The Ariane 5 rocket launches with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope onboard, from the ELA-3 Launch Zone of Europes Spaceport at the Guiana Space Centre at Europes Spaceport, at the Guiana Space Center on December 25, 2021, in Kourou, French Guiana. The James Webb Space Telescope (sometimes called JWST or Webb) is a large infrared telescope with a 21.3 foot (6.5 meter) primary mirror. The observatory will study every phase of cosmic history from within our solar system to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe.

Shown in this picture, the James Webb Space Telescope’s sunshield was deployed and tensioned by testing teams at Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, California, where final deployment tests were completed. Webb’s sunshield is designed to protect the telescope from light and heat emitted from the sun, Earth, and moon, and the observatory itself.

A photo provided by NASA shows assembly of the James Webb Space Telescope in a Northrop Grumman facility in Redondo Beach, Calif., in 2019. The Webb telescope is the biggest observatory built for launch into space. (Chris Gunn/NASA via The New York Times) — EDITORIAL USE ONLY —

On Christmas morning, while many families were waking up to open presents, a massive telescope folded like origami emerged from the confines of a European Space Agency rocket, on its way 1 million miles from the Earth to eventually orbit the sun. Astronomers around the world celebrated, many watching the launch together in their pajamas over Zoom.

The James Webb Space Telescope is undergoing the trickiest part of its mission: unfolding five layers of sun shields the size of a tennis court and its 18 hexagonal infrared mirrors spanning 21 feet. The shields will block heat from the sun to keep the telescope cold enough to allow the mirrors to capture infrared light with long wavelengths that can slip through clouds of dust, transmitting back the highest-resolution images we’ve ever seen of stars and galaxies.

In the simplest sense, Webb is a time machine portal that will alow scientists to peer back 13.7 billion years — 100 million years after the Big Bang — to observe how the very first galaxies formed. These baby pictures of galaxies will help answer fundamental questions about our existence, the fabric of space and the universe at large.

“Just imagine if for three years or so I didn’t have any pictures of my kids,” Thomas Zurbuchen, a NASA science mission chief, told the editorial board. “I see the birth — cosmic radiation — but nothing until they’re toddlers and running and walking around. I would miss a big part of their story.”

NASA scientists believe the telescope will also be able to identify potentially thousands more exoplanets — planets outside of our solar system that may even foster life — and the molecular components that make up their atmosphere. For those with science fiction fantasies that humans will one day be able to colonize planets well beyond Earth, such information will be tantalizing.

Yet the precariousness of this operation is enough to keep the entire space industrial complex on pins and needles. The sun shields are about as thin as human hair. One small rip could render the telescope completely ineffective and send nearly $11 billion worth of taxpayer dollars swirling down the drain. Unlike its aging observatory cousin, the Hubble telescope, which hangs out in low-Earth orbit, Webb will be well out of reach for astronauts to shuttle into space to repair it.

“There are over 300 things, any one of which goes wrong, it is not a good day,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, told the Los Angeles Times. “So the whole thing has got to work perfectly.”

The fact that this new observatory even got to the point of hurtling into space is a feat unto itself — the culmination of such groundbreaking engineering that it took more than 10,000 people from 14 different countries working 40 million hours to accomplish, overcoming numerous delays and logistical challenges.

The concept of Webb — named for former NASA administrator James Webb — was first developed in 1989, before Hubble launched in 1990, but didn’t begin construction until 15 years later. The telescope was endorsed as the top-ranked project in the National Research Council’s astronomy decadal survey in 2000, but most of the technology required to build it was either in its infancy or didn’t exist yet. When the technology finally caught up to the ambition, testing the project exposed numerous flaws: the sunshield ripped during a practice run; fasteners fell off during vibration tests. Even after it arrived at the launch site in French Guiana, clamps came loose and communications between the telescope and rocket malfunctioned.

That’s nothing compared to the near-death experience Webb went through when it arrived at the Johnson Space Center in 2017. The telescope came to Houston for thermal vacuum testing, which simulates the temperatures and vacuum of space. Scientists at the space center had spent 45 days preparing the testing chamber when Hurricane Harvey blew through town. The Chronicle’s Andrea Leinfelder reported that while the storm dumped rain across the region, Johnson Space Center employees slept in conference rooms with water leaking through ceiling tiles, all to ensure that the telescope wasn’t damaged.

In the end, the years of trial and error will be well worth it once those first images from Webb are transmitted back to Earth in six months. Science is, of course, not immune to public scrutiny and the project is expensive — $11 billion over 24 years. But that investment accounts for only 0.0095 percent of all U.S. spending during this period. We believe invaluable insights into our cosmos are more than worth the price tag.

For all who have spent any time pondering the significance of life and how we all came to be, we finally have the technology within our grasp to watch some of the earliest chapters. At a time when space flight is the province of billionaires in search of new hobbies, it’s worth celebrating the Webb telescope commencing an entirely new chapter of space exploration that allows us to learn more of how we fit in the grand scheme of our sprawling universe.

The Editorial Board is made up of opinion journalists with wide-ranging expertise whose consensus opinions and endorsements represent the voice of the institution - defined as the board members, their editor and the publisher. The board is separate from the newsroom and other sections of the paper.

As a result, rents have spiked and investors have begun snapping up apartment complexes at historically high rates — a dynamic that economic forecasters believe will persist into next year.