He took over beleaguered project and steered it into space

WASHINGTON • In 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope, the beleaguered project to build an instrument that could gaze back to the earliest stars in the universe, appeared to be going off the rails. Again.

The pieces of the telescope and its instruments were complete, but they needed to be assembled and tested. The launch date was slipping further into the future, and the costs, already approaching US$8 billion (S$11.3 billion), were again rising. The US Congress, which had provided several major infusions of financing over the years, was unhappy that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) was asking for yet more money.

That was when Mr Gregory Robinson was asked to take over as programme director.

At the time, Mr Robinson was the deputy associate administrator for programmes at Nasa, making him responsible for assessing the performance of more than 100 science missions. He said "no". "I was enjoying my job at the time," Mr Robinson recalled.

Dr Thomas Zurbuchen, Nasa's associate administrator for science, asked him again. "He had a kind of the confluence of two skills," Dr Zurbuchen said of Mr Robinson.

"The first one is he had seen many projects, including projects that were in trouble. And the second piece is he has that interpersonal trust-gaining activity. So he can go into a room, he can sit in a cafeteria, and by the time he leaves the cafeteria, he knows half of 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 of my arms to take over Webb," Mr Robinson said.

His path to that role seemed an unlikely one. At Nasa, Mr Robinson, 62, is a rarity: a black man among the agency's top-level managers. "Certainly, people seeing me in this role is an inspiration," he said, "and also it's acknowledging they can be there too."

He said 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, taking part in news conferences as he has following the launch of Webb.

"We have many things going on to try to improve," he said.

The Webb assignment came in the midst of bad publicity for the project. The target date for launching had slipped again, to May 2020 from 2019. Nasa had set up a review board of outside experts to advise what needed to be done to get the 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 have to survive the vigorous vibrations of launch, so engineers test them by shaking them. When Webb was shaken, embarrassingly, screws holding the cover of the telescope's large, fragile sun shield popped loose.

"That set us back months - about 10 months - just that one thing," Mr Robinson said. The launch date was pushed to March last year, and the price tag rose by another US$800 million.

NYTIMES