NOVA: "Ultimate Space Telescope" (WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, January 17) I watched a couple of science shows on KPBS – Wednesday has become their “science night” – including a 2022 NOVA episode on the James Webb Space Telescope called “Ultimate Space Telescope” and a Secrets of the Dead show from 2015 called “Ben Franklin’s Bones.” I’m sure “Ultimate Space Telescope” will turn out to be a misnomer because, just as the scientists of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) built Webb because they exhausted everything they could discover with the previous Hubble Space Telescope, someday (assuming the human population and civilization survive that long) they will build another one that will surpass Webb. The show, written and directed by Terri Randall and narrated by Craig Sechler, featured 23 interviewees plus one person, U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland), shown in an archival clip threatening NASA scientists and other officials that if they didn’t get Webb up in the air and working in space, she would personally make sure the funding spigot was closed. The Webb telescope was conceived in 1995 and the original launch date was supposed to be in 2007, but they missed that time window by 15 years. Part of the problem was that the telescope was so huge, and its mechanism essentially was folded together like a piece of Japanese origami – a comparison actually made in the program – there were a possible 354 points of failure. What’s worse, the Webb was being designed to take advantage of a so-called “G2” effect of gravity within the solar system, which meant it had to be designed to survive both bitter cold and intense heat. Also the “G2” layer was so far from Earth (over 1,000 miles) that they couldn’t send a crew of astronauts to fix it the way they did with Hubble, which went up with its mirrors horrifically out of focus and a space crew had to make highly dangerous emergency repairs to get it up and running again and get its camera in focus.

The program was basically a lot of suspense points over whether the telescope would unwrap itself in space properly, and each part would come out in the right order – including a super-thin cover of foil designed to shield the Webb’s delicate mechanisms from the heat of the sun (while they were simultaneously relying on the sun to power it in the first place) and the array of mirrors covered in an ultra-thin film of gold they were relying on to do the actual astronomical observations. One welcome development in today’s space program is the personnel are both international and multicultural. If you see the documentaries on the Apollo missions the ground crew at Mission Control is a sea of white male faces. No more: the personnel in charge of the Webb telescope includes white, Black, Brown and Asian people, and are almost evenly divided between men and women (my list of 23 interviewees includes 13 men and 10 women). Also the telescope was launched into space in the first place in French Guiana on a European Ariane-5 rocket (a good thing they didn’t entrust the mission to one of Elon Musk’s notoriously unreliable rockets!), though this meant some dicey transportations of the craft from Baltimore, where it was built; to Houston, where it was tested; to the West Coast, where it was loaded onto a ship; and finally through the Panama Canal to French Guiana for the actual launch. Much of the information Webb was supposed to glean from the universe was an expansion of the sheer number of galaxies already discovered by Hubble – one of the biggest changes Hubble produced in our understanding of the universe was that areas of space we’d always assumed were totally empty were actually filled with galaxies, which we couldn’t see before only because our telescopes were handicapped by the amount of energy an object had to emit before we could see it at all through the obstructions of heat and light from the sun, Earth itself and the moon.

Some of the galaxies discovered with Hubble are elongated and red – the effect of the so-called “red shift” based on the sheer amount of space the light from a faraway galaxy has to travel before we, even with an amazing tool like Webb orbiting about 2,000 miles from Earth, can see it. One of the scientists compared it to Salvador Dali’s famous 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory – the one in which watches bend over and literally melt over tree branches – and the Dali painting was actually put on TV to illustrate the point. The show kept reminding me of the old adage, “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” In an era in which it’s become fashionable to denounce big projects as boondoggles inherently doomed to failure, Webb’s story stands as a triumph of the human spirit, evidence that if we knuckle down to it and work together on a major project, we can do something big that will expand our knowledge of the universe. Even the minor tizzy about the name – it was named after James Webb, the official in charge of NASA during the Apollo missions, who in the 1950’s had submitted a paper to Congress about the employment of “homosexuals and other sex perverts” in government, which led a number of Queer activists to demand a last-minute change in the name – doesn’t take away our admiration for the sheer size and scope of the achievement and the fact that everything on board worked as it was supposed to and is advancing the frontiers of human understanding. It’s also remarkable that despite the wrenching political changes during the time Webb was being worked on – it started when Bill Clinton was President and survived George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, and finally got launched under Joe Biden – didn’t derail the project.