When I Grow Up

I want to be just like Greg Robinson. You see all kinds of people posting how great he is on LinkedIn. Did any of them take the time to check out his profile? See what I'm talking about? He has no time for that - he has something really important to do.

Now, I have to shamefully admit, when I listened to the WSJ podcast interview, that I did not expect him to be a black man. When he said, "answer not just the words of the question but the intent of the question," I detected a bit of an accent, but I was pleasantly stunned by the picture, when I eventually saw it.

Well then, what are these ten new technologies we shot up into space a few months ago?

1. Infrared detector hybrids - if it doesn't sound new enough to me, it's because I don't know enough😊
2. Micro-shutters on the scale of the human hair. Nothing before JWST can observe up to 100 objects simultaneously spectroscopically at high-resolution.
3. A five-layer sun-shield (with space-age coatings) the size of a tennis court. This one failing to unfurl was one of the 344 single-points of failure (a Mars mission has about 70-85 SPFs)
4. Wavefront Sensing and Control : Space-age math that controls the instruments (mirrors, et al) to get the image into focus.
5. A backplane (that holds everything together) that achieves mechanical steadiness down to 32 nanometers while being cooled to -240°C! Northrop Grumman did the graphite composites needed.
6. Cryogenic mirrors
7. Cryogenic imaging IC - looks like the SIDECAR was also used on the Hubble. Hey, go with what works. Can't go wrong there 😊
8. A three-stage cryocooler that ensures the low temperature of operation (kills the noise that the detector electronics is naturally prone to) from a distance of meters, while achieving a very low vibration spec. You wonder why Hubble can work for 30 years without complaining and why the JWST was only expected to do five years (the Europeans did such a good job with delivering and parking the beast at it's final home that there's enough fuel left to operate for an additional five years. The solar panels provide 2 kW of power. But, I guess there's some tolerance built in to things, but they just expect stuff to fail and fail till you no longer get the quality you need out of the thing - and so you have a finite life - not like the Hubble where you can send up a crew in a shuttle to do maintenance. I wonder if some people on death row can volunteer for a glorious death mission - go knowing you'll never come back - and take a giant leap for mankind. Sounds like something a Japanese astronaut with Samurai roots might try. Commit some white collar crime and decide to redeem yourself with a glorious death. What's more glorious than serving humanity on a suicide mission like servicing the Webb?

What's the opposite of the baker's dozen? The NASA ten - hey, they only have eight listed on their page. Don't look at me funny.

FYI, the 200 inch telescope in Mt. Palomar's Hale Observatory is considered one of the great achievements of mankind. The glass for the mirror took six years to grind. And they got that done in 1948! That's all we had till Hubble came along in 1993 😊 Hubble isn't bigger, just better - being 50 years more advanced. It only has an 95 inch mirror.

Now, coming to the man who rescued the project. A new term : schedule efficiency : If it's 50%, that means, for each day the project is ongoing, it's end date moves out by a day 😊 Sound familiar?

Given that the Manhattan project cost $2b and the JWST cost $10b all told, in 2022, projected backwards, with inflation, that's $500m in 1940 dollars.. Is it more complicated than the first nuke? Probably. I'd say - given that very smart people worked for about 30 years on it (total involvement, about 20k people!)

I'm very mission, organization and team focused.

Greg took over the project in 2018 (already 11 years behind schedule for launch). 

I thought it was critically important to put everything on the table and answer, not just the words of the question, but the intention of the question. And to give, not just data, but information.

He is the kind of leader who will take you out to coffee and, when you're done, you will know exactly what to do and he will not have told you what he wants you to do.

One person can make a difference and, oftentimes, it's not the person you expect, and that's the person you want.

Incremental progress over many years leads to exponential progress.