The pieces of the telescope and its instruments were complete, but needed to be assembled and tested. The launch date was falling further into the future and the cost, already approaching $8 billion, was rising again. Congress, which had provided several major funding infusions over the years, was unhappy that NASA was asking for even more money. That’s when Gregory Robinson was asked to take over as Webb’s program director. At the time, Mr. Robinson was the deputy assistant administrator for programs 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 science associate, asked him again. “He had a kind of coincidence of two skills,” said Dr. Zurbuchen for Mr. Robinson. “The first is that he had seen a lot of projects, including projects that were in trouble. And the second part is that he has this interpersonal activity that earns trust. So he can walk into a room, he can sit in a cafeteria, and by the time he leaves the cafeteria, he knows half the people.” Finally, Mr. Robinson relented. In March 2018, he began the task of getting the telescope back into orbit and into space. “He twisted both my arms to get 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 executives. “Certainly people seeing me in that role is an inspiration,” he said, “and it’s also an acknowledgment 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, for example by taking part in press conferences as Mr Robinson follows her Webb’s circulation. “We have a lot of things to try to improve,” Mr Robinson said. Born in Danville, Va., along the southern edge of the state, he was the ninth of 11 children. His parents were tobacco farmers. He attended an all-black elementary school until the fifth grade when the school district was finally integrated in 1970.
Learn more about the James Webb Space Telescope
After traveling nearly a million miles to reach a site beyond the moon, the James Webb Space Telescope will spend years observing the universe.
He was the only one in his family to pursue science and math, with a football scholarship paying 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 an electrical engineering degree from Howard. He started working at NASA in 1989, following some friends who had already worked there. Over the years, his jobs included deputy director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and deputy chief engineer. The Webb commission came amid bad publicity for the project. The target date for the launch had dropped again, to May 2020 from 2019. NASA had created a review board of outside experts to advise what needed to be done to get Webb to the finish line. A month into Mr Robinson’s tenure, a botched test provided a vivid illustration of how much needed to be fixed. Spacecraft must survive the intense shocks of launch, so engineers test them by shaking them. When Webb shook, embarrassingly, the screws holding the cover of the telescope’s large, fragile sun shield snapped. “That set us back months – about 10 months – just that one thing,” Mr Robinson said. The launch date was pushed back to March 2021 and the price increased by another $800 million. The incident seemed like a repeat of previous problems the Webb project had faced. When the telescope was named Webb in 2002, it had a budget of $1 to $3.5 billion for a launch as early as 2010. By the time 2010 arrived, the launch date had been moved to 2014 and the estimated cost for the telescope had risen to $5.1 billion dollars . After reviews found that both the budget and schedule were unrealistic, in 2011, NASA reinstated the program with a much higher budget of no more than $8 billion and a start date of October 2018. For several years after the 2011 reset, the program appeared to be in good shape. “Landmarks were falling,” Mr Robinson said. “Really good program margin.” But, he added, “There are things going on in there that you don’t see. Ghosts always get you, don’t they?’ For the screws that popped during the shake test, it turned out that the engineering drawings didn’t specify how much torque to apply. That was left up to the contractor, Northrop Grumman, to decide, and it wasn’t tight enough. “You should have a specification to make sure it’s right,” Mr Robinson said. The review panel published its report, noting a number of issues and making 32 recommendations. NASA followed them all, Mr. Robinson said. One of the recommendations was to conduct an audit of the entire spacecraft to detect “embedded problems” — mistakes that happened without anyone noticing. The engineers checked the plans and specifications. They reviewed purchase requests to ensure that what was ordered matched specifications and that suppliers provided the correct products. “There were a lot of teams that were set up, led by the most experienced people,” Mr Robinson said. “They really dug the papers.” For the most part, the material did indeed match what was originally designed. A few things didn’t fit – Mr Robinson said none of them should lead to a catastrophic failure – and they were fixed. When Mr. Robinson took over as program director, the Webb program’s efficiency — a measure of how the pace of work compared to what was planned — had dropped to about 55 percent, Dr. Zurbuchen. This, to a large extent, was the result of avoidable human error. Dr. Mr. Robinson was credited with turning things around. Within months, effectiveness reached 95%, with better communications and managers more willing to share potentially bad news. “You needed someone who could gain the trust of the team, and what we needed to understand was what was wrong with the team,” said Dr. Zurbuchen. “The speed at which this thing turned was just amazing.” However, some new issues caused additional delays and cost overruns. Some, such as the pandemic and a problem with the payload fairing on the European-made Ariane 5 rocket, were beyond Mr Robinson’s control. There have been other human errors, such as last November when a clamping band securing the telescope to the launch pad broke, shaking the telescope but causing no damage. But when Ariane 5 carrying Webb finally launched at Christmas, everything went off without a hitch, and development 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, with pride, that he worked himself out of a job.
