Decades of meticulous planning and they couldn't give their teams a day off on Christmas? Of course it could be that consensus was this beats any other kind of activity that day in which case fair enough. :-)
Well, according to the original planning it should have launched before Christmas. It was only the weather delaying it by one day. I guess once they were ready for the launch, they want to avoid to delay it any longer than needed. Not sure, how long the rocket can be "stored" in launch-ready state before it has to be serviced again.
Oh cool, I get to celebrate his birthday twice per year now. That said, strangely enough, if the calendar changed after my death and people were still celebrating my birthday, I'd expect people to celebrate the day on the calendar I used rather than the accurate day.
Since Isaac Newton was actually born extremely prematurely, at less than 30 weeks of pregnancy, maybe he was the one rushing to match the date of the JWST launch. :P
I think spending Christmas wringing your hands unsure if your $10B decades-in-development baby is going to make it to orbit sounds incredibly stressful...
It's going to be awesome for us to watch but I feel for all the folks that worked on this.
FWIW: given the extraordinarily complicated mechanical design, merely reaching orbit is the "easy part". The real imagined disasters won't happen until the mirrors assemble.
True, though it’s also worth considering that Webb is going far beyond “orbit“ as we generally think of it. I don’t know how much has been launched all the way out to L2 before, but it’s probably an order of magnitude less than what’s in Earth orbit.
Your intuition is quite right, there is way less satellites parked around L2 than in low earth orbit for example.
But that doesn't really pose too big of a challenges in itself. It is of course far, both distance wise and energetically.
The main complication often mentioned is if something is wrong with the telescope it makes it very unlikely that a crew can visit it to fix it. The way for example how they repaired Hubble is unlikely to happen with Webb.
Meh, but there's nothing to hit in space. The energy required to reach a routine geosynchronous orbit is already ~85% of escape velocity. The added boost is minimally more dangerous and the trip is just empty hours. "Time" does kill spacecraft, but not often.
The Webb self-assembly is absolutely where the scary bits lurk.
Particularly given the launch record of the Ariane 5 platform. I did some quick research, and no modern launch platform has as high a mission failure rate (4.5%.) The Delta family comes close at 4.4%, but that's a 50yr launch history. The Delta 4 iteration has had no failures.
The Ariane 5 is batting 106 for 111 which is pretty good odds and perfectly respectable for a heavy lift vehicle... but not so much so that I don't wish it was launching on an Atlas 5 instead.
Ariane 5 had some early problems, the first failure even became a case study in critical software development. But it had only had one partial failure after the 17th launch: the payload was launched to the wrong orbit because the wrong coordinates were put in the computer. A huge QA problem but not the fault of the launcher which did exactly as told.
Now, both Ariane 5 and Atlas 5 are extremely reliable, mature rockets.
I really don't get your fixation about this: the people involved are all most likely extremely happy to see their creation fly and to have Christmas take a backseat to that.
Let's just hope it all goes well, this is one of the most complex space endeavors we've ever tried, and if it fails it will have many negative long term implications.
I did not get your real or feigned ignorance that Christmas is a much more significant holiday to the vast majority of the people involved than the Feast of the Ass.
my personal preference is irrelevant. my comment was regarding whether it is tractable to plan around Christmas, or unreasonable because there are too many holidays of comparable significance.
Too many holidays might be a factor but I really doubt it's a large one. The bigger reason is you just don't delay a 20 year $10billion project for any holiday.
Some of the grunts might be disappointed but having worked on way less important things that were launched on holidays, I can guarantee anyone significantly involved in the project is just happy to see it get off the ground no matter what day. You have a good window for launch, you take it