Over Nine Billion Dollars of SRE Lessons - the James Webb...
summary
Project costs reach $9.5B and launch happens December 2021 into L2 halo orbit; the telescope uses a foldable 18-segment mirror that must unfurl perfectly and engineers identify 344 single-point failures, so priority goes to testing, redundancy, and design-for-repairability. Telemetry and embedded sensors replace a selfie camera to avoid heating the cold optics. A meteoroid nicks a mirror but wavefront error stays well under the 150 nm SLO target (actual <75 nm). One mid‑infrared grating wheel shows excess friction and is taken offline for investigation.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:52Why Webb? The functional requirements.
- 3:35Functional requirements drive non-functional ones
- 10:36History of development
- 12:59Where does the trust come from?
- 16:34Reliability - a single point of failure?
- 17:19The cost of observability
- 22:14First Reliability Issues - within SLO
- 28:02The James Webb Deep Field
- 28:12The Webb "SRE Strategy"
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