In 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope, the besieged project to build an instrument that could look back at the earliest stars in the universe, appeared to be deviating from the rails. Again.
The parts of the telescope and its instruments were complete, but they had to be assembled and tested. The release date was slipping further in the future and costs, which were already approaching $ 8 billion, were rising again. Congress, which had provided several major infusions of funding over the years, was not happy that NASA was asking for even more money.
That’s when Gregory Robinson was asked to take over as Webb’s program director.
At that time, Mr. Robinson was NASA’s associate associate program director, which made him responsible for evaluating the performance of more than 100 science missions.
He said no. “At the time I was enjoying my job,” Mr. recalled. Robinson.
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate science administrator, asked him again.
“He had a kind of confluence of two skills,” Dr. Zurbuchen said of Mr. Robinson. “The first is that I had seen many projects, including projects that had problems. And the second piece is that you have this interpersonal activity of gaining confidence. So he can go into a room, he can sit in a cafeteria, and when he leaves the cafeteria, he meets half the people. ”
Finally, Mr. Robinson relented. In March 2018, he entered the task of returning the telescope to the track and space.
“He twisted both my arms to take over Webb,” Mr. Robinson.
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 seeing people in this role is an inspiration,” he said, “and it’s also acknowledging that they can be there, too.”
He says there are now many black engineers working at NASA, but “probably not as many as there should be” and most have not gone up enough to be seen by the public, for example participating in press conferences as follows Mr. Robinson. the launch of Webb.
“We have a lot of things to try to improve,” Mr. Robinson.
Born in Danville, Virginia, on the southern edge of the state, he was the ninth of 11 children. His parents were tobacco shards. He attended a primary school for black children through 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 place beyond the Moon, the James Webb Space Telescope will spend years observing the cosmos.
He was the only one in his family to pursue science and math, with a football scholarship coming to Virginia Union University in Richmond. He later moved to Howard University. He earned a bachelor’s degree in math from Virginia Union and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Howard.
He began working at NASA in 1989, following friends who had already worked there. Over the years, his work has included that of Deputy Director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and the Deputy Chief Engineer.
Webb’s commission came amid poor publicity for the project.
The target date for the launch had slipped again, until May 2020 from 2019. NASA had set up an external expert review board to advise what needed to be done to bring Webb to the finish line.
One month after the term of Mr. Robinson, a failed test provided a vivid illustration of how much needed to be fixed.
Spaceships must survive the vigorous vibrations of the launch, so engineers put them to the test by shaking them. When Webb was shaken, embarrassingly, the screws holding the cover of the telescope’s large, fragile sunscreen came loose.
“That made us go back months, about 10 months, just one thing,” Mr. Robinson. The release date was brought forward to March 2021 and the price increased by another $ 800 million.
The incident seemed a repetition of previous problems the Webb project had encountered. When the telescope was named Webb in 2002, it had a budget forecast of between $ 1,000 and $ 3.5 billion for launch as early as 2010. When it arrived in 2010, the launch date had been moved to 2014, and the estimated costs of the telescope had risen to $ 5.1 billion. . After reviews found that both the budget and schedule were unrealistic, in 2011, NASA reinstated the program with a much higher budget that did not exceed $ 8 billion and a release date in October of 2018.
For several years after the 2011 re-establishment, the program appeared to be in good condition. “They were eliminating milestones,” Mr. Robinson. “Very good time margin.”
But, he added, “things happen that you don’t see. Ghosts always catch you, right?”
For the screws that came out during the shake test, it turned out that the engineering drawings did not specify how much torque needed to be applied. This was left to the contractor, Northrop Grumman, to decide, and they were not tight enough.
“You should have a specification to make sure it’s correct,” Mr. Robinson.
The review board released its report, pointing out a number of issues and made 32 recommendations. NASA followed them all, said Mr. Robinson.
One of the recommendations was to conduct an audit of the entire spacecraft to identify “integrated problems,” errors that occurred without anyone noticing.
Engineers checked the plans and specifications. They examined purchase requests to make sure that what was requested matched the specifications and that the suppliers provided the correct items.
“There were several teams created, led by the most experienced people,” Mr. Robinson. “They really dug into the paperwork.”
For the most part, the hardware matched what was originally designed. Some things didn’t match (Mr. Robinson said none of them should cause catastrophic failure) and they were fixed.
When Mr. Robinson took over as director of the program, Webb’s schedule efficiency, a measure of how the pace of work compared to what was anticipated, was reduced by about 55 percent, he said. Dr. Zurbuchen. This, in large part, was the result of an avoidable human error.
Dr. Zurbuchen said Webb’s team was full of smart, skilled people, who had become wary of criticism. He credited Mr. Robinson the fact of changing things. In a few months, the efficiency reached 95 percent, with better communications and managers more willing to share possible bad news.
“You need someone who could gain the team’s trust and what we had to find out was what was going on with the team,” Dr. Zurbuchen. “The speed at which he turned this thing around was amazing.”
A number of new problems, however, led to additional delays and excess costs. Some, such as the pandemic and a problem with the payload enclosure of the European-made Ariane 5 rocket, were out of the control of Mr. Robinson. Additional human errors occurred, such as last November when a clamp band that held the telescope to the launch mount broke, shaking the telescope but causing no damage.
But when the Ariane 5 carrying Webb was finally launched at Christmas, everything went smoothly and the deployment has since gone smoothly.
With the remarks beginning, there will soon be no more need for a program director for Webb.
Mr. Robinson says, proudly, that he has lost his job.