Hubble's enormous, ambitious successor is poised to change our understanding of the universe - Salon

Folded like a $9.7 billion piece of metal origami and nestled into the nose of an Ariane 5 rocket, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will, in late December, be sent nearly one million miles from the surface of the Earth.

Over two decades of work — totaling 100 million hours of labor from more than 1,000 scientists, engineers, and technicians — went into the development of this next-generation space telescope.

In outer space, deploying the telescope will take a total of 29 days, an intensely nerve-racking window in which hundreds of discrete release mechanisms need to fire in perfect succession. .

Articles in The Washington Post and NPR detailed a posthumous investigation into the career of James Webb, a former leader at NASA and the telescope's namesake, who stood accused of discriminating against LGBTQ government employees in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s.

But a NASA investigation concluded that the name will stay. .

"NASA's History Office conducted an exhaustive search through currently accessible archives on James Webb and his career," NASA spokeswoman Karen Fox told the Washington Post in a statement.

"They also talked to experts who previously researched the topic extensively… NASA found no evidence at this point that warrants changing the name of the James Webb Space Telescope."  .