Discovery's 'Telescope' Documentary Goes Inside the 'Excitement' and 'Terror' of the $8 Billion Webb Gamble
Oscar-nominated documentarian Nathaniel Kahn (My Architect, Two Hands) has always wanted to convey the wonder of telescopes, and with his new film premiering Saturday on Discovery, he succeeds.
Telescope, a project years in the making, is more than a fascinating look back at the 400-year history of the instrument and its discoveries. It captures the hope of the future — the building of NASA’s massive James Webb Space Telescope, due to launch in October 2018. One hundred times more powerful the Hubble (think being able to detect a child’s nightlight from the moon), it will be capable of seeing the first stars and galaxies, as well as atmospheres of exoplanets where it will search for potential signs of life. If it works.
As you see in the exclusive clip above, in order for the Webb’s infrared vision to not be blinded by the light and heat of the sun, it must orbit 1,000,000 miles from Earth. That’s too far for astronauts to reach for repairs, meaning we have one shot to get it right — a notion that’s both exhilarating and terrifying for the thousand people from 14 countries working on the $8 billion project. Why? To fit on a rocket, the Webb must be built as what Dr. Matt Mountain, President of The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), refers to as an “origami telescope.” It has hundreds of deployments or releases that need to happen successfully over the course of weeks while the telescope — with its 18 mirror fragments that will ultimately come together to create a surface over 21-feet wide, protected by a heat shield the size of tennis court — reaches its destination, unfolds, cools off, and comes to life. “It’s going to be a lot of people getting very little sleep,” Mountain says.
Yahoo TV spoke with Kahn and Mountain to get some of our burning questions answered, starting with…
Are they crazy to think this will work?
When he finishes laughing, Mountain explains that NASA has gotten very good at building complex things with individual components that they test… and test… and test. “We test everything to the point that we can, and when we think there is a risk of failure, we put another system in place. We use this term ‘redundancy,’” he says. So for example, when there’s a motor behind a mirror, there’s actually two, in case one fails. They try to think of everything that could possibly go wrong, but in the end, there’s really no way to know if they have. “That becomes the sort of excitement and the terror, at the same time, to do really difficult things like this,” Mountain says. “You then just have to take that leap of faith that your team was the best team the world ever put together, and you’ve done the best test program the world has ever put together, and that it’s going to work.”
That drive, and innate drama, makes the interviews Kahn’s favorite thing in the film. “The people who are giving their lives to trying to understand our place in the universe — I see their passion, their concern, their total commitment,” he says. “It’s less about the information [and] more about when the person you’re talking to reveals a little piece of their soul, of what makes them tick.“
He points to Nobel Laureate Dr. Adam Reiss talking about the variable star that the Hubble used to determine the distance of the Andromeda nebula. “When he says, ‘That is my favorite star in the universe, aside from the sun,’ you feel this sort of childlike joy that a scientist has and there’s just an emotional connection,” Kahn says.
There’s Dr. Jon Arenberg PhD, chief engineer of Northrop Grumman’s James Webb Space Program, sharing his recurring nightmare of the unknown unknowns — failure to imagine something that could have been fixed on the ground. “This thing is something that he will have spent 10 years or more on by the time the project launches,” Kahn says. “That kind of focus is something that I find so inspiring.”
Another candid moment is when Dr. John M. Grunsfeld, an astrophysicist and astronaut who made three missions to the Hubble, admits that his favorite images from that telescope were the ones that proved he hadn’t just broken it. “I love a moment of humanity like that, just the openness of that,” Kahn says.
Mountain participated in the Hubble’s last servicing mission from the ground in 2009, when Grunsfeld and fellow astronaut Andrew Feustel needed to replace a camera. “All they had to do was undo one bolt. It was stuck. It had been up there for seven or eight years and nobody touched it. They couldn’t undo it,” Kahn says. ”[Feustel] could keep on turning, which might snap it off, at which point the whole mission was doomed, or it would move. You could hear the tension rise, you could see their heartbeats go way up. They realized the whole fate of the mission was going to be determined on the next step they took. … There are always points where the telescope could have been broken. They rehearse in big tanks of water, they test, they are very careful, [but] you always hit this unknown unknown. The very first minute of the very first day of space work, the very first bolt wouldn’t turn? None of us had predicted that one. We hope we’ve got some resiliency in our programs, some ability to correct and adapt.”
Why is all the stress worth it?
“There’s a whole part of the universe we can’t see currently, which is called the Dark Ages. We’re very original in astronomy,” Mountain says with a laugh. He likens it to looking at the Arctic Ocean and seeing the odd iceberg. “You know there’s this whole rock, this structure underneath the ocean, from ice. We know that galaxies in the infrared, hidden from the view of the Hubble, are in the universe somewhere. We know that the universe started with this very simple Big Bang. Something happened and these very complicated galaxies turned up. What happened? What all is hidden in the Dark Ages? That’s what the Webb is going to allow us to see for the first time,” he says.
With the Hubble Deep Field, we were able to determine that there are 10,000 galaxies in every spot of the sky the size of a drinking straw (see the image above). There are 100 billion planets out there. “The thought that we might be lucky enough to find a planet roughly the size of the Earth that the Webb could possibly look at — that’s a long shot, but it could be exciting,” Mountain says. “What happens if we see liquid water on the surface of a planet going around a star like our sun in the Goldilocks zone [not too hot, not too cold]? Wouldn’t that be pretty intriguing? That would be a good place to go look for life.”
And that is something we need to do for our own survival, as the clip below from Telescope informs us.
So how scared of the sun do we need to be now?
“It’s a slightly trite phrase, but it’s true: It is written in the stars that the sun will annihilate us in 4 billion years time,” Mountain says. “What is the sun right now? It’s this massive fusion bomb going off continuously, where the pressure of gravity is crushing gas, which is predominantly hydrogen, and fusing it into helium. That fusion creates energy, gives off energy, that heats us all up. In about 4 billion years, there will be no more hydrogen left in the sun that hasn’t been turned into helium. At which point, gravity will take over and just cause the sun to shrink, and it will bounce. That bounce will throw off great layers of material in what’s called a planetary nebula. We see these with the Hubble Space Telescope across our own galaxy. There’s nothing we can do to stop this. In 4 billion years, we actually have to move.”
In some sense, Mountain says, the sun is Shiva. “It is the bringer of life, and it is the bringer of death. The question is, when you look out at the galaxy and you see these stars that have become planetary nebula, and they’re beautiful, beautiful images. … how many civilizations have been wiped out because they didn’t get their act together? It’s a very interesting thought. Yes, 4 billion years is a long way away. Remember, we’ve only been around 4 million. It’s not something you have to worry about tonight to keep you awake. [But] it does mean that we, as a species, need to think about things a little bit slightly longer-term view than what is happening in the next election cycle. That’s a billion election cycles. Maybe we can get organized in that time. ”
But back to October 2018, does Kahn intend to capture those tense weeks leading up to and after the Webb’s launch?
He’s planning on it. “It’s just too exciting, and when you think about some of the parts that we don’t even touch on: This telescope is so big, they actually have to put it on a boat and take it through the Panama Canal down to where it is launched,” Kahn says. That’s from a spaceport near Kourou, in French Guiana, because the spin of the Earth near the equator gives a rocket an additional push. “Being able to watch the telescope going through the Panama Canal, being unloaded, put on the rocket, and launched into space — yes, I want to be there for that,” Kahn says. “I was a very little boy when we landed on the moon, and I remember watching on the black and white TV. I think we’re going to remember this launch, and certainly when those first images come down. We’re going to want to tune in and find out what those things are.“
He does then believe that the Webb is going to work, and transform our sense of ourselves and our knowledge of the universe. “That’s because I have faith in human beings. I have faith that when we do take these big risks, things do work out. We have to learn to say, ‘Let’s try the hard thing.’ I think
back to that incredible speech that Kennedy gave at Rice University [in 1962]. He said, “We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard.’"
If you only retain one thing from Telescope, what should it be?
An appreciation for the instrument. In Mountain’s mind, telescopes are a more transformative instrument than any other in our history. “When Galileo lifted his simple hand-held device up to the sky and saw that there were moons of Jupiter and realized, ‘Oh my God, the Earth is not the center of the solar system,’ it’s not just that he could do that, but that anyone else could now repeat that experiment with another simple hand-held device and go, ‘Oh, shoot. Galileo was right,’” he says. “You can’t turn back from these discoveries, and that’s what’s so powerful about these telescopes. It presents you with pictures. It’s like the early explorers: They were told by Aristotle and everybody that the world is flat. The explorers went around going, ‘You know, Aristotle didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. I’ve sailed around, and I didn’t actually fall off. What the hell?’ This active observation is irreversible. You can’t unsee moons around Jupiter. You can’t unsee the fact that there are other galaxies out there. You can’t unsee the fact that there are planets out there. Telescopes keep bringing you forward. And we’ve got to the state where we share everything that we do. It’s not hidden in the priesthood of scientists anymore. We’ve got it on the web. That combination is incredibly powerful and transformative.”
For Kahn, who incorporated some of the amazing footage and images made available through NASA in the film, that last point especially resonates. And it presented its own challenge: “I think anybody who goes out at night in a dark place and looks up at the stars, you feel that ‘Wow.’ But somehow, getting that on film isn’t necessarily the easiest thing in the world. I think even if you talked to Steven Spielberg, I’m sure he’ll say he struggled to get the sky right in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There certainly are technical challenges getting the sky to really feel wonderful and vast for the home viewer.”
How did Kahn know when he achieved it? “I go back to that feeling as a little boy, looking up and just feeling that you’re being lost in the stars,” he says. “There’s just this sense of endless mystery of being a human being staring up at the cosmos. You have this strange connection and you get a chill many times. You feel it in your bones. You feel it in your spine. It’s the same thing: You’re looking at the images, you’re hearing the music [by House of Cards composer Jeff Beal]. You put all of these things together, you sit there, and you say, ‘Am I as moved and thrilled as I was when I was a kid looking up at the stars?’ A couple times in this film, I definitely feel that.”
To Kahn, the Webb, like the Hubble, is the people’s telescope. “We need to know about it, understand it, embrace it, and connect with it and with each other through it,” he says. “This is the sentiment that I end the film with: I believe doing things like this can unify us as human beings. We have so many issues and problems in the world today, but then you see these people putting their life’s work into something that is absolutely, 100 percent, the very best of what human beings can do — which is to try to understand where we came from, where we’re going, are we alone. These are the things that bind us together. It makes no difference where you come from, how old or young you are, who you are. And the pictures will be available to everyone. If you start thinking about humanity that way, we’re pretty darn good.”
Telescope premieres Feb. 20 at 9 p.m. on Discovery as part of Science Weekend. The film will also air Feb. 21 at 9 p.m. on Science Channel.
