The NASA scientists behind the James Webb Space Telescope have spent the better part of the past 26 years pleading for three things: patience, time and, in no small measure, money. It was in 1996 that a committee of astronomers working with the space agency first proposed a next-generation space telescope that would be capable of peering 13.6 billion light years away—detecting infrared light that has been traveling to us since just 200 million years after the Big Bang. The telescope, they promised, would be ready to launch by 2007 and would carry a price tag of just $500 million—cheap, as these things go.
It didn’t work out that way. That forecast 2007 launch didn’t happen until Christmas Day 2021, and as for that $500 million cost? That ballooned to $10 billion. But the astronomers’ promise remained the same: the images the new telescope revealed would be spectacular.
Read more at TIME Magazine.