Redondo Beach-based Northrop Grumman Webb masters prepare for telescope launch
“The basic nature of human curiosity is to look up in the sky and wonder; how alone are we? Where do we come from, and are we alone? Who wants to be the generation that stops (learning)? I don’t. We’re in this continuum. We are a curious species, this is what we do.” — Scott Willoughby, program manager, James Webb Space Telescope. by Garth Meyer Built by humans in Redondo Beach, it will never be seen by us again. It launches into space Dec. 24 from French Guiana, taking a month to fly to its destination a million miles from Earth. If something goes wrong, like the last time, it will be unreachable. The $10 billion project is the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble telescope, for which a microscopically-too flat mirror blurred its images until a Space Shuttle crew went up and corrected it. The Webb will include no such opportunity for repair. Pointed more than 10,000 times farther out, named after the director of NASA in the time of President Kennedy, the Webb is seven times larger than Hubble, a hundred times more powerful and that much more fragile. While its predecessor was small enough to launch essentially fully-formed, this has to unfold in flight. As the…
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