LAST Christmas, I woke early in the morning, which is unusual for me. Not only am I a practising Jew, but it has been a few decades since I was a kid in the household of my non-Jewish parent, waking up eager for gifts. But Christmas 2021 was different. NASA-in partnership with the European Space Agency and other organisations - was launching the next in its series of Great Observatories. I was up early because I wanted to watch and because I was nervous as hell: what if it blew up during launch? The final price tag for the instrument NASA calls the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was $10 billion. This sounds like a literally astronomical sum of money, but to situate it in context: Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe films have grossed almost three times this amount in less than the decades invested in JWST. Even so, $10 billion might be relatively small compared with the annual US Department of Defense budget (which is 194 times bigger), but to us in the astronomy community, it is a big number that has drawn bad press over the years.
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an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, and a core faculty member in women's studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her research in theoretical physics focuses on cosmology, neutron stars and particles beyond the standard model;
