An independent review commissioned by NASA of JWST in 2018 recommended that NASA increase oversight of the Ariane 5 to the same level as the agency does for missions launching on U.S. vehicles.
A 10-week launch processing schedule beginning with JWST’s shipment from California to the launch site in French Guiana in late August supports a mid-November launch timeframe.
JWST project officials said final preparations of the spacecraft are proceeding in a way that should make it ready for shipment to French Guiana by late August to support an 2021-10-31 launch.
The JWST program worked with Arianespace to change air vents in the Ariane 5 payload fairing.
NASA has discussed the JWST delay with the European Space Agency, and the European Space Agency will launch JWST on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana.
NASA had not set a new launch date for JWST as of June 2020 and planned a schedule assessment for July 2020.
NASA maintained optimism that JWST could still launch in 2021 on an Ariane 5 from French Guiana.
NASA closed its field centers in March 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic, causing personnel overseeing JWST integration and testing at a Northrop Grumman facility in Southern California to return home.
The JWST project resumed some work with reduced personnel and shifts starting 2020-03-25 through early April.
JWST integration and testing activities at the Northrop Grumman facility were reduced from about 45–50 NASA personnel weekly to about 15 personnel.
The JWST program performed an updated joint confidence level analysis of the mission’s cost and schedule in October 2019 that assessed a 12 percent confidence level for meeting the March 2021 launch readiness date.
Using a 70 percent confidence level metric, the GAO report estimated the JWST launch would likely occur in July 2021, a delay of four months from March 2021.
Greg Robinson, JWST program director at NASA Headquarters, and Scott Willoughby, vice president and JWST program manager at Northrop Grumman, believed the mission was on track to complete a final set of environmental and deployment tests and be shipped to the launch site at Kourou, French Guiana, by the end of 2020.
The JWST program planned to reassess its launch date in the spring of 2020 after completing significant technical tasks on the mission.
The JWST spacecraft element successfully completed its final thermal vacuum test on 2019-05-30.
NASA's JWST program held 60 days of margin for integration and testing of the combined spacecraft bus and optical elements, three weeks of margin after the observatory arrives at the launch site, and four months of reserve held at NASA Headquarters.
Thermal vacuum testing of the JWST spacecraft was expected to begin the week of the National Academies' Space Science Week meeting on 2019-03-26.
The GAO argued that conducting a JCL at the system integration review would allow the JWST project to update its assumptions of risk and uncertainty based on testing the separate spacecraft bus and optical elements prior to integration.
Greg Robinson is the director of the JWST program at NASA Headquarters and NASA is working to implement the review board recommendation for increased oversight of the Ariane 5 launch.
Work on JWST is following a revised schedule announced in June that calls for a launch at the end of March 2021.