If December 22’s launch goes as planned then the engineers behind the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or “Webb” for short) are in for a nervous Christmas.

Forget that it was originally conceived in the 1990s and was first expected to launch in 2007. Forget also the initial rocket launch—usually viewed as the most nerve-wracking moment. This time it’s not the European Space Agency’s Ariane 5 rocket—due to lift Webb into space from the Guiana Space Center, Kourou, French Guiana on December 18, 2021—that’s giving engineers sleepless nights. It’s the 29 days of “space origami” they’ll have to endure after the launch as Webb unfolds from its collapse state into a “giant sunflower.”

You see, the technological marvel that is Webb is fully assembled, but folded into the 5.4 meter/17.7ft. fairing of the Ariane 5 for launch—the largest rocket fairing NASA could find. When it’s in-situ a whopping million miles/1.5 million kilometers from Earth at the second Lagrange point (L2) —almost certainly too far away for astronauts to fix if the worst happens—it will resemble a huge sunflower once unfurled.

Scientists hope the hi-tech sleeping bag will stop eyeballs being squashed by zero-gravity in space.

If everything goes to plan, Webb will remake astronomy by peering at cosmic phenomena such as the most distant galaxies ever seen, the atmospheres of far-off planets and the hearts of star-forming regions swaddled in dust. Roughly 100 times more powerful than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which has transformed our understanding of the cosmos over the past 31 years, Webb will reveal previously hidden aspects of the Universe.

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Three decades after it was conceived, Hubble’s successor is set for launch. Here’s why astronomers around the world can’t wait.

December 18th i will give a short speech at AIAA Space Philosophy Gathering 2021!

Here’s the link to register and follow the conference:

Sat, Dec 18 at 9 AM PST.

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Interested.

Newborn stars contributed to this chaos.

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Any parent of newborns know just how powerful even small things are.

The same is true in space, where baby stars in a section of a nebula, or gas cloud, create a series a powerful shockwaves visible in a new Hubble Space Telescope image.

Unlike Hubble, which orbits Earth and was visited by NASA astronauts for fixes and upgrades, Webb is going a million miles away to Lagrange Point 2—so Webb almost certainly can’t be fixed if anything goes wrong (though never write-off NASA).

NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or “Webb” for short) is due to go skywards—at long, long last—on December 18, 2021.

And he will also be the first space tourist to go to the moon in 2023.

Japanese billionaire and entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa is on his way to the International Space Station (ISS), after launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard Russia’s Soyuz MS-20 crew ship today, December 8, at 2:38 am ET (07:38 GMT).

“Dream come true,” the entrepreneur tweeted before boarding the three-seat Soyuz spacecraft that would launch him up into orbit. He is joined by Russian cosmonaut and pilot Alexander Misurkin and film producer Yozo Hirano, who will document the expedition for Maezawa’s YouTube channel.

A ‘dream’ mission for Yuzaku Maezawa.

NASA has warned that a giant asteroid bigger than the Eiffel Tower will break into Earth’s orbit in just over a week.

The 1,082-foot space rock is heading our way and should skim past us on December 11.

NASA has its eye on Asteroid 4,660 Nereus because it’s well over 492 feet long and will come within 4.6 million miles of Earth.

The US Space Force installed a high tech new radar system this week that it says will be able to detect objects the size of baseballs in orbit.

The massive monitoring system, dubbed the Long Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR), is located at the Clear Space Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska, according to The Anchorage Daily News. The radar is slated to support the US missile defense system and provide reconnaissance data in space.

“Today marks an extremely important milestone for US homeland defense,” US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) director Jon Hill said in a press release yesterday. “The LRDR has finished construction, and we can now begin the testing phase that will lead to the full operational use of this vital system.”