The Incredibly Fascinating Story of the James Webb Telescope

With humor, clarity and enthusiasm, Richard Panek’s ‘Pillars of Creation’ presents the math and science of building, launching, and using the space telescope.

"Pillars of Creation: How the James Webb Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos" by Richard Panek.

Richard Panek has introduced a most complex undertaking within a most complex science and made it all so very simple. In his new work, “Pillars of Creation: How the James Webb Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos,” he doesn’t merely provide the reader with a history of the incredibly powerful and relatively recently launched James Webb Telescope. He gives a history of the telescope in general.

The book, in spite of its subject matter, is rather brief. It succeeds in taking one of the greatest, if not the greatest techno-scientific breakthroughs of the 21st century and making it easily understandable. The elimination of cosmological jargon (or at least most of it), the abundance of humor (including a Spinal Tap reference), and the use of easy-to-follow graphics allow readers to follow along.

Panek, however, doesn’t cheapen this intriguing story. The narrative is cleverly orchestrated, pulling from the historical perspectives of cosmology and its early founders, the increasing power of telescopes and how they were constructed, and the 20th-century scientists, primarily Americans, who pursued and stressed over the creation of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Panek seamlessly ties together the history, people, and the technological advances to form an unforgettable telling.

Close Calls

But the author’s work is not simply about all the things that went right. There were plenty of things that went wrong—so wrong that the JWST almost never left Earth. Delay after delay not only added over a decade to the launch date, but billions of dollars—projected at $1 billion and ending at $8.8 billion—to complete the project. Of course, NASA, and government agencies in general, have rarely been bastions of timely and cost-efficient projects.

Panek notes how the idea for the JWST originated shortly after the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) launched into orbit in 1990. (It now resides 325 miles from Earth.) Along with the JWST problems, the author briefly discusses the drama of the HST, like when the telescope’s primary mirror was out of focus. Had that not been corrected, the JWST would have remained a mere idea.

Panek reflects that when the mirror was fixed, the HST was “back in business, and business was booming.” The images coming from HST were rapidly changing the way people saw the universe. “The revelations were arriving with such frequency,” Panek writes, “that astronomers could hardly believe their good fortune at being astronomers at this particular moment in the history of science.”

A Most Enthusiastic Author

“Now, the exploration of space meant seeing the universe for yourself,” he wrote. He added: “You could sit at your desktop computer … and plant the mouthpiece and earpiece ends of a landline phone into the corresponding cushions of a modem, dial up the provider number, wait through a soft-jazz version of an MRI exam, monitor the horizontal bar at the bottom of the screen … and then, if you were lucky, see an image that might alter your understanding of space and time.”

This paragraph demonstrates not only the humor and good feeling of Panek’s writing, but it also demonstrates his enthusiasm. It’s  no wonder that he has become one of the country’s best scientific communicators. He doesn’t simply help you understand the science, he helps you enjoy understanding it. That’s a mighty accomplishment, especially for one (me) who has always struggled through the subjects of both math and science.

Absolutely Fascinating

One doesn’t have to have a keen interest in math or science, however, to appreciate what the HST, and the JWST, have allowed cosmologists to accomplish and continue to accomplish. It’s nothing short of mind boggling, and that’s putting it mildly. All of a sudden, humans could see billions and billions of light years into space, and therefore (this is the fun mathematics of the book) into the past and closer to the origin of the universe: galaxies, planets, moons, nebulae, black holes. As Panek noted, the “Webb, in short, would be testing our understanding of the universe at the most fundamental levels.”

Throughout the book, the reader is presented with answers to that inevitable question: What is out there?

Then, of course, there is the science behind manufacturing this approximately $9 billion telescope that was launched 1 million miles into space, settling in what is called a LaGrange point, specifically L2. The L2 happens to be in Earth’s shadow so as to protect it from the sun’s heat.

To deal with that heat, a “sunshield consisting of five layers, each layer the length of a long tennis lob and width of a tissue” was built and placed on the telescope. The sunshield had to be capable of resisting temperatures hundreds of degrees above zero on one side and hundreds of degrees below zero on the other—not to mention the telescope’s 18-hexagonal-shaped mirror technology.

It truly is all so fascinating, and Panek captures the history, science, and results beautifully. “Pillars of Creation” was one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a long time. It was indeed a book I couldn’t  put down, and, if it’s not obvious yet, I highly recommend it.

’Pillars of Creation: How the James Webb Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos’ By Richard Panek Little, Brown, and Company, Oct. 22, 2024 Hardover: 256 pages

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