Blowing soap bubbles never fails to delight one's inner child, perhaps because they are intrinsically ephemeral, bursting after just a few minutes. Now, French physicists have succeeded in creating "everlasting bubbles" out of plastic particles, glycerol, and water, according to a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Fluids. The longest bubble they built survived for a whopping 465 days.

Bubbles have long fascinated physicists. For instance, French physicists in 2016 worked out a theoretical model for the exact mechanism for how soap bubbles form when jets of air hit a soapy film. The researchers found that bubbles only formed above a certain speed, which in turn depends on the width of the jet of air.

In 2018, we reported on how mathematicians at New York University's Applied Math Lab had fine-tuned the method for blowing the perfect bubble based on a series of experiments with thin, soapy films. The mathematicians concluded that it's best to use a circular wand with a 1.5-inch (3.8 cm) perimeter and gently blow at a consistent 2.7 inches per second (6.9 cm/s). Blow at higher speeds and the bubble will burst. If you use a smaller or larger wand, the same thing will happen.

And in 2020, physicists determined that a key ingredient for creating gigantic bubbles is mixing in polymers of varying strand lengths. That produces a soap film able to stretch sufficiently thin to make a giant bubble without breaking. The polymer strands become entangled, like a hairball, forming longer strands that don't want to break apart. In the right combination, a polymer allows a soap film to reach a 'sweet spot' that's viscous but also stretchy—just not so stretchy that it rips apart. Varying the length of the polymer strands resulted in a sturdier soap film.

Scientists are also interested in extending the longevity of bubbles. Bubbles naturally take on the form of a sphere: a volume of air encased in a very thin liquid skin that isolates each bubble in a foam from its neighbors. Bubbles owe their geometry to the phenomenon of surface tension, a force that arises from molecular attraction. The greater the surface area, the more energy that is required to maintain a given shape, which is why the bubbles seek to assume the shape with the least surface area: a sphere.

However, most bubbles burst within minutes in a standard atmosphere. Over time, the pull of gravity gradually drains the liquid downward, and at the same time, the liquid component slowly evaporates. As the amount of liquid decreases, the "walls" of the bubbles become very thin, and small bubbles in a foam combine into larger ones. The combination of these two effects is called "coarsening." Adding some kind of surfactant keeps surface tension from collapsing bubbles by strengthening the thin liquid film walls that separate them. But eventually the inevitable always occurs.

In 2017, French physicists found that a spherical shell made of plastic microspheres can store pressurized gas in a tiny volume. The physicists dubbed the objects "gas marbles." The objects are related to so-called liquid marbles—droplets of liquid coated with microscopic, liquid-repelling beads, which can roll around on a solid surface without breaking apart. While the mechanical properties of gas marbles have been the subject of several studies, no one had conducted experiments to explore the marbles' longevity.

So Aymeric Roux of the University of Lille and several colleagues decided to fill that gap. They experimented with three different kinds of bubbles: standard soap bubbles, gas marbles made using water, and gas marbles made with water and glycerol. To make their gas marbles, Roux et al. spread plastic particles on the surface of a water bath, which jammed together to form a granular raft. Then the researchers injected a bit of air with a syringe just below the raft to form bubbles and used a spoon to push the bubbles over the raft until the entire surface of each bubble was coated with plastic particles.

The standard soap bubbles burst within a minute or so, as expected. But Roux et al. found that the plastic particle coating significantly neutralized the drainage process for the water-based gas marbles, which collapsed between six and 60 minutes. To extend the lifetime even further, the researchers needed to also neutralize the evaporation.

So they added glycerol to the water. According to the authors, glycerol has a high concentration of hydroxyl groups, which in turn have a strong affinity with water molecules, creating strong hydrogen bonds. So glycerol is better able to absorb water from air, thereby compensating for evaporation. The water/glycerol gas marbles lasted significantly longer: from five weeks to 465 days, enabling the researchers to determine the best ratio of water-to-glycerol—the perfect recipe for long-lived gas marbles.

The researchers' work even extends beyond bubbles. They were also able to create robust composite liquid films and shape them into different objects by dipping a metallic frame below a liquid surface covered with a layer of jammed plastic particles. The frame captured particle-coated films as it was slowly lifted back up to the surface. Most notably, Roux et al. were able to build a 3D pyramid shape out of a water/glycerol liquid film. The pyramid has lasted for over 378 days (and counting).

DOI: Physical Review Fluids, 2022. 10.1103/PhysRevFluids.7.L011601  (About DOIs).

Listing image by A. Roux et al, 2022

Even before their rollout, a distinct feature of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines has been their "reactogenicity"—that is, their tendency to cause mild symptoms that signal immune responses firing up after a shot, particularly the second one. As vaccine supplies were unleashed in the US last year, families, friends, and coworkers swapped stories of their harrowing post-jab days, often recalling fevers, chills, fatigue, and general crumminess.

Although those experiences are unquestionably real, their connection to the vaccines may not be. As more and more results from randomized-controlled vaccine trials hit science journals, researchers kept noting that, while trial participants often reported mild symptoms after shots, so too did the participants who received placebos—and not at trivial levels.

Many people are familiar with "placebo effects," which happen when an inert intervention leads people to report health benefits that couldn't possibly have been caused by the faux treatment. Placebo effects are well-documented and real—in that people can indeed experience a certain extent of psychosomatic benefits. A placebo will not treat serious medical conditions, such as cancer, but it could, for example, lead people to feel they have more energy or less general discomfort.

But placebos also have a dark side. The harmless interventions can just as easily lead people to report harmful side effects, particularly when people are expecting such side effects. Researchers have coined these phantom adverse reactions "nocebo responses." Nocebo responses are thought to stem from expectations of side effects, anxiety-induced effects, and the mistaken attribution of common, nonspecific ailments, like headaches, to the placebo.

COVID vaccine nocebos

Nocebo responses were startlingly common in trials of COVID-19 vaccines, and a new study quantified just how big a role they played. The meta-analysis, led by Harvard researchers and published Tuesday in JAMA Network Open, looked at side-effect data from 12 high-quality randomized clinical trials testing various COVID-19 vaccines against inert placebo control groups. The analysis concluded that nocebo responses accounted for 76 percent of systemic adverse reactions—like headache, fever, and chills—after the first vaccine dose and 52 percent of systemic reactions after the second vaccine dose.

The rates of side effects in the placebo groups were "substantial," the researchers, led by Harvard research scientist Julia Haas, concluded. While common, nonspecific symptoms, like fatigue and headache, are among the most common side effects linked to the vaccines, the study found them "to be particularly associated with nocebo."

Of course, the point of this analysis isn't just to make you question your sanity (although, seriously, your mind might be messing with you). The main point is that these nocebo responses are likely making safe, life-saving vaccines seem significantly less pleasant than they actually are—and apprehension about such unpleasant side effects is a known reason why some people choose not to get vaccinated.

"Informing the public about the potential for nocebo responses may help reduce worries about COVID-19 vaccination, which might decrease vaccination hesitancy," Haas and her colleagues wrote. In addition, some clinical evidence suggests that making people aware of nocebo responses can also lower their expectation for side effects and thereby actually lead to fewer perceived side effects.

Real effects

Of course, not all side effects are nocebo responses; some are clearly real, particularly local reactions and side effects after the second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

In the meta-analysis, Haas and her colleagues found that about 35 percent of placebo recipients reported at least one systemic side effect after their first faux dose. Meanwhile, 46 percent of vaccine recipients reported at least one systemic side effect after getting their first real dose. When the researchers looked at the severity levels of all of those systemic side effects, they found similar proportions of severity grades between the placebo and vaccine groups. In other words, the vaccine group wasn't collectively reporting more severe side effects than the placebo group. But there was a clear difference in the local side effects. Only 16 percent of placebo recipients reported local side effects, like pain or swelling at the injection site, while 67 percent of the vaccine group reported such effects.

After the second dose, there were even more differences. About 32 percent of the placebo group reported at least one systemic effect, while 61 percent of the vaccine group reported systemic effects. And in this case, the vaccine group tended to report more moderate to severe systemic effects than the placebo group. As in the first shot, the vaccine group had more local side effects, with about 73 percent reporting local effects while only about 12 percent of people in the placebo group reported them.

Overall, the nocebo responses clearly seem to be skewing our experience with COVID-19 vaccines, which are being used the world over. As such, the researchers argue that highlighting the potential for nocebo responses could reduce side effects and help improve vaccine uptake.

A Washington-state based aerospace company has exited stealth mode by announcing plans to develop one of the holy grails of spaceflight—a single-stage-to-orbit space plane. Radian Aerospace said it is deep into the design of an airplane-like vehicle that could take off from a runway, ignite its rocket engines, spend time in orbit, and then return to Earth and land on a runway.

"We all understand how difficult this is," said Livingston Holder, Radian’s co-founder, chief technology officer, and former head of the Future Space Transportation and X-33 program at Boeing.

On Wednesday, Radian announced that it had recently closed a $27.5 million round of seed funding, led by Fine Structure Ventures. To date, Radian has raised about $32 million and has 18 full-time employees at its Renton, Washington, headquarters.

During an interview with Ars, Holder and Radian CEO Richard Humphrey explained that they realized it would require significantly more funding to build such an ambitious orbital space plane. Funding will pace their development efforts. For that reason, Humphrey said he was not comfortable putting a date on the company's first test flights but said that Radian was aiming to have an operational capability well before the end of the 2020s.

The current design of Radian One calls for taking up to five people and 5,000 pounds of cargo into orbit. The vehicle would have a down-mass capability of about 10,000 pounds and be powered by three liquid-fueled engines. The idea would be to get as close to airline operations as possible, by flying, landing, re-fueling, and flying again.

Since its founding in 2016, Radian has focused on the propulsion and structure of a vehicle that must withstand a variety of thermal and pressure environments. Humphrey said the company has built and tested its first "full-scale" engine. At full power, this cryogenic-fueled engine will have a thrust of about 200,000 pounds.

"We’re still in the leading edges of that work," Humphrey said. "We understand the fundamentals, we can start it, we can stop it, and we're taking a series of small, progressive steps to get to a full capability."

Humphrey, Holder, and the company's other co-founders, Curtis Gifford and Jeff Feige, have a variety of backgrounds at NASA, the US Department of Defense, and various new space companies. They plan to draw upon earlier work by NASA and contractors who have previously attempted to develop a single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft as well as XCOR, which sought to build a suborbital space plane but had to shut down about five years ago due to a lack of funding.

NASA's last serious attempt at building such a space plane came in the late 1990s, with its "Reusable Launch Vehicle Program," which led to the X-33 program. NASA eventually selected a design by Lockheed Martin for the X-33, but this program fizzled out in 2001 as Lockheed and NASA ran into technical problems, and NASA's priorities changed.

Much has changed in the last two decades to make private development of such a vehicle more feasible, Humphrey said. Lightweight aerospace composites were mostly experimental then but are a well-understood technology now. Space launch companies also now regularly "super chill" their liquid propellants to gain more performance during flight, which Radian plans to do.

And perhaps most importantly, in the wake of SpaceX's success with its launch program, there is ever more private capital flowing into spaceflight operations. This means it should be easier for Radian to raise the substantial amounts of money it will need to bring an orbital space plane on line—more than $1 billion, almost certainly—than it would have even five or 10 years ago.

"A long time has passed since the last true attempt at this," Holder said. "The technology has moved forward, and people are willing to fund projects like this."

If Radian can succeed technologically, large markets would likely open. A vehicle like Radian One would be well suited to fly people to commercial space stations in low Earth orbit, which NASA seeks to foster development of by 2030. These planes could also perform Earth observation work and play a role in bringing back space-manufactured goods. There is also the potential for point-to-point travel on Earth.

There can be no question that this is a hugely challenging endeavor that many people have tried before. Will Radian find the right stuff, at the right moment in time? We'd like to think so.

As the US weathers record COVID-19 cases from the ultra-transmissible omicron variant, vaccine makers are thinking about future waves—and the shots that could help prevent them.

Leading mRNA vaccine makers Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech are currently working up omicron-specific versions of their vaccines, which could be ready in a matter of months. And according to recent interviews, they expect that such boosters will be used as annual shots, which could be given in the fall for the next several years until global transmission dies down.

"I think the reality is that this is going to become an annual vaccination, at least for a period of time," Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner and Pfizer board member, said Sunday on CBS's Face the Nation. "We don't know what the epidemiology of this infection is going to be over the long run, but certainly over the next couple of years, you can envision boosters becoming an annual affair."

It's still unclear what will occur after the towering omicron wave recedes in the US, which is expected to happen in the coming weeks. Omicron could continue to circulate at lower levels after peaking, or another variant (such as delta or a yet-to-be-identified variant) could take over. "I think most people presume it will be omicron," Gottlieb said. "If you can fashion a vaccine that's specific to the variant that's circulating, you probably have the potential to restore a lot of the original promise of the vaccine."

Fourth shots

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said last week that his company's omicron-specific booster will be ready in March. This is after the expected peak of the current wave but in time to prepare for an autumn surge. In an interview today with a French TV outlet, Bourla added that, for now, "it's important that people receive the three-dose regimen of Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine, [but they] will likely then require annual boosters, although the immunocompromised could require them every four months."

Moderna, meanwhile, now has its omicron-specific booster dose in Phase III trials. The company is also expecting that the booster could be used for an annual shot. However, Moderna is setting its sights higher with a seasonal shot that would cover seasonal flu and another seasonal respiratory virus, RSV, in addition to COVID-19.

"Our goal is to be able to have a single annual booster so that we don't have compliance issues where people don't want to get two to three shots a winter," Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said Monday during a panel at the World Economic Forum. As for when that combination shot could be ready, Bancel said that "the best-case scenario would be the fall of 2023." The mRNA-based flu and RSV vaccines are still under development.

Still, it's not yet clear that annual shots will be required—or even if omicron-specific boosters will be needed after the current wave recedes. Existing vaccines have faltered at protecting double-vaccinated people from infection with omicron. And experts say it's too early to know if people who recover from omicron will be well-protected from getting omicron again in the future. But boosters appear to significantly increase antibody responses, and protection remains strong against severe disease, hospitalizations, and death from omicron and all other variants.

For now, US officials have said it's too early to start talking about fourth vaccine doses and future booster drives. In a January 7 press briefing, Director Rochelle Walensky of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted the difficulty in getting people to take the booster doses that are already available to them. "Right now, I think our strategy has to be to maximize the protection of the tens of millions of people who continue to be eligible for a third shot before we starting thinking about what a fourth shot would look like."

Archaeologists surveying the planned route of a high-speed railway between London and Birmingham in the UK unearthed the remains of a Roman trading town in what is now South Northamptonshire.

At its height, the town boasted an assortment of workshops and businesses, with long-buried foundations that archaeologists have spent the past year carefully unearthing from the site’s dark—almost black—soil. Artifacts at the site, from jewelry and finely made ceramics to more than 300 Roman coins, hint at ancient affluence. According to archaeologists with the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) Headland Infrastructure, most of that wealth probably came from trade along the nearby River Cherwell or the 10-meter-wide stone-paved Roman road running through the middle of the town.

“It indicates that the settlement would have been very busy, with carts simultaneously coming and going to load and unload goods,” said MOLA Headland Infrastructure in a statement.

Life on the Roman frontier

People at the site, now called Blackgrounds for its dark soil, lived on the far-flung western frontier of the Roman Empire, but they lived a distinctly Roman way of life. Rome’s influence here is apparent not just in the Roman coins but in the Roman deities depicted on pottery and on metal weights for scales. Roman-style bronze brooches and the traces of lead-based cosmetics found at the site reveal Roman fashions in daily life. And in the end, at least some of the people who once lived here were cremated and laid to rest in Roman-style urns.

At a larger scale, Roman organization is clear in the layout of the town. Archaeologists noticed a distinct division between a residential district and a more industrial district. There, archaeologists found the remains of workshops, as well as a patch of burned red soil that suggests the presence of a baker, a foundry, or a potter’s kiln.

Other artifacts at Blackgrounds hint at less savory Roman institutions. Half a set of metal shackles may be evidence of either enslaved people or imprisoned criminals. Additional finds include bone dice and gaming pieces, weaving tools, ceramic pots, and pewter dishes.

The International Space Station is now more than two decades old. And while primary construction of the orbiting laboratory ended a little more than a decade ago, before the retirement of NASA's space shuttle, the station has continued to evolve with smaller modules and an ever-changing array of visiting spacecraft.

Over this time the station has begun to show its age, being exposed to the extreme hot and cold temperatures of space, a vacuum environment, and micrometeoroid debris. For more than 20 years, these harsh conditions have worn on the station, inducing stress fractures and other damage.

Following the space shuttle's retirement in 2011, NASA lost the ability to fly humans around the station to catalog these changes with highly detailed photographs. But thanks to the emergence of SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle, astronauts have started circumnavigating the station once again after undocking and before heading home.

Most recently, the Crew 2 mission led by NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough undocked from the space station on November 8, and the crew was able to capture multiple views of the space station. NASA's Johnson Space Center recently posted the photos on its Flickr page.

The orbital complex was flying over 250 miles above the Nile Delta in Egypt when this photograph was taken.

The view of the station from inside Crew Dragon.

The station's US segment and portions of the Russian segment are pictured. In addition to the modules where astronauts live and work, several external structures are visible including large white radiators extending from its integrated truss structure and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 seen on the far left.

This view shows the habitable volume of the station (modules arranged vertically through the center) along with white radiators used to dissipate heat and the large solar arrays used to generate electricity.

A good shot showing the scale of the station's new solar arrays.

The Bigelow expandable module can be seen in the middle of this image.

Prominent in this view are the Progress 78 cargo craft, the Soyuz MS-19 crew ship, and the Northrop Grumman Cygnus resupply ship.

The orbital complex was flying 263 miles above the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean when this photograph was taken.

On Monday, the University of Maryland School of Medicine announced that its staff had done the first transplant of a pig's heart into a human. The patient who received it had end-stage heart disease and was too sick to qualify for the standard transplant list. Three days after the procedure, the patient was still alive.

The idea of using non-human organs as replacements for damaged human ones—called xenotransplantation—has a long history, inspired by the fact that there are more people on organ waiting lists than there are donors. And, in recent years, our ability to do targeted gene editing has motivated people to start genetically modifying pigs in order to make them better donors. But the recent surgery wasn't part of a clinical trial, so it shouldn't be viewed as an indication that this approach is ready for widespread safety and efficacy testing.

Instead, the surgery was authorized by the FDA under its "compassionate use" access program. This allows those faced with life-threatening illnesses to receive investigational treatments that haven't gone through rigorous clinical testing yet.

The heart used for this transplant did come from a genetically modified line that was specifically engineered to reduce the chance of rejection by the human immune system. There are a number of lines that have been engineered with this in mind (there's a review of some of the competing ideas on what to modify). This line was developed by a company called Revivicor (now part of United Therapeutics), but the company doesn't provide any details on its website of the precise changes made. Searching for Revivicor on ClinicalTrials.gov returns only a single hit that involves a completely different pig line.

So it's difficult to know exactly what genes were modified in these pigs. The University of Maryland's press release indicates that there were three pig genes knocked out to lower its immune profile and avoid rejection, and a fourth knocked out to block "excessive growth" of the porcine cells. In addition, six human genes were inserted into the pigs to enhance the human immune system's tolerance of the foreign cells. While it's easy to speculate on what these genes might be, the potential list of targets is much larger than what has actually been edited.

Given the amount of effort that has gone into generating the pig lines, it was clearly a matter of time before these sorts of transplants were attempted. But the lack of details about the commercially developed heart donor mean that it's difficult to judge this first effort on a scientific level. And the fact that the transplant took place without a transparent plan for assessing the safety of the transplant raises questions of how informative the first effort will be.

From a human standpoint, however, someone who has been in the hospital for months for lack of a properly functioning heart now has one. And its ability to remain functional will likely tell us something.

As the Moon coalesced from the debris of an impact early in the Solar System's history, the steady stream of orbital impacts is thought to have formed a magma ocean, leaving the body liquid. That should have allowed its components to mix evenly, creating a roughly uniform body. But with the onset of space exploration, we were finally able to get our first good look at the far side of the Moon.

It turned out to look quite different from the side we were familiar with, with very little in the way of the dark regions, called mare, that dominate the side facing Earth. These differences are also reflected in the chemical composition of the rocks on the different sides. If the whole Moon was once a well-mixed blob of magma, how did it end up with such a major difference between two of its faces? A new study links this difference to the Moon's largest impact crater.

A big crash

The South Pole-Aitken Basin is one of the largest impact craters in the Solar System, but again, we didn't realize it was there until after we put a craft in orbit around the Moon. All we can see from Earth are some of the ridges that are part of the outer crater wall. Most of the 2,500 kilometers of the crater itself extend into the far side of the Moon.

Clearly, the crater formed after the magma ocean period, based on the fact that its features solidified after the impact. But it's also very old, and it could have formed prior to many of the volcanic features we can see on the near side. Intriguingly, the largest concentration of volcanic mare are found in the north of the near side—roughly on the opposite side of the Moon from the impact itself. Could they be related?

It's clear that an impact of this size could have generated a lot of heat within the Moon and potentially influenced or even restarted convection of the materials there. But it's far less clear that this would have produced volcanism so far from the site of impact.

To understand the situation better, a team of Chinese researchers built a model of the Moon's interior. This model combined software that could simulate the impact with models of the Moon's interior that could take into account the heating and additional material of the impact and the gravitational influence of the nearby Earth.

A big churn

As expected, the model shows that the heat derived from the impact does indeed restart convection within the interior of the Moon. But it doesn't restart evenly. That's because the body that created the crater also injects a lot of material into the interior of the Moon, and that material gradually spreads out from the site of impact in all directions. For a large portion of the Moon's interior, this disrupts organized convection.

This organized convection is what allows warmer, deep material to make its way to the surface and draws cooler material from the surface to the interior. The net result is that warm, deep material only makes its way closer to the surface on the side opposite the impact crater. On the Moon, this material also contains higher concentrations of radioactive isotopes, which will keep it warm for much longer, powering the extended period of volcanism that created the mare.

Not every impact will produce this sort of effect. If the angle of an impact is too shallow, the spread of material isn't wide enough to create a large asymmetry. And the details of the asymmetry are sensitive to the size of the impactor and the viscosity of the material it injects into the lunar interior.

Obviously, this sort of complicated mechanism requires a lot of things to go right, so researchers will probably want to recheck this work with independent convection models. And the authors of the study suggest that looking at the rocks near the Chang'e-5 landing site on the northern part of the near side may give us a greater sense of the composition of the materials that erupted there.

But as the authors note, there are several competing models to explain the asymmetry, so we'll have to wait for scientists to compare the models to see if there are any obvious differences in what they produce. And then we'll have to see if we can reasonably expect to get any relevant evidence from the Moon.

Nature Geoscience, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41561-021-00872-4  (About DOIs).

There were two stunningly good pieces of news about the James Webb Space Telescope this weekend. One was widely reported—that after an intricate, two-week process, the telescope completed its deployment without any difficulties. The next steps toward science operations are more conventional.

The other piece of news, less well-covered but still important, emerged during a news conference on Saturday. NASA's Mission Systems Engineer for the Webb telescope, Mike Menzel, said the agency had completed its analysis of how much "extra" fuel remained on board the telescope. Roughly speaking, Menzel said, Webb has enough propellant on board for 20 years of life.

This is twice the conservative pre-launch estimate for Webb's lifetime of a decade, and it largely comes down to the performance of the European Ariane 5 rocket that launched Webb on a precise trajectory on Christmas Day.

Prior to launch, the telescope was fueled with 240 liters of hydrazine fuel and dinitrogen tetroxide oxidizer. Some of this fuel was needed for course adjustments along the journey to the point in space, about 1.5 million km from Earth, where Webb will conduct science observations. The remainder will be used at Webb's final orbit around the L2 Lagrange point for station-keeping and to maintain its orbit.

So every kilogram of fuel saved on Webb's journey to the Lagrange point could be used to extend its life there. Because ten years seemed like a fairly short operational period for such an expensive and capable space telescope, NASA had already been contemplating a costly and risky robotic refueling mission. But now that should not be necessary, as Webb has at least two decades of life.

A lot of this comes down to the performance of the venerable Ariane 5 rocket. NASA and the European Space Agency reached an agreement more than a decade ago by which Europe would use its reliable Ariane 5 rocket to lift the telescope into space, and in exchange, European scientists would get time to use the telescope.

During an interview with The Interplanetary Podcast, Ariane 5 program manager Rudiger Albat explained how European rocket scientists approached the Webb launch. Each Ariane 5 vehicle is interchangeable, but engineers and technicians involved in the production of the rocket know which components are going on which rocket. So when they were building a part of Webb, an engineer might say, "I'll take a second look" to make sure the piece was the best it could be.

The Ariane 5 program also selected the best components for Webb based upon pre-flight testing. For example, for the Webb-designated rocket, the program used a main engine that had been especially precise during testing. "It was one of the best Vulcain engines that we've ever built," Albat said. "It has very precise performance. It would have been criminal not to do it."

A similar attitude was taken toward other components, including the solid rocket motors that were used to build the Ariane 5 that launched two weeks ago.

Albat admitted that the days prior to launch were exhausting and nerve-wracking. But soon after the launch, Albat said he and the entire European space community could take pride as Webb took flight and began to unfurl its wings. Now, he said, "I feel totally relaxed." The same can be said for a lot of scientists who have been watching Webb's development for two decades.

For much of the world, Saturday was just another weekend day filled with all of this planet's problems and perils. The Omicron-fueled pandemic raged around the globe. New York emerged from its first snowstorm of the season. Turmoil continued in Kazakhstan and elsewhere

But in space. In space. On Saturday, in space, there was a great triumph.

After a quarter century of effort by tens of thousands of people, more than $10 billion in taxpayer funding, and some 350 deployment mechanisms that had to go just so, the James Webb Space Telescope fully unfurled its wings. The massive spacecraft completed its final deployments and, by God, the process went smoothly.

Thanks to NASA, and space agencies in Europe and Canada, the world has a brilliant new space telescope that will allow humanity to see far further back into the depths of galactic time than ever before, and quite possibly identify the first truly Earth-like worlds around other stars.

I dare say that 99 percent of the world will not know or realize or care to understand the amount of work and engineering and paperwork that went into building, launching, and deploying the James Webb Space Telescope. But those of us who know, we know. And we are in awe.

In something of an understatement after full deployment, NASA's chief of science, Thomas Zurbuchen, said, "This is an amazing milestone."

Serious planning for a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope began in the 1990s, and scientists were keen to see back further, into the early universe. To do this they would need a dark, cold environment far from Earth. This is because to collect light from the most faint, distant objects in the universe requires not just a very large mirror, but also no background interference.

To do this, scientists planned to build a telescope that would make observations in the infrared part of the spectrum, where wavelengths are just a little bit longer than red light. This portion of the spectrum is good both for detecting heat emissions, and such wavelengths are long enough that there's less chance they will be deflected by interstellar dust.

Such a telescope would need to be very cold, however, which is how scientists came to devise a large, tennis-court sized heat shield to block light and heat from the Sun. But because no rocket has a super-large fairing, this heat shield and telescope would necessarily need to be folded like origami to fit within the protective cocoon atop a rocket. Nothing like that had ever been tried before. Building this heat shield, testing it, and ensuring it could be deployed in space required the better part of two decades.

Therefore, while the launch of the Webb telescope on Christmas Day two weeks ago was momentous, it was just the beginning of the end of Webb's journey from concept to science operations. As part of the deployment process, there were 344 actions where a single-point failure could scuttle the telescope. This is a remarkable number of instances without a redundant capability, which is why many of the scientists and engineers I have spoken with in recent years felt that Webb had a pretty good chance of failing once in space.

But now that ultra complex heat shield is working. The temperature on the Sun-facing side of the telescope is 55 degrees Celsius, or a very, very, very hot day in the Sahara desert. And already, the science instruments on the back side of the sunshield have cooled to -199 degrees Celsius, a temperature at which nitrogen is a liquid. They will yet cool further.

Work remains, of course. Webb still must traverse about 370,000 km to reach an orbit around a stable Lagrange point, L2. Scientists and engineers must check out and align the 18 primary mirror segments. Scientific instruments must be calibrated. But all of this work is somewhat more routine when it comes to science spacecraft. There are risks, to be sure, but these are mostly known risks.

We can therefore be reasonably confident now that Webb will, in fact, begin to make science observations this summer. We should, truly, be in awe.