Kaplan, 66, has spent a career in aerospace, from a decade at the US Naval Research Lab in Washington where he worked on space-based radars meant to counter Soviet ICBMs, to NASA, Ball Aerospace (the Colorado company that built Webb’s now-famous honeycomb mirror), Boeing to work on planetary probes, and finally, in a plot twist, a bittersweet five-year sojourn in Israel, where he became a citizen and worked closely with SpaceIL, the Israel Space Agency and the Israeli aerospace industry. Shortly after Webb’s picture-perfect launch into space on Christmas Day, The Times of Israel caught up with Michael Kaplan, a former NASA engineer who headed the space agency’s telescope planning in the 1990s and was one of Webb’s initiators, for a video interview from his home in Colorado on how Webb has already pushed the boundaries of humanity’s engineering capabilities and will soon dramatically grow our knowledge of the early universe, on why Israel’s innovative culture can paradoxically make it bad at space engineering, and where the near future of space travel is headed. The launch from Earth was so perfectly aimed that NASA announced it would need less fuel for the correction burns, potentially extending the ten-year estimate for Webb’s operation by several years. Worryingly for the superstitiously inclined, everything seems to have gone extremely well so far. Webb is an astonishing gamble, a $10 billion megalith so complex and so promising it seems a hubristic provocation against the gods. Reaction wheels, dozens of actuators that move and contort the mirror segments, a unique refrigeration system, the final correction burn delivering the telescope into its L2 orbit – all have to work perfectly, because no currently existing spacefaring technology will allow NASA to send anyone to fix it. The primary mirror, the first telescope mirror ever put into space in individually mobile segments, must deploy perfectly for the telescope to catch the hoped-for glimpses of the earliest universe.
The heatshield, a stack of five unfathomably thin sheets of a material called Kapton, the thickest of them just five- hundredths of a millimeter thick, has countless points of failure in its unfolding machinery.
It’s a spot that allows the telescope, the most sensitive and sophisticated instrument ever put in space, to keep all the major nearby sources of heat and radiation, whether Sun, Earth, Moon, or the telescope’s own electronics and attitude jets, safely to one side of its tennis-court sized heatshield.Ī great deal has to go perfectly right. The James Webb telescope is coasting to its final orbit around the sun at “L2,” a point in space about a million miles farther out from the sun than Earth. It’s a long, agonizing wait for astronomers.
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