JWST Delays
JWST Delays
[Top caption, in the panel:] James Webb Space Telescope [Subtitle of top caption:] Launch Delays
[There is a positive-quadrant only line graph. The x- axis is labeled 'Current Date' and the y axis is labeled 'Planned Launch Date'. The dates on both of the axes range from 1995 to 2030.] [In the graph are 15 points, starting at (1997,2007) and extending at a slope of a little less than one. The most recent one is labeled 'Now: 2021'.] [There are two lines on the graph: a red one and a dashed black one. The red one is a regression of the points on the graph. It has a slope of about ⅔. The black one is a line with a slope of one. They intersect at the point (2026,2026), marked by the label 'Late 2026'?]
[Caption below the panel:] Look, at least the slope is less than one.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a space telescope created to be the successor of the Hubble Space Telescope .
The telescope has been in development since 1996, but has been plagued by numerous delays and cost overruns. This comic was likely inspired by the most recent delay announcement , which was posted on June 27, 2018. At that time, the JWST was scheduled to launch on March 30, 2021.
This comic portrays the launch delays and the new predicted launch years and the times at which those predictions were made.  There have been so many delays in this project that you can plot a line of best fit with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy.  Randall says optimistically that the line’s slope is less than one (there is less than one year of new delay per year of elapsed time), implying, of course, that if events continue without further intervention, it will eventually be built, with a predicted date of late 2026.
The title text alludes to the famous research over the universe’s accelerating expansion .  The expansion had been predicted to be slowing due to gravity from everything in the universe; instead, it was found to be accelerating since about 5 billion years ago.  Here, Randall looks at the apparently ever-delaying schedule and observes that the delay per time does not decrease, although the date gets nearer (which should help to schedule the launch date, as research and unknown parameters are replaced with engineering and exact predictions and measurements). However, this delay inflation contradicts Randall's usage of a linear trendline.  Given the COVID-19 pandemic brought some additional delays in 2020 and 2021, the "early 2020" date was perhaps unintentionally prescient.
The Wikipedia article linked above includes a table which provides the data points for the chart:
[Top caption, in the panel:] James Webb Space Telescope [Subtitle of top caption:] Launch Delays
[There is a positive-quadrant only line graph. The x- axis is labeled 'Current Date' and the y axis is labeled 'Planned Launch Date'. The dates on both of the axes range from 1995 to 2030.] [In the graph are 15 points, starting at (1997,2007) and extending at a slope of a little less than one. The most recent one is labeled 'Now: 2021'.] [There are two lines on the graph: a red one and a dashed black one. The red one is a regression of the points on the graph. It has a slope of about ⅔. The black one is a line with a slope of one. They intersect at the point (2026,2026), marked by the label 'Late 2026'?]
[Caption below the panel:] Look, at least the slope is less than one.
