The Insane Engineering of James Webb Telescope

We don't even blink at an annual defense budget of nearly 800 billion dollars, but many are startled at this telescope project costing 10 billion (over the course of a number of years). We have strange priorities as a species.

Back in 5th grade I went on a field trip to the NASA Goddard facility and we got to see parts of the satallite being built. Years later, I graduated high school, and they're about to launch it in 4 days.

As a high school physics teacher I'm so thrilled to use this video as education material after the summer break. Truly wonderful!

The Mid InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) was made by colleagues of me at my job at Astron in the Netherlands. This instrument is truly international in scope.

Just wanna add the launch went so well that it will double the lifespan of the James Webb telescope. They ended up using much less fuel than they thought they would need to put it in the Lagrange point.

ONE PHOTON PER SECOND?? 💀💀💀

NASA, after all these years I still get excited watching your explorations. As a teen, I sat in front of a black and white and watched as the clock ticked down with Shepard in Freedom 7. Then Glenn, followed by the other 5 Mercury pilots. Then Neil took the first step and we thought this is it we are reaching the stars and there is no stopping us. Years later I was part of the Search team in East Texas praying every time we found the astronauts. Congratulations to all the men and women around the world that made history with Webb.

Human determination has no no boundaries. From being mere hunters to creating super complex james web telescope, progress is unbelievable.

Excellent video, really enjoyed it! But a few minor mistakes to point out: 5:22 You say "83 °C" but have written "-83 °C". I assume it should be +83°C. 18:56 Infrared is (unlike you said) lower frequency than ultraviolet and gold reflects lower frequencies well. You're thinking about wavelength .

The JWST cryo cooling system is just something else entirely. I work as an engineer on land vehicle cooling systems, and the thing about cooling systems is you don't realise how little you understand about the science behind active heat transfer systems until you actually start designing them. The designers would have had to simulate and account for every single joule of thermal energy throughout the entire telescope, and then design such a cutting edge active cooling system with moving parts that can last for decades of non-stop operation with no servicing and with no allowances for failure. How many times the engineers would have woken up at night in a cold sweat! I'm not even one bit surprised that it cost $150 million to design.

As a steel fabricator, Swinging my 22 pound long shaft hammer accurately was always a proud achievement. This takes engineering to a different level. (Hope you appreciate the light hearted comment). Well impressed with this presentation.

this is absolutely insane. The sheer amount of precision and ingenuity it takes to accomplish something like this.. Imagine if the defense budget was directly towards aerospace engineering..

Real Engineering, whoever did your visuals for this episode was EXTREMELY talented and clearly understood the subject matter! Keep using this person!

If I was in charge of the deployment system, I don't think I'd sleep one second for the next two weeks.

I feel so blessed to have lived in this point in history just watching all the things we are inventing everything from the internet, cell phones, and the James Webb telescope. We had none of these things when I was a kid. It truly is humbling and amazing.

imagine NASA budget being like the military budget. I'm sure we would have like 100s of these telescopes already produced in the 90s.

I can't imagine the stress of "things that can go wrong", or the level of excitement for the team if this goes completely as planned

The graphics is incredible. The attention to detail was almost as good as the heat shield

It makes me so glad to say, that as of June 6th 2022, this telescope is successfully deployed, and will transmit its first official images in just over a month from now, July 12 2022. Human engineering is amazing.