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Watch Cosmic Dawn: The Untold Story of the James Webb Space Telescope in the player above.

Cosmic Dawn, a NASA documentary

On June 11, 2025, NASA released a new documentary called Cosmic Dawn: The Untold Story of the James Webb Space Telescope. You can watch the 96-minute show in the player above. This is the story of how the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) came to life, bringing us some of the deepest glimpses into the universe we’ve yet seen.

Much of the documentary focuses on the engineering challenges. And there is a lot of stress and drama that go along with them. The original design for the space telescope began in 1996 under the name of the Next Generation Space Telescope. But years of delays meant that Webb did not launch until Christmas 2021.

Part of the fun of watching the documentary is recalling your own history with the telescope: When you first heard about it, the stress of watching it launch, waiting for it to arrive at its home at Lagrange 2, and then the unfolding and the first images.

Politics and Webb

Regular questioning by lawmakers over the years kept the JWST team on its toes. And it’s fair to say that such an ambitious design would never get approved today, especially in light of the cuts NASA is facing. But facing lawmakers’ scrutiny is expected, considering how much the project cost, at around $10 billion.

And the Webb’s predecessor, Hubble, had a rough beginning that no one wanted to repeat. When Hubble first got into orbit and began sending back pictures, they were blurry due to a tiny aberration. Spacewalks to service the telescope followed, giving it pristine vision. But sometimes, people only remember the bad news. Case in point, I was once talking about Hubble more than a decade after its launch when my brother-in-law stopped me and said: “But isn’t it a lemon?” He had heard about the flaw but had never, in the many years following, heard it was fixed and regularly sending us mind-blowing images.

So everyone, from the JWST team to politicians and the public, were nervous about sending an expensive telescope so far away that it could never be serviced if a problem arose. And fortunately for everyone, Webb has performed marvelously.

Human stories and Webb

Of course, the most poignant stories the documentary tells are the human stories of those associated with Webb. One of the video producers shows so much excitement and emotion when she talks about Webb that I generously forgave her when she accidentally called our galaxy the solar system.

One of my favorite scenes was the husband and wife trucker team that delivered the mirrors to NASA and then got a tour of the assembly facility. We get to share in their excitement that they got to play a small role in the telescope that will help us understand our origins. As they overlook the clean room from the viewing platform above, trucker Bob Harmon jokingly asks: “So I guess you can’t smoke in there?”

Overcoming adversity to see the Cosmic Dawn

The documentary recounts many obstacles the space telescope faced. It was in Texas during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. It became covered in dust after a shake test and had to be meticulously hand cleaned with tiny brushes. During shipping to Guiana Space Centre in South America, they had to avoid the threat of pirates. But the end result was more than worth it.

At the end of the documentary, we get to sit in on a press release showing the first images from Webb. I felt my own emotions rise watching others get choked looking through Webb’s infrared eyes. In one image of a star with bright spikes, John Durning, the Webb deputy project manager, says: “There’s supposed to be nothing behind it. Nothing.” But instead, we get a view of 250 galaxies that had been hiding until Webb revealed them.