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Before we go, 

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we have to tell you about a new NASA project that will literally change the way we see the universe. 

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The James Webb telescope could unlock big mysteries, but it was almost blinded by a budget battle.

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John Zarrella joins us from CNN Miami. He's been keeping a close watch on this story.

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It's very expensive to look into space, John.

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Yeah, it really is, Manisha. You know, you can consider Webb really sort of the younger, smarter brother to the Hubble Space Telescope. 

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But it's been a problem child, fraught with cost overruns and schedule delays.

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This is the future outside the Maryland Science Center. 

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It's a full-scale model of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. 

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Scientists believe the real thing will redefine our understanding of our place in the universe. 

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It will be so unique it can look further back in time than the Hubble telescope, almost to the dawn of creation.

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The James Webb telescope is to help us find our entire history 

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from the first things after the Big Bang to how the first galaxies are born.

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And, astronomers say, if they look in just the right place and get just a bit lucky...

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This may give us our first clues about the existence of life in another solar system.

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If we could see a planet like Earth with an ocean, I think that would be really cool.

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Webb will orbit about one million miles from Earth. 

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Its instruments are designed to image primarily in the infrared range, light we can't see. 

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Webb's capabilities will allow it to literally look where Hubble could not -- into gas and dust clouds, at the birth of the first stars and planets.

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Sounds incredible, right? Webb might get us another step closer to solving the puzzle: Are we alone?

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I don't even know how you would put a price on being able to answer questions like, 

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how old is the universe, how did this all start? Where's it going? What is it made of? 

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Are there other people out there like us? These questions are just so intrinsic.

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But there is a price tag. When Webb is finally launched in 2018, 

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it will be years behind schedule and cost about $8.8 billion, six and a half billion more than the original estimate. 

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At one point, Congress came close to killing it.

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So what happened? How did it end up astronomy at an astronomical cost?

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When you're doing inventions and things for the first time, you don't know exactly what you're gonna run into. 

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And we found several things that we had to work around.

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And it better work from the get-go.

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When Hubble ran into problems, space shuttle astronauts came to the rescue. But Hubble was only 300 miles up. 

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At one million miles away, even if the shuttle was still flying, it couldn't get there to fix Webb.