of the same material

that we're seeing in these beautiful images.

The iron in our blood and the calcium in our bones

was literally formed out of a star that exploded billions of years ago.

Newborn stars are enshrouded in dust.

We need to be able to see through that dust,

and infrared light allows us to do that.

This is a dying star in its last gasp of its life.

This beautiful view of the Cartwheel Galaxy

gives us a closer look at what happens when galaxies collide.

The new discoveries from JWST in the field of exoplanet science are just incredible.

There was this recent discovery of carbon dioxide in a gas giant planet

orbiting a Sun-like star about 700 light years away.

It really is the first clear, detailed evidence for carbon dioxide

ever detected in a planet outside the solar system.

[music fades]

Still, it just blows me away.

It's overwhelming. I mean…

[chuckles]

Yeah, it's a bit overwhelming.

I think it's so-- it's such a good example of what, you know,

what we humans can do when we work together for something good.

There's so much bad in the world right now.

It's a really tough time.

And this is… this is good.

This is a-- a little bit of light…

[chuckles] …in what is otherwise a little bit of a dark time,

I think, for sure.

[intriguing piano music playing]

[Thomas] Webb is a demonstration of what's possible

when we come together and, uh, do something hard.

Ten thousand people, all of them with strengths and weaknesses,

all of them with many reasons why it shouldn't work,

coming together as an excellent team, and being successful at it.

We can do that,

imagine all the other problems we can solve.

So for me, it's-- Yeah, it's that hope that is up there in-- in space now, right?

You know, demonstrating its power every day.

[Scarlin] We made history, that we're looking back

13 and a half billion years.

I feel proud. I feel filled with hope.

You know, because these images today just show the world

that there's so much more to explore in our universe

and how we're connected.

This is only the beginning.

[Mike] I hope I can tell my grandkids I was on the team that built the telescope

that'll solve the really, really big question.

Right? "Are we alone or not?"

Every space telescope that's been put up

has found something they just didn't anticipate.

And I hope with something the size of James Webb

that, you know, we see something completely,

completely unexpected.

[music ends]

[intriguing synth music playing]