Employees and guests at JWST prime contractor Northrop Grumman Space Park in Redondo Beach, California, are seen on screen as they watch the broadcast releasing the first full-color images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope on July 12 at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. (

The technical achievements of deploying JWST and the anticipation about its first images have overcome what JWST had been known for: billions of dollars in cost overruns and years of schedule delays.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...