Robotics

Lessons from NASA's Webb Telescope with Greg Robinson

Greg Robinson shared the gripping story of how teamwork, shared purpose, and positive culture carried the James Webb Telescope mission through adversity (including earthquakes, wildfires, snowstorms, and pandemic) to ultimate success, with five rules for success from the factory floor and boardroom to life itself.

Artist's conception of James Webb Telescope in space (using assets provided by NASA). Image provided by Adobe Stock.

June 6, 2023 by Daniel Brown — Editor, Networld Media Group

He may be an international celebrity, but Greg Robinson's deep voice was gentle and soft-spoken as he introduced himself.

"I'm going to cut this short so I can go down to the exhibit hall and see all those robots down there, so if I stop in 10 minutes, you know why," the former director, NASA, James Webb Space Telescope, said during a keynote address called "A NASA-inspired approach to leading innovation in any organization," delivered in the Grand Riverview Ballroom at the Huntington Place Convention Center during the Detroit Automate 2023 conference.

Belying his quiet demeanor, Robinson is a recently retired 33-year veteran of NASA, one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people of 2022 (appearing alongside people like Apple CEO Tim Cook and Ukraine president Volodymir Zelenskyy.)

He is perhaps best known for taking the helm of a beleaguered Webb Telescope mission and turned the program around, bringing it to an historic success as the successor of the Hubble Telescope and humanity's most powerful lens into the stars, including the ancient past, helping pave the way for answering some of the most fundamental questions about the origins of the universe. An international team with multiple production, supply and assembly points had to create 10 new technologies just for this mission, demonstrating the power of robotics, automation, applied science, engineering and business development, from factory floors and clean rooms to transportation and logistics.

Across all verticals, Robinson credits success to five principles that he recommended to the assembled representatives of some of the globe's leading automation, robotics, manufacturing, self-service, technology and business firms, with vivid stories illustrating each.

1. "Don't be afraid to be bold."
2. "The team has to be aligned."
3. "Transparency builds trust."
4. "Early technology maturation."
5. "Remain open to new ideas."

Greg Robinson sharing the Webb mission story onstage at Automate Detroit 2023. Image credit: Daniel Brown/Networld Media Group.

The Webb Story: Victory through teamwork, purpose, culture

This mission was no small undertaking: "The James Webb Space Telescope is the most ambitious and complex space science mission humanity has ever undertaken," Robinson said.

Still, he didn't always think of himself as a mission leader. "My boss twisted my arm many times, and eventually I decided to take over Webb," Robinson said. His reluctant-prophet stance wasn't due to malingering, he added; "I just enjoyed the job I was doing."

Robinson paused to ask the audience how many of their companies contributed work to Webb (hands went up across the crowded hall). In addition to inter-company teamwork, the mission was also developed in partnership between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency — indeed, Webb was a global mission, Robinson emphasized, part of a grand tradition of human cooperation in the space program, with NASA holding over 700 international partnerships.

Even within the U.S., collaboration was a great theme. "Webb was developed in 29 states in the U.S. and 14 countries around the globe," Robinson said.

When the telescope was being shipped to the launch site in French Guyana, the transport vessel arrived flying the French flag, but without prompting, the crew also raised an American flag as a courtesy to the boarding Americans.

"That shows really, really good collaboration with different countries," Robinson said. "And we often say, space and sports are the most collaborative industries in the world. Regardless of what's going on in the world, space and sports normally thrive," he added. "So, we can collaborate, regardless of what people say."

"Why do we do these big things?" Robinson asked. "One of the reasons we do astrophysics, and that's the type of mission Webb is, is to see what our place is in the universe and to see where we came from. How do we fit into this vast universe? And the other question we all ask, from kids to adults: are we alone? So, Webb also helps us peek into some of those questions and hopefully will help us answer some."

Why is Webb special?

Robinson showed his skills as a folksy science communicator when showing photos of the telescope and explaining the engineering involved.

"If you look up top, you'll see the cold side, that's the big mirror you see," Robinson said, explaining why it is so important for the cold side precisely to face deep space rather than any source of heat from the inner solar system.

"Now, I started playing golf five or six years ago (and I dig up a lot of dirt.) But it's hard for me to track the ball after I hit it. Of course, I put on shades — it helps out a little bit. Webb has the same issue with background light and heat, because it's looking for faint light and faint heat off into the dark universe, so that side has to stay very cold, and the other side where you have the spacecraft electronics has to stay nice and toasty. It's almost a 600 degrees difference."

While there are additional components that help, the sun shield is a massive part of this process, Robinson explained, with 18 separate mirrors equipped for both independent and synchronous movement.

As a whole, this project was orders of magnitude beyond what most people are familiar with in Webb's predecessor, the Hubble Telescope. "Hubble has been a workhorse for the world for over 30 years, it's still working great, but Webb is 100 times better," Robinson explained. "Webb is half the mass of Hubble but twice the size — again, some serious engineering. We have 10 new technologies, never built, certainly never flown before, on Webb. And that's unprecedented in a space mission, ever."

There are many examples, like the "micro shutters that look off into space and take images extremely fast, many times faster than what Hubble can do." Perhaps Robinson's favorite, though, is the sun shield: "I talked about the sun shield, not just the coating, but the actual fabric itself and how we actually develop that."

Robinson posed a simple analogy. "So when you go to the beach this year, and you're thinking about what sunscreen you should use — I forget all the numbers, 40, 50, 60 — just think of 1.2 million for your sunscreen. I think that'll keep you protected from the sun.

"So that's how good the sun shield is. It's five layers… And each layer is the thickness of your hair, if you can imagine. Now, also imagine: we have to fold this thing up so it can fit inside the rocket ferry so you can launch it, and then it has to unfold by itself."

Beyond inventing new technologies from scratch, the team had to navigate nearly 350 single points of failure, Robinson said, an astonishing quantity for such endeavors.

Adapt and overcome: Assembly and production challenges

Robinson showed video and pictures of the assembly process, which involved multiple sites in various global locations, including the world's largest clean room environment (to date) at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Multiple pipelines were involved, along with production, shipping, logistics and more; for example, one component had to be sent for cryogenic testing at Chamber A in the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Much of the final assembly happened on the West Coast, and the launch site was in South America.

The project would have been impossible without a world class team working around the clock. "This is the smartest team I've ever worked with," he said, praising the resilience of a team that worked through adverse weather events and emergencies, including Hurricane Harvey, during which the team ended up having to sleep in the NASA facility on makeshift bedding between working on the telescope and doing volunteer work to help stricken communities affected by the hurricane. Wildfires, earthquakes and "snowmageddon" were other memorable experiences at various sites involved with Webb development, to say nothing of COVID (which singlehandedly added at least two to three months to the mission timeline by Robinson's estimate).

As with other production environments, safety, PPE, dexterity and more were daily parts of the job. Cleanliness, particularly on a mirror designed to see ultra-faint light and heat from billions of years ago, was essential, Robinson added.

Even after years of effort culminating in a successful launch, it took 29 days for the telescope to reach its target: "Webb is there now, what we call Lagrange Point 2. It's one of the multiple Lagrange points around the earth. It's a very stable orbit, we don't have to use fuel to stay in that orbit. And it's a million miles from Earth. It always points… away from the earth, sun and moon for light and heat purposes."

Mission impact and lessons

"I didn't do a scientific survey. But I believe and contest that there were more TV sets on on a Christmas morning than in the history of humankind," Robinson said, noting that this is not scientific data but rather anecdotal, based on the many international people he has met who described the phenomenon.

He shared the power of negotiation; even negotiating carefully in small aspects of your project can affect the entire outcome down the road.

Robinson shared some famous photos from Webb, including his personal favorite, which he said was the Cradle of Stars and galaxies being formed.

He also showed an image of exoplanets. "But we're also looking at the elemental composition of these planets. These are planets that have an orbit around their star, similar to the earth's orbit around our sun, around the same size and certain characteristics. So we have satellites that can find these now. If you go back 20 years ago no one even talked about exoplanets. And now we're actually finding these. But Webb actually allows us to look at the elemental composition. So we can see if there's water or oxygen… So we learn a lot about potential habitability, which helps with that question, are we alone?

"Now scientists would tell me, and tell all of us, we know this to be true: there are hundreds of billions of galaxies out there. Hundreds of billions. Just think of our own solar system. And think of our own milky way. And you say there are hundreds of billions of those.

"When people ask me, do you believe there's life out there, I say, well, what's the probability, when you're looking at hundreds of billions of these things replicated? Still don't know the answer, but that's my, that's my response."

"So Webb is just opening up so many things within our own solar system, outside of our solar system. And we're trying to look back 1, 3. 5, 6, 7, 8 billion years. That's how far, how long, that light is traveling from an event that occurred back then. So, we're trying to learn as much as we can about the creation of the universe."

And yes, Robinson addressed the old question of science and religion, albeit briefly. "When we had a 60 Minutes show a couple of years ago, I got an email from some random person, she was giving me the business about Earth's creation. 'You don't need Webb, just go to Genesis…' And by the way, I don't think these things are in conflict at all."

Robinson shared some of the things NASA is interested in (noting that he retired last summer). All-electric airplanes, trying to lower the sonic boom to enable faster flights, and going back to Venus are on the list, along with returning Mars samples now being dug by Perseverance (incidentally, another great example of robotics in action). In addition, the Artemis program aims to put humans on the moon again, including the first woman and the first person of color, within this decade.

"I'm assuming some of your products will be used to help us do some of these things," Robinson said. "And when you talk automation and robotics, this is really it. At a particular scale I know we need to use it in our day-to-day lives as well."

Robinson's rules

Robinson closed with an overview of the principles of success which, he advocates, apply beyond the Webb mission, from the factory floor to the board room and to life itself.

RULE 1: "Don't be afraid to be bold."

RULE 2: "The team has to be aligned."

• This includes floor tech, president, CEO, stakeholders and investors.
• The team must use the same language and terminology.
• The team must be on the same page.

RULE 3: "Transparency builds trust."

• "It's important to communicate with transparency," Robinson elaborated. "It builds trust."

RULE 4: "Early technology maturation."

"If you're doing major, major projects, technology will slow you down once you start to develop it," Robinson elaborated. "So, I challenge everyone, if you're doing new technology — and most times it's level of effort, funding and level of effort workforce — put that into a development lifecycle curve so you can accelerate the technology maturation." Robinson noted that Webb got to a couple billion dollars a day during the mission timeline. "So, you can't allow technology to slow you down… Retire that risk early and remain open to new ideas."

RULE 5: "Remain open to new ideas."

"My team again, the smartest I've ever worked with," Robinson said. "Sometimes, they were very insular and they weren't open to new ideas. And as when the late chief engineer at Johnson Space Center used to say, you're not the only one in the room who knows everything. Somebody else knows everything too. So, it's okay to listen to them from time to time."

About Daniel Brown

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Daniel Brown is the editor of Digital Signage Today, a contributing editor for Automation & Self-Service, and an accomplished writer and multimedia content producer with extensive experience covering technology and business. His work has appeared in a range of business and technology publications, including interviews with eminent business leaders, inventors and technologists. He has written extensively on AI and the integration of technology and business strategy with empathy and the human touch. Brown is the author of two novels and a podcaster. His previous experience includes IT work at an Ivy League research institution, education and business consulting, and retail sales and management.