While NASA is prepping to decommission one of the Great Observatories, namely the Spitzer Space Telescope, it is also developing the next generation of telescopes, Mashable reports.

James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope and the most powerful and complex observatory ever built, is scheduled to launch on March 30, 2021, but it might not. A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (US GAO) says that NASA will likely postpone the launch.

The U.S. GAO is a government agency that audits and evaluates the programs funded by the U.S. government.

The report evaluated that there was “only a 12 per cent confidence level” for the space telescope to make its March 2021 launch date. This will not be the first delay the JWST has seen since its inception as The Verge reports, the costs have skyrocketed by 95 per cent as the schedule kept getting extended further and further.

The most powerful and complex observatory ever built, James Webb Space Telescope is an important milestone for space exploration. The origami-inspired design has been developed so that the large telescope with a 6.5-meter long primary mirror can fit inside a rocket. Once in the orbit, the observatory will take months to unfold and be operational. The giant mirror will allow astronomers to peer through the cosmic dust and observe the most distant objects in the Universe.