[1] A preliminary concept in pre-formulation, it was presented to the United States Decadal Survey in 2019 for a possible selection to NASA's large strategic science missions.

Origins would provide an array of new tools for studying star formation and the energetics and physical state of the interstellar medium within the Milky Way using infrared radiation and new spectroscopic capabilities.

The workgroups have identified these baseline science topics: Early and preliminary goals for the Origins Space Telescope mission include the study of water transport as both ice and gas from the interstellar medium to the inner regions of planet-forming disks, from interstellar clouds, to protoplanetary disks, to Earth itself—in order to understand the abundance and availability of water for habitable planets.

[8] In the Solar System, it will chart the role of comets in delivering water to the early Earth by tracing their molecular heredity of deuterium/hydrogen ratio.

[8] Its spectrographs will enable 3D surveys of the sky that will discover and characterize the most distant galaxies, Milky-Way, exoplanets, and the outer reaches of the Solar System.