Officials could track the boat’s whereabouts only by frantically checking shipping ledgers.
The JCMT team had no line of communication to the captain during this quite unauthorized trek. The boat then idled outside the Panama Canal, purportedly awaiting special clearance for its explosive cargo, before heading to Ecuador, where it unloaded the stuff. Instead, the boat sailed to Holland, where it picked up a shipment of dangerous explosives, presumably for a side job. Read: The spacecraft that filled the galaxy with planets
The captain was supposed to sail right to Hawaii. According to Richard Hills, a JCMT project scientist, the vessel hired to transport the structure broke down at the last minute, and the job was given to a commercial captain and his small boat. In 1984, a steel structure for the observatory was prepared for transport from England, where it was built, to Hawaii, where it would protect the telescope. Perhaps the most dramatic mishap in modern history is the story of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, or JCMT for short. The hardware was found stuffed in the trash behind a nearby hotel, so scratched up that the observatory had to send it off for repairs. Langley managed to persuade the thief to divulge the location of the lens in exchange for keeping the man’s identity out of the papers. Langley and the thief met and “argued into the night” the astronomer refused to pay the thief’s ransom, believing that it would spur “lens-napping” at other institutions. “The story goes that Langley receives a letter in the mail from the foul fiend, and he says, ‘Meet me in the woods behind the observatory at midnight, or you’ll never see your lens again,’” Lou Coban, the observatory’s manager, told me. The lens of the observatory’s telescope had been stolen. The astronomer Samuel Langley, the observatory’s director, had just returned from a conference when his employees rushed him to the top of the building. One of the earliest known calamities of this category occurred at the Allegheny Observatory, in Pittsburgh, in 1872. (Webb is particularly enticing with 18 gold-plated mirrors arranged in a honeycomb shape, the instrument will be perhaps the most ornate telescope in space.) The history of astronomy research is sprinkled with shipping mishaps and sinister plots, driven by very earthly motivations. Telescopes are strange, elaborate, expensive objects, and they attract attention. But the concern is not entirely unfounded. All this secrecy is just one more precaution. There are many more realistic circumstances that could derail the mission than marauders at sea, but for a project that has been through so much-for a telescope that was initially supposed to launch in 2007, the year the first iPhone was released-pirates might as well happen too.Ī NASA spokesperson told me Webb will sail sometime in late July or mid-August, but did not respond to questions about specific measures, such as whether the U.S. The James Webb space telescope has taken far longer to develop than anyone anticipated after more than 20 years of work, it’s finally supposed to launch in late October. But the playful commentary carried a hint of unease. When Conselice tweeted about the meeting, other scientists responded with jokes about swashbucklers and st arrrs.
“Why would you announce that you’re going to be shipping on a certain day something that is worth over $10 billion,” he explained to me, “that you could easily put in a boat” and sail away with? Christopher Conselice, an astrophysicist at the University of Manchester who attended the meeting, was at first baffled by the concern because, well, pirates, but it quickly clicked. Its departure date will be kept secret, someone said at the meeting, to protect against pirates who might want to capture the precious cargo and hold it for ransom. Webb, with a mirror as tall as a two-story building and a protective shield the size of a tennis court, is too large for a plane. Later this year, the telescope will travel by ship to a launch site in South America, passing through the Panama Canal to reach French Guiana. The topic came up at a recent meeting about NASA’s James Webb space telescope, named for a former administrator of the space agency.
So, naturally, the people responsible for the telescope’s safety are now thinking about pirates. Name a problem, and this telescope-meant to be the most powerful of its kind, a worthy successor to the famous Hubble- has faced it: poor management, technical errors, budget overruns, schedule delays, and a pandemic. NASA’s new space telescope has had a rough go.
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