In 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope, a project to build an instrument that could see the universe’s first stars, appeared to be going off the rails. Once again.
The telescope’s parts and instruments were complete, but needed to be assembled and tested. The release date was being pushed further and further into the future, and costs, which were already approaching $8 billion, had started to climb again. The US Congress, which over the years had made several large contributions to the project, was unhappy that NASA was asking for even more money.
That’s when Gregory Robinson was asked to take over as program director at Webb.
At the time, he was acting deputy program administrator at NASA, responsible for evaluating the performance of more than 100 scientific missions.
Robinson refused. “I was enjoying my job at the time,” she recalled.
Thomas Zurburchen, NASA’s deputy scientific administrator, reiterated the invitation.
“Robinson had a kind of confluence of two abilities,” said Zurbuchen. “The first was that he had already followed many projects, including projects that were experiencing problems. And the second is that he carries out an activity to build interpersonal trust. He is able to walk into a place, sit in a cafeteria, and when leaves, he already knows half the people present.”
Robinson eventually gave in. In March 2018 he took on the task of putting the telescope back on its axis and sending it into space.
“He used maximum persuasion to convince me to take on Webb,” says Robinson.
His path to this role seemed unlikely.
Robinson, 62, is a rarity at NASA, being a black man among the agency’s top administrators.
“The fact that they see me in this role is an inspiration to people and shows that they too can fill this space,” he commented.
Robinson says there are many black engineers at NASA today, “but certainly not as many as there should be”, and most of them have not achieved high enough positions to be seen by the public, for example participating in press conferences as Robinson has been doing since launch. from Webb.
“We have a lot of things in the works to try to improve,” Robinson said.
Born in Danville, Virginia, on the southern tip of the state, Robinson was the ninth of 11 siblings. His parents were sharecroppers who grew tobacco. He studied until the fifth grade at an elementary school for black students, until 1970, when the school was finally racially integrated.
Robinson was the only one in his family to major in science and math, funding his studies at Virginia Union University in Richmond on a scholarship he won by playing football for the university. He later transferred to Howard University. He earned a BS in mathematics from Virginia Union and a BS in electrical engineering from Howard.
He started working for NASA in 1989, following some friends who already worked at the space agency. Over the years he has held positions such as deputy director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and deputy chief engineer.
Work on the Webb telescope came as the project was going through a phase of negative publicity.
The target launch date had been pushed back again from 2019 to May 2020. NASA had created a review board made up of outside experts to give recommendations on what needed to be done to get the project to the finish line.
A month after Robinson took office, a test that found problems vividly illustrated how much still needed to be resolved and fixed.
Spacecraft must survive the strong vibrations of launch; so engineers test them by shaking them. When the Webb was shaken, something embarrassing happened: the screws holding the cover of the telescope’s large, fragile solar shield came loose.
“This problem put us in a delay of months — about ten months,” Robinson said. The release date has been pushed back to March 2021 and the cost has increased by an additional $800 million.
The incident felt like a replay of previous problems the project had run into. When the telescope was named Webb in 2002, its estimated budget was between $1 billion and $3.5 billion, with a launch expected in 2010. When 2010 arrived, the launch was delayed to 2014 and the estimated costs had rose to US$ 5.1 billion. In 2011, when reviews concluded that both the budget and schedule were unrealistic, NASA overhauled the program with a much larger budget, but expected to be no more than $8 billion, and an expected launch date of October 2018.
For several years after the 2011 restart, the show appeared to be doing well. “They were reaching several milestones,” Robinson said.
But, he added, “things happen in there that you don’t see. The ghosts always get you, you know?”
In the case of bolts that came loose during the vibration test, it was found that the engineering drawings did not specify how much torque needed to be applied. The decision was made by the company supplying the screws, Northrop Grumman, and they were not tightened sufficiently.
“There needs to be a specification to make sure it’s correct,” Robinson said.
The review board issued its report, highlighting a number of issues, and made 32 recommendations. NASA followed them all, Robinson said.
One of the recommendations was to conduct an audit of the entire ship to identify “built-in problems”, that is, errors that occur without anyone taking notice.
Engineers checked the drawings and specifications. They looked at purchase orders to make sure that the parts ordered matched specifications and that the suppliers had supplied the correct items.
“A number of teams were created under the most experienced people,” Robinson said. “They really delved into the documents.”
In most cases, the equipment and parts actually corresponded to the original drawings. Some things didn’t match, and those cases were fixed. Robinson said none of them would have led to a catastrophic failure.
When Robinson took over as program director, Webb’s schedule efficiency — which measures how the pace of work compares to what was planned — had dropped to 55%, Zurburchen said. This was largely due to avoidable human errors.
Zurburchen said the Webb team was full of smart, highly skilled professionals who were hesitant to voice criticism. He attributed the change in this situation to Robinson. Within a few months, efficiency had soared to 95%, with better communication and managers more willing to share potentially negative news.
“We needed someone who was able to earn the team’s trust and we needed to understand what was going wrong with the team,” said Zurburchen. “The speed with which Robinson turned the situation around was simply astounding.”
But several new problems caused additional delays and led to a budget overrun. Some, like the pandemic and a problem with the payload compartment of the European-made Ariane 5 rocket, were beyond Robinson’s control. There were some additional human errors, such as last November when a clamp holding the telescope to the launch pad broke, shaking the telescope but causing no damage.
But when Ariane 5 was finally launched, carrying Webb, on Christmas Day, everything went without a hitch, and the telescope hasn’t had any problems since.
With observations starting, soon there will be no need for a program director for Webb.
Gregory Robinson proudly says he worked so well that he was out of a job.
Translation by Clara Allain
