The Webb telescope’s stunning images beat the jumpsuits off billionaire selfies in space

The James Webb Space Telescope’s first images of the near and distant cosmos captured lights in literal and figurative darkness, an American-led international endeavor revealing new dimensions of planets, stars and galaxies at a gloomy moment in our relatively infinitesimal timescale. Using the infrared spectrum to peer over 13 billion years into the universe’s past, the telescope probed a point in creation that many earthlings leave to religion rather than science, which may be why some of the expert commentaries are infused with wonder at the nearly divine.

“We humans really are connected to the universe,” NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn said while reviewing some of Webb’s first images. “We’re made of the same stuff in this beautiful landscape.”

The telescope’s mind-expanding debut stands in devastating contrast to the stultifying space antics of a year ago, when a couple of the world’s richest men scraped the edge of Earth’s atmosphere and declared themselves pioneers, having explored nothing novel apart from the outer reaches of megalomania.

Virgin Group founder Richard Branson was the first to break the hubris barrier with an hour-and-a-half flight that got about as far from Earth as Stockton is from Sacramento, all of 50 miles into the atmosphere. Undeterred, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos took his galactic ego trip the following week.

Bezos’ minions peevishly explained that although the online retail magnate may have appeared to lose the capitalist space race to Branson by several days, his rocket not only had bigger windows but also crossed the Kármán line, a commonly used international definition of the inner border of outer space. While the British billionaire’s flight had managed to cross the Federal Aviation Administration by leaving its designated airspace, it had fallen short of that somewhat arbitrary atmospheric boundary by about a dozen miles. So there!

Perhaps not surprisingly given that they hadn’t really seen or done anything new, the lasting images of the billionaires’ ventures were primarily of, well, them: Branson in an absurd jumpsuit telling the hoi polloi that their dreams also might come true; Bezos in an absurder cowboy hat thanking Amazon shoppers for making it all possible. The indelible impression was that they had squandered their vast resources on the ultimate selfie.

The tycoons’ narcissistic inward gazes were in diametrical contrast to the sophisticated instrument now expanding the field of human vision to previously unseen and unknown horizons. A year to the day after Branson’s glorified joy ride, President Joe Biden unveiled Webb’s first look outward — way outward.

In the week since its launch, the telescope has produced an unprecedented image of galaxies dating to the early history of the universe; captured the “cosmic cliffs” of the Carina Nebula, a star-forming cloud of gas and dust in our own galaxy; and found signs of water on an exoplanet, demonstrating the instrument’s power to explore faraway worlds’ potential to sustain life. And these are just the early days of a deployment expected to last at least 20 years.

“The telescope and instrument suite have demonstrated the sensitivity, stability, image quality, and spectral range that are necessary to transform our understanding of the cosmos through observations spanning from near-earth asteroids to the most distant galaxies,” says a review of the instrument’s initial performance by a team of scientists from NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. They predicted that the telescope “will go deeper faster than expected.”

That is pretty deep compared with Branson’s shallow promise to “democratize” space travel while preparing to charge astro-tourists nearly half a million dollars a ticket — provided he could get his space plane off the ground again, which he has so far failed to do. The Webb telescope, a collaboration of the world’s democracies, is a public-spirited deployment of collective technological resources that puts extravagant displays of Big Tech solipsism to shame.