A year-long series looking back on the most significant moments of the past 25 years, how they changed our world, and how they will continue to shape the next 25.

Simon Winchester’s most recent book is The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind. His previous books include The Professor and the Madman, The Men Who United the States, The Map That Changed the World, The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World, and Krakatoa. In 2006, he was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire.

It was a Christmas morning like no other, that mid-pandemic day in 2021. True, there were the usual living-room delights: the tree, the decorations, the tempting packages, the new-lit fire, carols on the radio, glorious scents wafting in from the kitchen. Excited children in pyjamas. The family dog, bewildered and glitter-dusted.

But then, just before 7:20 a.m., we turned our attention to the moment for which all had prepared. The room fell suddenly silent. All eyes turned to the TV screen, with its unseasonable scenes of gantries, palm trees and, front and centre, a giant pure-white space rocket, the Ariane 5. The crawler told those who didn’t know that we were in South America, at a place called Kouro, in the French colony of Guiana. A satellite launching centre.

First came the clipped voice of an announcer, the range operations manager, a French official named Jean-Luc Voyer:

“Cinq. Quatre. Trois. Deux. Unité. …”

Then a pause, a huge void-filling sound, and a triumphal “Décollage!” – liftoff. And even the younger children joined the cheers as an enormous roar swelled into the room, and we watched, as open-mouthed as in earlier launches we used to be, at the alabaster rocket rising through its immense cloud of smoke.

Arianespace's Ariane 5 rocket with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope onboard lifts off from the launchpad at Europe's Spaceport, the Guiana Space Centre, in Kourou, French Guiana, on Dec. 25, 2021.JODY AMIET/AFP/Getty Images

The James Webb Space Telescope was on its way.

Ahead of it unspooled a 1.5-million-kilometre voyage “from a tropical rain forest to the edge of time itself,” as another voice, this time American-accented, put it: “A voyage back to the birth of the universe.” And all hyperbole aside, we knew as we resumed our seasonal duties that we had just witnessed something quite historic and extraordinary – if, that is, it worked.

If.

For the next two weeks those of us who had become well-nigh obsessed with the seeming never-ending birth story of James Webb held our collective breath. There were, we were told, no fewer than 344 potential points of failure between launch and arriving at its destiny, tiny things that could go wrong and in so doing doom the entire US$10-billion dollar, quarter-century-long project. But if they were each overcome, one by one, then the telescope – which would start its estimated 20 years of working life at its lonely orbital home-base in deep space known as the L2 Lagrange Point – would come to be regarded as an unarguably magnificent achievement of human science,........

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