are not the first issues to face the James Webb Space Telescope project in the last nine months. Following NASA’s announcement in September that the telescopes launch was slipping from October 2018 to NET (No Earlier Than) March-June 2019, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) warned in February 2018 of dangers of additional slips beyond the realigned date due to ongoing issues with integration and testing operations and prime contractor [Northrop Grumman] optimism.
The report was particularly scathing toward Northrop Grumman, highlighting the company’s work on JWST as the project’s critical path toward being able to launch at the end of the window in June 2019 as well as Northrop’s continued “optimism” for schedules and underestimation of time needed to complete work.
Moreover, the GAO identified five specific areas that posed threats to the March-June 2019 launch schedule, including:

“resolving lingering technical issues from the OTIS (Optical Telescope & Integrated Science Instrument Module) cryovacuum test and preparing and shipping of OTIS to the Northrop Grumman facility in California for integration with the spacecraft,
Completing integration of spacecraft hardware, and conducting spacecraft element environmental tests and remaining deployments of the spacecraft and sunshield – activities which, to date, have taken considerably longer than planned,
Integrating the completed OTIS element with the spacecraft element and testing the full observatory in the fifth and final integration phase, which includes another set of challenging environmental tests,
Mitigating approximately 47 remaining tracked hardware and software risks to acceptable levels and continuing to address the project’s 300+ potential single point failures to the extent possible, and
Preparing and shipping the observatory to the launch site and completing final launch site processing, including installation of critical release mechanisms.”
As a result, the GAO warned that JWST was at risk of exceeding its $8 billion formulation and development cost cap prior to launch.