The hardware is then lowered very, very, very slowly into a 165,000-pound shipping container that NASA had manufactured specifically for this purpose. The top of the container is secured, sealing Webb inside a climate-controlled sarcophagus. The container is rolled out of the cleanroom, fitted with hydraulic wheels, and attached to a semi-truck. The truck then drives south from Goddard to Joint Base Andrews, surrounded by a convoy of police and NASA employees. The trip usually takes about a half hour, but Webb is precious cargo. The truck will reach no more than 10 miles per hour, slowing to a crawl around turns or beneath underpasses.

By the way, this whole thing happens in the dead of night, when it’s easier for police to block off stretches of highway. After the truck arrives at the air base, it’s loaded into a C-5 military transport plane, an aircraft designed to carry tanks and fighter jets. The plane flies to the Ellington Field, a military base near Houston. The truck is unloaded and driven to Johnson Space Center. There, Webb’s mirrors and instruments will be dipped inside a test chamber, cooled by liquid nitrogen and helium to simulate the extreme cold of deep-space.

NASA won’t say when Webb will be making the big move, citing security reasons, but sometime in the next few weeks look likely.

The Webb team has had some practice. Last year, NASA transported a 3,000-pound replica of Webb’s backbone, which has stood in for the real thing in several tests, from Goddard to Johnson through the same process. The mirrors and instruments themselves have been lifted and shuffled around the Goddard facility to different rooms for acoustics and vibrations test, which simulate the sounds and shakes of a rocket launch. The team has folded and unfolded the hexagonal mirrors to make sure they will deploy properly in space.

By the time of launch, the James Webb will be a well-traveled piece of technology. The beryllium powder for the telescope’s mirrors was mined in mineral-rich mountains in Utah. From there, the beryllium has criss-crossed the country, making stops at various facilities in Ohio, Alabama, California, Colorado, and New Jersey to be shaped, polished, and tested. After it completes testing in Houston, the mirrors and instruments will travel to California, where they will assembled with a tennis court-sized sunshield and other hardware to become, finally, the James Webb Space Telescope. The completed telescope will be transported by ship through the Panama Canal and to French Guiana, where it will lift off on an Ariane 5 rocket.

Webb’s travels won’t end there. The telescope will reach a spot about 1 million miles away from Earth, where it will orbit the sun. When it unfolds, its gold mirrors will stare out into the darkness, looking farther back in time than humans ever have before, in search of light from the very first stars.