On this grim anniversary of Trumpian insanity come to a pinhead, I have chosen to instead feature something uplifting — literally.
That being the Christmas Day launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, a joint project between the United States, Canada and Europe. Then, at 7:20 a.m. ET, this magnificent beast of astrophysical splendor hurled its 13,000 pounds from Earth's obstinate gravity, heading out on a one-month, one-million mile odyssey to an orbit around our little planet's heat lamp. (So far, traveling at one-third of a mile per second, it has completed more than 68% of its flight path, with less than 300,000 miles to go.)
In its five-to-10-year lifespan, Webb will look to the universe's cradle — the Big Bang — with much better eyesight than Hubble's. Its 1990 launch enabled astrophysicists to witness the cosmos' birth after some 400 million years, while Webb will cut the postnatal timespan to 100 million — within Creation's 14-billion-year expanse, less time than a baby's burp.
Along the way, Webb will vastly improve our knowledge of black holes, stars' parturition, the universe's infant galaxies, signs of distant life, and Nature only knows what else. To accomplish all this, astro-engineers had to come up with 10 fresh technologies, much like Issac Newton's on-the-fly conception of calculus as a mathematical steppingstone to comprehending gravity. Webb's mirror, for instance, possesses six-times the image-collecting size of Hubble's, and is 100 times more discerning in its imagery.
Says one of the project's scientists, "Some of the deep field work that Hubble has done, they would look in a particular field for a couple of weeks. Webb can reach that kind of sensitivity limit in seven or eight hours." Thus astrophysicists can come to work in the morning and be done with their cosmic gazing before dinner.
That's just ... awesome — indeed a trifle more "awesome" than a new Taylor Swift recording or Panera's latest soup. It's refreshing to use the adjective in its truest meaning of awe-inspiring reverence. Webb's creation to discover Creation — whose explosive, stellar elements now constitute our physical bodies and your front lawn's geraniums — is a phenomenal testament to humankind's ingenuity, resourcefulness, and childlike sense of wonder. May we never lose it.
We damn near did, when 2011's Tea-Partying U.S. House of Representatives attempted to cancel the Webb Telescope project. Republicans' Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee proposed slashing NASA’s budget to a pre-2008 amount, which a Yale astrophysicist attacked as "kill[ing] U.S. space science for decades." As for Webb's murder, the House committee justified it because of the project's cost overruns, ultimately coming to $10 billion. Contemporaneously, the Defense Department was spending an inclusive $20 billion a year to air-condition its Iraq and Afghanistan tents.
Of course Webb survived the onslaught of anti-scientific Republican puddin' heads. And in a little less than three months from now, it will disgorge its first celestial images. To state that that's exhilarating is a proud understatement.