Mark Sturtevant Loc: Grand Blanc, MI

🤞🏾🤞🏾🤞🏾!!!
Very late, and way over budget. But if it works, it will be amazing. Here is a segment from 60 Minutes about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMxdeUJ0v2c&t=799s

BassmanBruce Loc: Middle of the Mitten

I definitely have all my fingers and toes crossed. I wish it was going up on spacxex rocket instead of an arianne for safety reasons, but I understand the monetary reasoning for this pairing.

Go Baby Go!!!

ken_stern Loc: Yorba Linda, Ca

Let's HOPE all goes well
&
It never needs to be repaired!!!

kpmac Loc: Ragley, La

I hope everything works as planned.

birdman12 Loc: Pinopolis, SC

"God Speed" James Webb.

davidrb Loc: Half way there on the 45th Parallel

Hope it has been thoroughly tested BEFORE it is launched. Hubble was put in orbit before the problems involving its mirror were known. Nasanauts had to replace the faulty component before the thing worked properly. That might have been fixed more easily had the problem been discovered before launch. There will be great rewards when this eye looks at the beginning of time. Astrophysisists are giddy with anticipation.

alberio Loc: Casa Grande AZ

Arianne rockets are pretty reliable.

Mark Sturtevant Loc: Grand Blanc, MI

The Hubble story was a great lesson. As I understand it, a mirror is ground and meanwhile checked with a special instrument that precisely measures the curvature. It came out perfect, but that instrument had a tiny flaw -- a speck of paint that misaligned it by a very small amount. So the mirror was ground to be precisely wrong.
No one thought to check the instrument that was doing the checking.
There is a deep psychic memory about that debacle.

sippyjug104 Loc: Missouri

Here's a thought...The best government project can be reduced by a part provided by the lowest bid contract.

wrangler5 Loc: Missouri

For some perspective - the story I remember about the scale of the flaw is that if the Hubble mirror was supposed to be absolutely flat and was big enough to cover the US from Maine to California, the flaw was the equivalent of something like a 1 inch diameter rock sitting in the middle of Kansas.

Luckily, some very bright people figured out a way to compensate for the flaw, and the telescope itself was within reach of the Space Shuttle which could deliver the parts and technicians to fix it. That won't be possible for the Webb telescope - it will be parked at Lagrange point 2 which is about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, permanently in Earth's shadow from the Sun. So Webb has to work perfectly the first time, and every time thereafter. I've read elsewhere that there are something like 300 different points of failure, any one of which can kill the thing.

So there are some pretty tight sphincters around the world right now. Unfortunately, it will take months of setup and testing after the launch, even if everything seems to go perfectly, to see whether the captured data will actually live up to the design parameters. Let's all hope the years of design, testing and retesting will pay off, because what they expect to get from Webb will be really spectacular.

alberio Loc: Casa Grande AZ

My hopes are with the TMT in Hawaii. Much more serviceable and cost effective. However they still have the local naysayers to deal with.

BBurns Loc: South Bay, California

NASA’s Webb Space Telescope Confirmed for December 24 Launch.

Here is the latest online.
I have a friend who worked the program before retiring in 2017.
He is still in contact with an old coworker who is currently at the launch site.
Apparently, it is crazy busy, so they don’t make contact on a regular basis.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope launch: Live updates

If you have not seen these videos take the time to watch it. They are best watched on a big screen with good sound.

James Webb Space Telescope Launch and Deployment

29 Days on the Edge

bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

Already old technology being launched and still a long way from operational; successful launch, successful positioning, successful unfolding, successful communications, etc. Still a lot of uncertainties...

bwa

alberio Loc: Casa Grande AZ

👍👍👍

pendennis

Unfortunately, that's the world in which we conduct scientific experiments in space.

However, if Webb delivers anything equal to, or just above, that which has been delivered by Hubble, I will be happy.

After Hubble started delivering images, and those were posted to the public, I was absolutely awestruck at the images. If someone had told me to draw a picture of "Gaseous Pillars in M16", I'd have no idea where to begin. Granted, there are some estimations and image adjustments, but the sheer beauty of the images is amazing.