The James Webb Space Telescope successfully launched earlier today from French Guiana, ending years of doubt and skepticism that the successor to Hubble would ever be finished.
The Europeans did their part with Ariane 5 and now it's up to a NASA that's been under constant criticism about overruns and a low joint confidence interval since the first delays were announced in the early part of the century and routinely since.
Now the question is if all of the extra money over 19 years of delays will pay off. Will it work? That we can't begin to know for a month because that's how long it will take to arrive in place on the other side of the moon. It can't be fixed way out there, it's either pass or fail, and failure might mean the end of Big Government Science in the US. Government-driven efforts have suffered a series of failures: the Superconducting Super Collider was scuttled and then the government Human Genome Project effort capitulated to the private sector for a joint success concession prize.
The private sector is doing what NASA could have done if they weren't a job works program.
Not all programs are at risk, NASA will still be able to put cute robots on Mars, but other NASA programs have been denied funding for years, some 40 worthwhile efforts, because James Webb Space Telescope suffered chronic overruns. If JWST doesn't work, small programs won't have trouble getting money again, because big ones will be out of the US.
If things go well, we'll get 10 years of better, farther of pictures than Hubble can provide from low earth orbit but even if it's successful it may be a challenge to get another one. It will have been in operation for half as long as it was delayed and responsible politicians may feel like there is better use for taxpayer money than seeing a little farther.
