“It set us back months – about 10 months – that’s the only thing,” Mr Robinson said. The launch date was pushed back to March 2021, and the price went up another $800 million.
The incident appeared to be a repeat of previous problems encountered by Webb. project. When the Webb Telescope was named in 2002, it had an estimated budget of $1 billion to $3.5 billion to launch in early 2010. When 2010 rolled around, the launch date moved to 2014 and the estimated cost of telescope rose to $5.1 billion. . After reviews found the budget and schedule to be unrealistic, in 2011 NASA reset the program with a much higher budget of just $8 billion and an October 2018 launch date.
A few years after the 2011 reset, the software seemed to be in good shape. “They were cutting stages,” Mr Robinson said. “Really good margin on the table.”
But he added: “There are things going on there that you don’t see. Ghosts always get you, don’t they?’
For the bolts that popped out during the vibration test, it turned out that the engineering drawings did not specify how much torque to apply. This was left up to the contractor, Northrop Grumman, to decide and was not tight enough.
“You have to have specifications to make sure they’re right,” Mr Robinson said.
The Control Board published its report, noting a series of problems and making 32 recommendations. Mr Robinson said NASA had tracked them all down.
One of the recommendations was to conduct an audit of the entire spacecraft to identify “built-in problems”—errors that had gone unnoticed.
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