The James Webb Space Telescope can see light from roughly 180 million years after the Big Bang, but building an instrument capable of that took a quarter century, ten times the original budget, and a design with 344 single-point failures. This episode explains why a bigger Hubble would not have worked: cosmological redshift stretches the ultraviolet and visible light of the first galaxies into infrared, and infrared astronomy demands a telescope that operates below 50 Kelvin so its own heat does not blind its sensors.

We walk through the engineering that made it possible, from the halo orbit around the L2 Lagrange point 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, to the five-layer Kapton sunshield rated at SPF one million, to the 18 gold-coated beryllium mirror segments aligned to 10 nanometers. We also cover the fraught history, including the 1996  ...