The Most Exciting Spot in the Cosmos Right Now Is French Guiana

KOUROU, French Guiana—One of the first things that the project manager of the world’s most powerful space telescope wanted to show me was the sloth.

Bill Ochs, a longtime manager at NASA, had already seen the animal a few times, hanging out in a strip of rich-green jungle, across the street from a hotel. “You see this kind of weird-looking tree right here?" Ochs said, pulling the car over. And there was the sloth, motionless on a high branch, nearly hidden, with only a patch of gray, wiry fur peeking through the leaves.

Ochs does photography in his spare time, and although he enjoys bird-watching in the wildlife refuge near his home in Maryland, he is not here, thousands of miles away in French Guiana, for the local wildlife. Ochs is here for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, years in the making.

So are hundreds, even thousands, of others from NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency, which are working together on the project. Employees from. A machine that is into space that astronauts won’t be able to repair it. So all of these people know they had better get this part right.