The Wait Was Worth It

KOUROU, French Guiana—More than 25 years ago, the Next Generation Space Telescope was mostly a dream, an idea for a complex instrument meant to see farther than Hubble ever could, which no one had ever attempted to build. A few years ago, the dream was ready to be assembled into a real observatory—gold-covered mirrors, sensitive instruments, a sophisticated sun shield. A couple of months ago, that telescope sailed across the Atlantic to a spaceport here in South America, and two days ago, tucked safely inside the tip of a rocket, it was pulled to the launchpad, its final stop on Earth.

And then this morning, the space telescope was airborne. The observatory, now known as the James Webb Space Telescope, named after a NASA administrator from the Apollo era, throttled into the sky on Christmas Day, trading the humid air of the French Guyanese jungle for the cold darkness of outer space. The observatory left Earth folded. Webb carries the hopes of countless scientists into the expanse, and, if the process works, it will have a deliciously .