As you read these words, there are likely dozens of algorithms making predictions about you. It was probably an algorithm that determined that you would be exposed to this article because it predicted you would read it. Algorithmic predictions can determine whether you get a loan or a job or an apartment or insurance, and much more.
These predictive analytics are conquering more and more spheres of life. And yet no one has asked your permission to make such forecasts. No governmental agency is supervising them. No one is informing you about the prophecies that determine your fate. Even worse, a search through academic literature for the ethics of prediction shows it is an underexplored field of knowledge. As a society, we haven’t thought through the ethical implications of making predictions about people—beings who are supposed to be infused with agency and free will.
Defying the odds is at the heart of what it means to be human. Our greatest heroes are those who defied their odds: Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Marie Curie, Hellen Keller, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, and beyond. They all succeeded wildly beyond expectations. Every school teacher knows kids who have achieved more than was dealt in their cards. In addition to improving everyone’s baseline, we want a society that allows and stimulates actions that defy the odds. Yet the more we use AI to categorize people, predict their future, and treat them accordingly, the more we narrow human agency, which will in turn expose us to unchartered risks.
Human beings have been using prediction since before the Oracle of Delphi. Wars were waged on the basis of those predictions. In more recent decades, prediction has been used to inform practices such as setting insurance premiums. Those forecasts tended to be about large groups of people—for example, how many people out of 100,000 will crash their cars. Some of those individuals would be more careful and lucky than others, but premiums were roughly homogenous (except for broad categories like age groups) under the assumption that pooling risks allows the higher costs of the less careful and lucky to be offset by the relatively lower costs of the careful and lucky. The larger the pool, the more predictable and stable premiums were.
Today, prediction is mostly done through machine learning algorithms that use statistics to fill in the blanks of the unknown. Text algorithms use enormous language databases to predict the most plausible ending to a string of words. Game algorithms use data from past games to predict the best possible next move. And algorithms that are applied to human behavior use historical data to infer our future: what we are going to buy, whether we are planning to change jobs, whether we are going to get sick, whether we are going to commit a crime or crash our car. Under such a model, insurance is no longer about pooling risk from large sets of people. Rather, predictions have become individualized, and you are increasingly paying your own way, according to your personal risk scores—which raises a new set of ethical concerns.
An important characteristic of predictions is that they do not describe reality. Forecasting is about the future, not the present, and the future is something that has yet to become real. A prediction is a guess, and all sorts of subjective assessments and biases regarding risk and values are built into it. There can be forecasts that are more or less accurate, to be sure, but the relationship between probability and actuality is much more tenuous and ethically problematic than some assume.
Institutions today, however, often try to pass off predictions as if they were a model of objective reality. And even when AI’s forecasts are merely probabilistic, they are often interpreted as deterministic in practice—partly because human beings are bad at understanding probability and partly because the incentives around avoiding risk end up reinforcing the prediction. (For example, if someone is predicted to be 75 percent likely to be a bad employee, companies will not want to take the risk of hiring them when they have candidates with a lower risk score).
This year saw more space tourists fly to space on a bunch of different systems, and the story has only just begun.
Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and SpaceX each flew their first tourist-focused missions this year, sending aloft several people each with minimal training in professional spaceflight. Meanwhile, Roscosmos (the Russian federal space agency) brought two sets of space tourists into space, including a mission with Space Adventures.
With 2022 also set to be busy, between more tourist flights and the expected addition of company Axiom Space (using a SpaceX Crew Dragon), we rounded up some of the main milestones of 2021 below.
The four members of the Axiom Space Ax-1 crew: Michael Lopez-Alegria, former NASA astronaut, Axiom Space vice president and Ax-1 commander; Larry Connor, U.S. real estate entrepreneur and Ax-1 pilot; Mark Pathy, Canadian investor and philanthropist; and Eytan Stibbe, Israeli businessman and fighter pilot. (Image credit: collectSPACE.com)
Axiom Space revealed its clients Jan. 26 for its first privately-funded and operated mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Called Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1), the flight is arranged under a commercial agreement with NASA.
Slated to launch on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraftare Larry Connor, an American real estate and technology entrepreneur; Eytan Stibbe, a businessman and former Israeli fighter pilot; Mark Pathy, a Canadian investor and philanthropist; and Michael Lopez-Alegria, a retired NASA astronaut with nearly 260 days in space already across four missions.
In June, SpaceX and Axiom announced an agreement to fly three more missions to the orbiting complex after Ax-1. NASA officially cleared the Ax-1 crew for flight on Dec. 20.
2) Starship launches test flight and sticks the landing
After several attempts on previous test landing that didn’t make it safely to landing, SpaceX’s Starship SN-15 prototype launched its own test flight May 5 and made it all the way from takeoff to touchdown.
The uncrewed test flight coincidentally fell on the 60th anniversary of the United States’ first-ever crewed spaceflight, which saw NASA astronaut Alan Shepard make it to suborbital space. SpaceX has said it hopes to use Starship to branch out in the solar system, especially for crewed Mars missions.
The four-person crew and two pilots of the Unity 22 test flight mission took off from the company’s Spaceport America facility in New Mexico and flew just above the boundary of space, where everyone experienced about four minutes of weightlessness.
Future flights of Virgin Galactic, though, have been delayed due to a Federal Aviation Administration investigation into a reported incident that happened during the spaceflight. That said, Virgin has opened up tickets again to paying spaceflyers, now at $450,000 apiece.
Since the system flies autonomously, no pilots were required to be on board (although Funk is highly qualified as an aviator) as the New Shepard system lifted off from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One near the West Texas town of Van Horn.
While Bezos and Branson denied their companies were in competition, the broadcast of Bezos’ flight made several cutting remarks about the company flying above the Kármán line, an internationally recognized boundary of spaceflight that Virgin Galactic flights don’t reach.
Bezos also said in an interview in July that Blue Origin is not focused on competition, but building a “road to space.” The company has adopted that catchphrase as a tagline and repeats it frequently during live broadcasts.
5) SpaceX stacks tallest booster ever with Starship
SpaceX’s first orbital Starship SN20 is stacked atop its massive Super Heavy Booster 4 for the first time on Aug. 6, 2021 at the company’s Starbase facility near Boca Chica Village in South Texas. They stood 395 feet tall, taller than NASA’s Saturn V moon rocket. (Image credit: SpaceX)
SpaceX’s newest Starship prototype (SN-20) perched on its massive Super Heavy booster for the first time on Friday (Aug. 6), briefly setting a new record for the world’s tallest rocket during preparations for an orbital mission.
The hour-long fit check brought the stack to 395 feet tall (120 m), taller than NASA’s massive Saturn V moon rocket, which was 363 feet tall (110 m). Super Heavy alone stands 230 feet (70 meters) tall and Starship SN4 includes another 165 feet (50 m) of height.
The next major milestone for Starship is the orbital launch that may take place in 2022, pending an environmental review by the Federal Aviation Administration and related government groups. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has pushed back launch estimates several times due to the review.
6) Inspiration4 launches 4 civilians on first orbital mission
Billionaire Jared Isaacman’s privately chartered spaceflight launched on Sept. 15, 2021 aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, flying high in Earth orbit on a nearly three-day mission. Inspiration4 was the first crewed orbital mission with no professional astronauts on board (as the Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin flights preceding it were all suborbital missions.)
Isaacman, a pilot, commanded the flight and was accompanied by physician assistant Hayley Arceneaux, data engineer Chris Sembroski, and geoscientist and science communication specialist Sian Proctor. Sembroski and Proctor won their seats in contests to support St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, while Arceneaux is employed at that hospital.
A “Star Trek” star boldly went into suborbital space Oct. 13 on Blue Origin’s second crewed space mission, called NS-18. William Shatner, 90, is best known for playing Captain James T. Kirk on “Star Trek: The Original Series.”
“That was unlike anything they described,” Shatner was heard saying via a radio link as the capsule parachuted back to Earth, after carrying him and three other crew members to suborbital space.
Shatner is now the oldest person to have ever flown to space, beating the record set by Wally Funk, 82, who flew on Blue Origin’s first crewed flight July 20. Crew member Glen de Vries died in a plane crash weeks after the flight and Blue Origin dedicated their next crewed mission in December to him.
8) Russian film crew shoots drama on ISS
Russian actress Yulia Peresild (center), director Klim Shipenko (second from right) and cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy (right) bid farewell to their Russian crewmates Anton Shkaplerov (second from left) and Pyotr Dubrov before returning to Earth on Oct. 17, 2021. (Image credit: Roscosmos/Anton Shkaplerov via Twitter)
Just days after Shatner’s ride to space, a Russian film crew including actress Yulia Peresild and producer Klim Shipenko landed with cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy of the Russian federal space corporation Roscosmos on Oct. 17.
“Вызов” (“Challenge” in English) is the movie in production. It follows the fictional story of a surgeon (Peresild) who is launched to the station to perform emergency surgery on a cosmonaut (Novitskiy, who would play the role well given he is a cosmonaut in real life.)
The effort is a joint production of Roscosmos, the Russian television station Channel One and the studio Yellow, Black and White. Given the small crew on hand in space, Shipenko took on several behind-the-scenes roles, including director, make-up artist, sound editor and cinematographer.
9) Blue Origin launches ‘Good Morning America’ host to space
Blue Origin’s next (and likely last) crewed flight of 2021 filled out all six seats in the New Shepard spacecraft during a successful launch and landing Dec. 11. The starring guest was Michael Strahan, host of “Good Morning America”, who is a retired football player. (The crew threw mini-footballs in space to celebrate his past career.)
Strahan said the experience was amazing. “I want to go back,” he told Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos after returning to Earth. “Touchdown has a new meaning now!!!” he wrote on Twitter after the flight.
Also on the flight was Laura Shepard Churchley, 74, the daughter of NASA astronaut Shepard after whom the New Shepard system is named, and four other individuals who paid for their seats. Blue Origin has not yet released per-seat pricing for customers, and we are also awaiting details on their next planned crew launch.
10) Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa flies to ISS
Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa entered the International Space Station on Dec. 8, 2021. (Image credit: NASA TV)
A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, video producer Yozo Hirano and cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin launched on Dec. 8 to the International Space Station for a 12-day mission to the orbiting lab.
Maezawa is also planning to fly around the moon on a SpaceX mission that he paid for, tentatively slotted for 2023, but chose to visit the space station as well on a mission brokered by the U.S. space tourism company Space Adventures with Russia’s Roscosmos space agency. It was not revealed how much Maezawa paid for the flight, but single seats in the past have cost up to $35 million. And Maezawa bought two seats, one for himself and for Hirano, who recorded videos of Maezawa in space.
Maezawa, the CEO of Start Today and the founder of online clothing retailer ZOZO, bought the seats for himself and Hirano. Hirano documented the mission and participate in some health and performance research. They also made the first Uber Eats delivery in space on the flight. The trio returned to Earth on Dec. 19.
And that’s a wrap at the biggest space tourism moments in 2021. The year 2022 is expected to bring more milestones as the company Axiom Space plans to launch its first fully private crew to the International Space Station early in the year, with SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic all expected to continue their private spaceflight pace.
At the core of my soul, I want to hate BioLite’s FirePit+, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t my favorite gadget I’ve used this year.
You see, I’m a person who appreciates simplicity, and you don’t get any more simple than fire. You can essentially start one anywhere (not recommended), no fancy equipment required. So when it comes to firepits, my gut reaction is to favor the “it’s a firepit because there’s a circle of rocks on the ground” variety. Even the over-priced junk-steel firepits—the round kind that you can buy pretty much anywhere—feel preferable to anything fancier. God forbid someone introduce rechargeable batteries into the equation.
And then I tried the FirePit+.
At $250, it costs exactly $250 more than I spent putting rocks into a circle in my backyard, but having used it for several months now, I can say it’s easily worth that much or more. No other gadget I’ve used in recent memory has been as satisfying to use nor inspired my friends and family to rush out and spend some cash.
Solid, Compact, and Portable Construction
The BioLite FirePit+ (the company’s second-generation firepit) promises more than just toasted marshmallows and something to help you tell better ghost stories. At its heart is a small fan powered by a 12,800 mAh battery, which easily clips on and off one end of the firepit, and is meant to make starting a fire easier and—most importantly—keep the smoke out of your eyes. The fan box also includes two ports, one for charging the battery with a micro-USB cable and a standard USB port for charging your phone or whatever else.
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Altogether, the FirePit+ is roughly the size of a medium-sized cooler and weighs about 20 pounds—hefty, but small and light enough to pack in the trunk for an overnight camping trip or a parking lot cookout at the ski slopes. Measuring about 17.5 inches long and around 7 inches wide (from the inside of the lip), the fire cavity (the actual pit part of the FirePit+) easily allows for standard-size (16-inch) logs, and there’s nothing stopping you from cramming some longer ones in there if you don’t mind them sticking out the top.
The long sides are made of attractive black metal mesh, so you can still see the flames inside, and it has handles on either end for portability. It also has four foldable legs, a log grate in the bottom to allow air all around the burning wood or charcoal, and a removable grate on top for grilling whatever you like.
Not Quite ‘Smokeless’—but Pretty Dang Close
The fan, which has four speeds, promises to all but eliminate the worst part of firepits: all that freakin’ smoke blowing in your face, no matter where around it you happen to sit. And it actually works! No, it doesn’t create a “smoke-free” fire—but it’s pretty darn close.
Here’s how the fan works: Levels 3 and 4, the highest fan speed settings, blow enough air into the fire cavity to give the flame ample oxygen to get going. Honestly, this feature is a little like magic: The fire starts so easily it makes you look like a goddamn Boy Scout. Even when the sticks and wood have been a bit damp, the fire was going nice and healthy within a matter of minutes. Levels 2 and 3 will keep a fire going strong while eliminating nearly all of the smoke. And level 1 lets the fire burn easily, but you’ll probably get a bit of smoke whirling around, mocking you.
Now, if you start a fire like me (using crumpled-up newspaper), the FirePit+ is not powerful enough to eliminate all the smoke during start-up—paper simply smokes way too much, even with the fan whirring at level 4. But once only wood is burning, I am continuously surprised by how very little smoke whirls around to pester me and my guests.
Battery Life for Days
Mercifully, the FirePit+ does not screw around with companion apps or anything annoying like that. Instead, it sticks with tried-and-true buttons—or, rather, button. There’s just one. Press it once to start the fan, then click it again until you have the fan speed you want. Hold and press to turn it off. That’s it.
Photo: Andrew Couts/Gizmodo
In terms of battery life, BioLite promises 30 hours on the lowest setting and 7 hours on the highest. When I attempted to conduct my own tests, I basically failed—the first time, I fell asleep before the fan shut off on level 4. The second time, I gave up after more than 7 hours had gone by and I needed to go to sleep. So, I don’t have any specific battery life figures to give you. But based on real use, I can say it has not in the past six months run out of battery while I’ve been enjoying some backyard flames. (Side note: Absolutely no one should use this thing exclusively set to level 4—you will just burn through an entire stack of logs because it acts like a freakin’ incinerator when the fan is set that high.) Most of the time, I had it set to level 2, which gave me enough juice for multiple hours-long outdoor get-togethers.
Beyond the basic FirePit+, BioLite also sells a few accessories, including a cast iron griddle that spans the top of the fire cavity, a BBQ lid, and a set of cooking utensils (knife, tongs, spatula), all of which the company included in the review kit I received (retail: $400, including the FirePit+). You don’t need any of this stuff to enjoy the FirePit+, but I will say it all came in handy during a camping trip this summer when I wanted to cook up some scrambled eggs and sausages for me and my friends in the morning.
Less Smoke = Less Heat
There are only three things I dislike about the FirePit+. First, the downside to eliminating smoke is that it also reduces the amount of heat the fire emits to the sides. I admit I’m not 100% sure about the physics behind the smoke-reducing fan, but there is noticeably less warmth coming from the FirePit+ when the fan is set to anything above level 2. This doesn’t matter if you just have a fire going for ambiance. But during the winter months when we’re all hanging out exclusively outdoors because of the never-ending pandemic, heat becomes far more important—which just means you might want to stick to level 1 and endure a bit more smoke.
Second, I have to care about this thing, which is annoying. I have two other firepits, one that’s just some rocks in a circle, and the other is one of those aforementioned crappy circular pressed-steel ones that are everywhere now. Neither do I have to care about—I don’t bring them into the garage to ensure they don’t get rained on, nor do I fret when they show a little wear and tear. The FirePit+ is different—it’s nice. And while I’ve definitely left it out in the rain a few times without any consequence, it’s still a piece of equipment I feel the need to take care of, which bothers someone like me who doesn’t want the things I have to dictate my brain-space.
Photo: Andrew Couts/Gizmodo
Third, it’s a little small. This is both a positive and a negative. Positive because it’s just the right size to make it portable while not being so small that you can’t make it your main firepit, especially if you have limited outdoor space. Negative because, well, sometimes you just want to make a big-ass bonfire—a real raging inferno—and this thing just ain’t gonna cut it. But that’s also not what it’s made for, so I can’t really dock the thing for not being the size of a small car, which is approximately how big I like my fires to be from time to time.
The FirePit+ Is Almost Too Nice—Almost
As I said, I didn’t want to like the FirePit+. But I truly do, despite myself. It’s portable, sturdy, and works better than I expected. It may not be 100% “smokeless”—but it’s far closer to smokeless than even BioLite itself promises. It’s held up well for months despite my haphazard care. In fact, it works so well and looks so good, both my friends and my brother got one for themselves after using it at my house. I’ve taken it on camping trips and set it up in my yard and on my deck. And while I can gripe about a loss of heat or the fact that I have to pop it in the garage or shed to protect it from the elements, sometimes that’s the price we have to pay to have nice things.
For the past 31 years the Hubble Space Telescope has been an invaluably versatile observation platform for astronomers but it’s begun showing its age of late. Last serviced in 2009, the telescope has had to enter the partial-shutdown “safe mode” multiple times over the last few years — most recently, this October. And while optimistic estimates suggest that the Hubble could remain in operation through the end of the decade, NASA, with its ESA and CSA partners, have already spent more than a dozen years developing a successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). When the Webb launches — currently set for liftoff on Christmas Day — it will take over as humanity’s preeminent eye in the sky for decades to come.
The 7.2-ton JWST will be the largest telescope NASA has ever put into orbit. Its 6.5-meter primary mirror array — composed of 18 gold-plated hexagonal segments — is more than twice the size of the Hubble’s and nearly 60 times larger in area than the Spitzer Telescope, which retired in 2020. The sun shield it uses to protect its delicate infrared sensors is nearly as long as a tennis court, and the telescope apparatus as a whole stands three stories tall. The 458 gigabits of data collected daily will be first routed through NASA’s Deep Space Network, then transmitted to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which will collate and disseminate that information to the greater astronomy community.
When it reaches its orbital home at the L2 Lagrange point 930,000 miles from Earth, the JWST will begin its four-point mission: searching for light from the earliest post-Big Bang stars; studying the formation and development of galaxies, examining the evolution of stars and planetary systems; and seeking out the origins of life.
To do so, the Webb will take a different approach from the Hubble before it. While the Hubble looked at the universe in the visible and ultraviolet spectrums, the JWST will see in infrared, just as the Spitzer used to but with far greater resolution and clarity. Using this infrared is critical to the Webb’s mission as that wavelength can peer through clouds of interstellar gasses and dust to see otherwise obscured objects beyond.
NASA/Chris Gunn
The Webb’s camera suite is made up of four individual components: the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), and the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph/Fine Guidance Sensor (NIRISS/FGS). These instruments are actually so sensitive that they can detect their own heat radiation when they’re operating. To minimize these infrared emissions, three of the sensors are chilled to negative 388 degrees Fahrenheit (-233 degrees C). The especially sensitive MIRI is cooled even further to -448 degrees F (-266 degrees C) — that’s a mere 7 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero.
Getting the MIRI that cold is no easy feat. After the JWST makes its way into orbit, the telescope will spend weeks slowly chilling the sensor to its optimal operating temperature using a helium-based refrigeration system.
“It’s relatively easy to cool something down to that temperature on Earth, typically for scientific or industrial applications,” said JPL cryocooler specialist Konstantin Penanen in a recent NASA blog post. “But those Earth-based systems are very bulky and energy inefficient. For a space observatory, we need a cooler that is physically compact, highly energy efficient, and it has to be highly reliable because we can’t go out and repair it. So those are the challenges we faced, and in that respect, I would say the MIRI cryocooler is certainly at the cutting edge.”
The extra effort that MIRI requires will be well worth it as ground-based infrared telescopes — especially those operating within the mid-infrared spectrum as MIRI is, are largely hampered by heat emissions from the devices themselves and the surrounding atmosphere.
“With the other three instruments, Webb observes wavelengths up to 5 microns. Adding wavelengths out to 28.5 microns with MIRI really increases its range of science,” George Rieke, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, said earlier this month in a NASA blog. “This includes everything from studying protostars and their surrounding protoplanetary disks, the energy balance of exoplanets, mass loss from evolved stars, circumnuclear tori around the central black holes in active galactic nuclei, and a lot more.”
NASA
Given the JWST’s highly specific low temperature needs, keeping the telescope’s sensor suite out of direct sunlight (and blocked from other light sources like the Moon and Earth) is crucial. To ensure that those cameras are perpetually shaded, NASA engineers have built a five-layer sunshield made from aluminum-coated Kapton film to keep them in the cold, cold dark.
"The shape and design also direct heat out the sides, around the perimeter, between the layers," said James Cooper, the JWST’s Sunshield Manager at Goddard Space Flight Center. "Heat generated by the Spacecraft bus at the ‘core,’ or center, is forced out between the membrane layers so that it cannot heat up the optics."
Measuring 69.5 feet by 46.5 feet by .001 inches, the kite-shaped sun shield is stacked five layers high so that energy absorbed by the top layer radiates out into space between them, making each successive layer slightly cooler than the one above it. In fact, the temperature difference at the outermost (383K, or 230 degrees F) and innermost layers (36K, about -394 degrees F) is roughly an order of magnitude.
NASA
In order to collect enough light to view the fainest, most distant stars possible — some as far as 13 billion light years away — the JWST will rely on its massive 6.5m primary mirror array. Unlike the Hubble, which utilized a single 2.4m-wide mirror, the Webb’s mirror is divided into 18 individual segments, each weighing just 46 pounds thanks to their beryllium construction. They’re coated in gold to enhance their reflection of infrared light and hexagonal in shape so that, when fully assembled in orbit, they’ll fit together snugly enough to act as a single, symmetrical, gapless reflective plane. Their small size also allows them to easily be split up and folded down in order to fit within the tight confines of the Ariane 5 rocket they’ll ride into orbit.
ESA
The role of coordinating these segments to focus on a single spot in a distant galaxy falls to the mirrors’ actuator assembly. Seven small motors sit on the backside of each mirror segment (one at each corner and a seventh in the middle), enabling precise control of their orientation and curvature. "Aligning the primary mirror segments as though they are a single large mirror means each mirror is aligned to 1/10,000th the thickness of a human hair,” said Webb Optical Telescope Element Manager, Lee Feinberg.
After 20-plus years of development and delays, costing $10 billion and involving the efforts of more than 10,000 people, the Webb Telescope is finally ready for launch — and hopefully this time it’ll actually take. The program has seen delay, after delay, after delay to its launch schedule. NASA abandoned the initial date of March 2021 in the wake of the initial COVID-19 outbreak and its associated lockdowns — though, to be fair, the GAO in January 2020 had only given the JWST a 12 percent chance of getting off the ground by the end of this year — and set a vague “sometime in 2021” timetable for its launch.
NASA
NASA later revised that estimate to a firm “sometime in October 2021,” eventually settling on a Halloween launch window, only to delay it again to late November/early December. Of course, early December quickly became late December, specifically the 22nd, which was then nudged back once again to its current date of December 24th. Actually, make that the 25th.
These delays have been caused by the myriad factors that go into getting an instrument of this size and sensitivity ready for launch. After completing its construction, the JWST had to undergo an exhaustive battery of tests, then be gently loaded into a shipping container and transported to its launch site in Kourou, French Guiana. Once there, the actual task of prepping, fueling, and loading the JWST onto an Ariane 5 rocket took another 55 days.
That timeline was further extended due to an “incident” on November 9th wherein, “a sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band — which secures Webb to the launch vehicle adapter — caused a vibration throughout the observatory,” per NASA. The Webb’s anomaly review board initiated an additional round of testing to ensure that those vibrations didn’t damage other components or knock anything important out of alignment.
NASA
Now that the telescope has been deemed A-OK, final preparations are underway. Barring any more setbacks, the JWST will launch at 7:20 ET on Christmas Day (watch here live!) to begin its 30-day, 1.5 million kilometer-long journey out the Lagrange 2 where it will spend the net two weeks slowly unfurling its mirrors and sunshield, then begin exploring the depths of the early universe.
