The extraordinary James Webb telescope

I just watched Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine, the documentary about the building and launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, and was deeply moved. The passion, determination and teamwork behind it are extraordinary. People devoted decades of their lives to making something almost impossibly ambitious succeed. To me, it represents the best of humanity: our curiosity, ingenuity and ability to work together for good.

The project took shape in 1996 as a scientific successor to Hubble. Developed by NASA with the European and Canadian space agencies, Webb uses infrared light to peer through cosmic dust and see galaxies as they were billions of years ago. It really is a kind of time machine: the farther it looks into space, the further it sees into the past.

The engineering is mind-boggling. Its 6.5-metre mirror consists of 18 gold-coated segments, protected by a sunshield roughly the size of a tennis court. Everything had to fold inside a rocket, then unfold in space. There were 344 single points of failure—individual failures that could compromise or destroy the mission. Launched on Christmas Day 2021, Webb travelled to an observing position 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, beyond the reach of any available repair mission. It had to work.

And it did. When the first science images were revealed in July 2022, the shared wonder on people’s faces moved me most. One image contained thousands of galaxies in a patch of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. Almost impossible to comprehend. After decades of effort, here was something everyone could share: the sheer amazement of looking into the universe and discovering more of what we belong to.

Some of the extraordinary images sent back to earth

Favourite singers: Linda Rondtadt

I have just watched the incredible documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, and it has left me loving her more than ever. First, that voice. What a voice! Such power, clarity and warmth, with the ability to move from the tenderest phrase to something that seems to fill your whole being. Her great gift was as an interpreter: she could take someone else’s song and make it utterly her own. When she sang, the emotion felt lived, as though she were finding the words for something she had felt herself.

Then there was her extraordinary musical courage. She could have stayed with the rock and country music that made her a star, but her curiosity kept taking her somewhere new. Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance on stage; the sumptuous standards she recorded with Nelson Riddle; the traditional Mexican songs of her family heritage. People in the industry warned her against some of these changes of direction, yet she trusted her love of the music, and audiences followed her. I find that deeply inspiring: the willingness to become a learner again, to risk failure, and to follow what moves you even when others cannot see the sense in it.

Knowing that she eventually lost her ability to sing makes watching her performances almost unbearably poignant. Her illness was initially diagnosed as Parkinson’s and later identified as progressive supranuclear palsy. To lose something so central to your life, and such a profound source of pleasure, is hard to imagine. What moves me in the documentary is the matter-of-fact courage with which she speaks about it, and the humour and intelligence that remain so unmistakably hers. I came away grateful for all the music she has given us, and full of admiration for the woman herself.

Favourite songs: Hallelujah (Jeff Buckley)

I watched the documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley the other day and was really moved. What a voice he had, and what an amazing human being came through in the film: sensitive, curious, funny, and so alive to music and the world around him. One of my favourite moments was his former girlfriend Rebecca Moore saying, “He drank up the world like a sponge.” I love that image. That openness to experience, that hunger to absorb everything and feel it deeply, is something I find enormously inspiring. 

It’s heartbreaking to think that Grace, now revered as one of the great albums, was the only studio album he completed in his lifetime. He drowned accidentally in 1997, aged just 30, with so much still ahead of him. Listening to what he left us, I can’t help imagining what he might have gone on to create. How would that extraordinary voice have matured? Where would his curiosity have taken his music? The documentary left me feeling both grateful for what we have and terribly sad for the man, and all the music, we lost.

I love Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, but Jeff Buckley’s version is my favourite. There’s so much expression in his singing: tenderness, longing, sorrow, and something like surrender. With just his voice and that beautiful guitar accompaniment, it feels deeply intimate. 

He had such a powerful voice with such an extraordinary range, yet it’s the relative restraint here that touches me most. That power held in reserve makes the moments when his voice opens up all the more moving. There’s such feeling in the way he holds a note or lets it fall away. I can return to this performance again and again and still feel deeply.