My wife is an astrophysicist here in Australia and had been looking forward to this launch for over a decade. She plans on using James Webb and gravitational lensing to observe galaxies at extremely high redshifts. Basically one looks behind single or clusters of closer galaxies for very young galaxies in the early stages of forming, not long after the Big Bang. The gravity well of the closer cluster acts as a giant lense, acting as an additional optical element to the telescope propelling us even further into the distant past.

As we watched the launch I asked her what James Web means to astronomy. Her answer? "It will fundamentally change what we know about the universe".