With a few last-minute knuckle-biting delays in the weeks preceding the launch, this good news is so encouraging. All the planning and delays really did pay off, knock on wood. Things aren’t just going well as expected, they’re going quite a bit better than expected.

A physicist friend of mine, by the way, told me the other day that even though he had to sweat through all the math at uni to demonstrate LaGrange points, he never really thought of them as anything except mathematical concepts. He’s a little overawed to see Webb actually headed out to L2 to do real work.

I think we are all going to be overawed when we see the science start coming in. We’re going to observe more than with Hubble by orders of magnitude. And I’m sure most of us can remember how dramatically Hubble increased our understanding of the universe.