In 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope, the beleaguered project to build an instrument that can look back to the earliest stars in the universe, appears to be going off the rails. Again.
Parts of the telescope and its instruments were complete, but needed to be assembled and tested. The launch date was slipping further into the future and costs, already approaching $8 billion, were rising again. Congress, which has provided several major funding infusions over the years, was unhappy that NASA was asking for more money.
This is when Gregory Robinson was asked to take over as Webb’s program director.
At the time, Mr. Robinson was the Deputy Associate Program Administrator at NASA, making him responsible for evaluating the performance of more than 100 science missions.
He said no. “I was enjoying my job at the time,” Mr Robinson recalled.
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, asked him again.
”He had something of a fusion of two skills,” Dr. Zurbuchen said of Mr. Robinson. “The first is that he’s seen a lot of projects, including projects that have had problems. And the second part is that he has this interpersonal activity of gaining trust. So he can walk into a room, he can sit in the coffee shop, and by the time he walks out of the coffee shop, he knows half the people.
Eventually, Mr. Robinson relented. In March 2018, he took on the task of getting the telescope back on track and into space.
“He twisted both my arms to take Webb,” Mr Robinson said.
His path to this role seemed unlikely.
At NASA, Mr. Robinson, 62, is a rarity: a black man among the agency’s top managers.
“Of course people seeing me in that role is an inspiration,” he said, “and also recognizing that they can be there too.”
He says there are many black engineers working at NASA now, but “certainly not as many as there should be” and most have not risen high enough to be seen by the public, such as attending press conferences such as Mr. Robinson follows Webb’s launch.
“We’ve got a lot of things we’re going to try to improve,” Mr Robinson said.
Born in Danville, Virginia, on the southern tip of the state, he was the ninth of 11 children. His parents were tobacco cops. He attended an all-black elementary school until the fifth grade when the school district finally integrated in 1970.
Learn more about the James Webb Space Telescope
After traveling nearly a million miles to reach a location beyond the Moon, the James Webb Space Telescope will spend years observing the cosmos.
He was the only one in his family to major in science and math, with a football scholarship that paid his way to Virginia Union University in Richmond. He later transferred to Howard University. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Virginia Union and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Howard.
He started working at NASA in 1989, following several friends who were already working there. Over the years, his work has included deputy director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and deputy chief engineer.
Webb’s assignment came amid bad publicity for the project.
The target launch date has again moved to May 2020 from 2019. NASA had created a review board of outside experts to advise on what needs to be done to get Webb to the finish line.
A month into Mr. Robinson’s tenure, a failed test provided a stark illustration of how much needs to be fixed.
Spacecraft must withstand the strong vibrations of launch, so engineers test them by shaking them. When Webb was shaken, embarrassingly, the screws holding the lid of the telescope’s large, fragile sun shield came loose.
“It set us back months – about 10 months – just that thing,” Mr Robinson said. The launch date was pushed back to March 2021, and the price went up another $800 million.
The incident appeared to be a repeat of previous problems encountered by the Webb project. When the telescope was named Webb in 2002, it had a budget estimate of $1 billion to $3.5 billion to launch as early as 2010. When 2010 rolled around, the launch date was pushed back to 2014, and the estimated cost of telescope had grown to $5.1 billion. After reviews found both the budget and schedule to be unrealistic, in 2011 NASA reset the program with a much higher budget not to exceed $8 billion and an October 2018 launch date.
A few years after the 2011 reboot, the program looked to be in good shape. “They were knocking off cornerstones,” Mr. Robinson said. “Really good schedule margin.”
But he added: “There are things going on there that you don’t see. Ghosts always get you, right?
For the screws that popped out during the shake test, it turned out that the engineering drawings did not specify how much torque should be applied. That was left up to the contractor, Northrop Grumman, to decide, and they weren’t tight enough.
“You have to have a spec to make sure it’s right,” Mr Robinson said.
The review board published its report, noting a series of problems and making 32 recommendations. NASA tracked all of them, Mr. Robinson said.
One of the recommendations was to conduct an audit of the entire spacecraft to identify “embedded problems” – errors that occurred without anyone noticing.
Engineers checked the drawings and specifications. They reviewed purchase requisitions to ensure that what was ordered met specifications and that suppliers were providing the correct items.
“Multiple teams were created, led by the most experienced people,” Mr Robinson said. “They really dug into the paperwork.”
For the most part, the hardware did live up to what was originally designed. A few things didn’t add up—Mr. Robinson said none of them should have led to a catastrophic failure—and they were fixed.
When Mr. Robinson took over as program director, Webb’s schedule performance — a measure of how the pace of work compares to what was planned — had fallen by about 55 percent, Dr. Zurbuchen said. This was largely the result of avoidable human error.
Dr. Zurbuchen said that Webb’s team was full of smart, qualified people who became uncomfortable with criticism. He credits Mr. Robinson with turning things around. Within a few months, effectiveness was up to 95 percent, with better communications and managers more willing to share potential bad news.
“You needed someone who could gain the trust of the team, and what we needed to figure out was what was wrong with the team,” Dr. Zurbuchen said. “The speed at which he turned that thing around was just amazing.”
However, a number of new problems caused further delays and cost overruns. Some, such as the pandemic and a problem with the payload fairing of the European-made Ariane 5 rocket, were beyond Mr Robinson’s control. Additional human errors have occurred, such as last November when a clamp securing the telescope to the launch pad broke, shaking the telescope but causing no damage.
But when the Ariane 5 carrying Webb finally launched on Christmas Day, everything went smoothly, and the deployment has been smooth sailing ever since.
With the start of observations, there will soon be no need for a program director for Webb.
Mr. Robinson says proudly that he is self-employed.
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