Peter Jakobsen

Zeron:

This is Montserrat Zeron, and this is an interview with Dr. Peter Jakobsen. Today's date is July 11th, 2024, and we are recording this in Dr. Jakobsen's home in Copenhagen. To start, if you could please state your title and institutional affiliation?

Jakobsen:

[laughs] I'm Peter Jakobsen or ‘Yakobsen’, depending on what side of the Atlantic I'm on. I was with the European Space Agency for twenty-eight years. I'm retired, but I'm still associated with the University of Copenhagen. I'm an affiliated professor at the Niels Bohr Institute there, so I'm still active, even though I'm retired, in research.

Zeron:

I know you were born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1953, but I don't know anything else about your family. Who were your parents? What did they do?

Jakobsen:

I was born here in Copenhagen. When I was around three years old, my father was a civil engineer, and he had just finished his master's degree at the Polytechnic University, as it was called at the time here. This was in the mid-‘50s, when there was a dearth of engineers in the United States. All the big corporations in the US were actually sweeping the European [laughs] universities and polytechnics for engineers. My father was hired straight out of school by Procter & Gamble. We lived in Cincinnati for eight years, and that's why I talk the way I do. [laughs] Some of my first school years were in the United States. This was in the mid-, late-‘50s, right under the Cold War. I was indoctrinated to fear the reds, and had dreams about commies coming through the basement window and everything, and ‘Duck and Cover’. It was wild. But equally important for me, at least—and that was in—was it '56 or '57? I'm forgetting now—that Sputnik 1 occurred, and the United States saw the first satellite ever fly across the continental US. This really freaked out the Americans big time, and rightly so, of course. But this even propagated down to the school system, so even little kids like me in second and third grade, whatever, we were indoctrinated massively that we should preferably become scientists or engineers, and preferably in space because we had to beat the Russkies. [laughs] That's why I took a very early interest in space. Even then, the early Mercury and Gemini programs, they would even bring us down to the canteen so we could watch the launches and everything. I was inoculated with space very early on because of that upbringing. We later moved back around '63, '64, I think it was. It was right after Kennedy's assassination, I remember, or relatively soon after, we moved back to Denmark, where I got my formal education and went to high school and university.

Zeron:

You were around fifteen—

Jakobsen:

I'm sorry?

Zeron:

—or fourteen?

Jakobsen:

I think I was around thirteen at the time. My parents are now dead, so I can't get the exact dates. [laughs] I used to have a green card, but I lost it. [laughs] Anyway, I studied physics and astronomy at the University of Copenhagen here. I was lucky enough that some of the professors took me under their wings. They knew I was in interested in space, and they wanted to further the Danish involvement in space. They shipped me off to France, to Marseille, to do my master's thesis at a space laboratory there that no longer exists. It was called Laboratoire d’Astronomie Spatiale in Marseille. The French were very good to me, I must admit. I wrote my master's thesis there.

Zeron:

I wonder, actually, if we could go back a little bit more. If you could tell me—like you said, you had influence from the United States, the interest in science—do you remember what kind of books you read when you were young in that age?

Jakobsen:

Tom Swift, of course [laughs], I was quite fascinated by that and science fiction. I must admit, when I later went to Berkeley, and met American counterparts the same age, they had exactly the same experience. We all came out during the Reagan years as space scientists, like they wanted us to be [laughs], but it was a different time then entirely. Anyway, the French shipped me off to Berkeley at the Space Sciences Laboratory there, where I was lucky enough to join Stu Bowyer's group there, which was a hands-on space astronomy group, and quite successful. I participated in a sounding rocket experiment there, in an Aries sounding rocket, for my thesis. I had a secondary experiment on it. I got trained firsthand in the space business there, you know, how to do and test things for space, so I was quite familiar with that.

Zeron:

When you started your high school back here in Denmark, I'm just trying to trace, how did your interest in physics start? Was that something that started with the space age early beginnings in the US?

Jakobsen:

It was always there. I have to admit that my high school years were very turbulent. Remember, I went to high school from '69 to '72 [laughs], and that was a wild time everywhere. [laughs] My interests were all over the place. I didn't particularly care for high school very much, but obviously my physics and math grades were my best ones. [laughs] It was clear where I was going.

Zeron:

Did your parents encourage an interest in science while you were growing up? Were you influenced by his career in engineering?

Jakobsen:

They certainly encouraged me, because I had very supportive parents. I think probably but not explicitly. I had that interest always. I was always interested in space.

Zeron:

What about when you came back to Denmark? What about professors in your high school? Did they encourage you? Any particular class that you remember that really sparked your interest?

Jakobsen:

I did like both my physics and math teachers. They were good, and they'd tolerate what a bratty teenager I was.

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

[laughs] Yes, they did play a role, definitely. But I must admit, I only really flowered at university.

Zeron:

How did you—?

Jakobsen:

That was in the old days here, back when university was—I'd like to think—pretty tough in the sense that you were your own boss. It was very open. They used to have these monster courses. It was easy to get into university here, and certainly in physics and math because it regulates itself. But the first year would just be hell on Earth. They had this monster math course, the whole year's course, the whole year. There would be algebra and there'd be calculus. There'd be everything. There'd be like two or three written and a couple of oral exams and everything. It was brutal, really brutal. Like twenty percent got through.

Zeron:

It's the weed-out course. [laughs]

Jakobsen:

There was a weed-out course the first year. That's how they did it back then. I managed to get through. I got a passing grade. It was a brutal thing. I did much better later. But they really did do a favor. The instructors told you, “If you make it through this, you'll make it—

Zeron:

You have what it takes.

Jakobsen:

—through your degree, guaranteed.” It was very different. Now it's very, very different. Now it's like going to high school. I've done some guest lectures, and helped some of my colleagues at the university to give some lectures and stuff. It's really a different world. They take attendance. It's a very, very different way to go to university. I loved the freedom because then I could study when I wanted, however I wanted. If I didn't want to go to a lecture, I didn't have to. I soon figured out the most important thing was to go to the exercises, and make sure you could do all the problems. I didn't want to sit the whole afternoon going through stuff I had already done. I became quite arrogant, and turned up first, maybe five minutes before, went to the instructors, and said, “I'm fine with all these problems, but problem 7, there's something that I don't get. What is it?” Then I'd go, “thank you,” and then I'd leave again.

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

I was an arrogant ass, but I flowered. I really did well there because I loved it. I really loved it.

Zeron:

How did you decide to go to the University of Copenhagen?

Jakobsen:

There's not much choice. At that time, there were two major universities in Denmark. There are more now, but the major one is Copenhagen, and the secondary one is Aarhus, in the second city in Jutland. If you're from around here, you go to Copenhagen. I mean, there was no choice, so I didn't have to fret about it at all. If you wanted to do physics, of course, this is the country of Niels Bohr and other physicists, so there's plenty of history.

Zeron:

At what point is this? Do you decide right away that you want to major in physics, or is that something that they let you declare after?

Jakobsen:

You have to do it beforehand. It's a different system here. The general education part is done in high school. There you have to take all sorts of courses, in languages and everything else, and then you specialize. It's different. Around 19, you have to decide what you want to do. Then you say, “I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that.” It's different. I mean, shall we say, the culturally formative part that's in the first years of US college is taken care of in high school. The idea is the same.

Zeron:

It gives you a step ahead.

Jakobsen:

It's a little different approach.

Zeron:

Were there any of your undergraduate teachers or any courses that made a particularly strong impression?

Jakobsen:

I liked most of them. I liked all of them, I think. I really enjoyed it, I must admit. I had already met my wife—

Zeron:

In the university?

Jakobsen:

— in my second year. So I didn't have to run around and go out drinking every Saturday.

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

I could nerd out, thanks to her. [laughs]

Zeron:

[laughs] How were the classes? Were they smaller classes or the big auditorium?

Jakobsen:

Oh, much smaller, they were. As I said, it was all optional. There were lectures, and there were exercises with instructors. They would tell you, “Here's the curriculum,” very detailed, “this, this, this, you have to know, and you have to know that. We'll see you at the finals.” It was very free.

Zeron:

You must just—

Jakobsen:

Oh, I loved that. But I discovered a personality flaw I have is I'm just really bad at letting other people tell me what to do. I'm just really bad at it.

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

[laughs] It's a flaw.

Zeron:

It worked out. It's a good system here. How did you two meet?

Jakobsen:

We met at a party of a mutual acquaintance. That's all.

Wife:

No, I'm not educated in anything, except for gardening.

Zeron:

[laughs]

Wife:

Actually, it was on my 18th birthday that we met, and we have just been together since.

Jakobsen:

Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

Wife:

Peter was twenty-one, just turned twenty-one.

Jakobsen:

Second-year physics student, nerd. [laughs]

Wife:

I'm coming from a family where you get no education.

Jakobsen:

But they're business people.

Wife:

Yeah, business people and strange people. All my friends that we had in common, they told me, “He is so crazy. Don't go there.”

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

[laughs]

Wife:

I said, “Oh, that's what I want.” [laughs]

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

[laughs]

Wife:

That was more or less how we met. [laughs] I needed someone that was different from what I was used to—and Peter as well, I think.

Zeron:

It worked out. [laughs]

Wife:

[laughs]

Zeron:

I wonder, as you were developing your physics education, what was it that attracted you about physics? Was it more to be a theorist or an experimentalist?

Jakobsen:

In the beginning, it was more to be a theorist. That's not the way it went. I was interested in understanding how the world worked. I thought it was fantastic, because I got a pretty solid physics education at the University of Copenhagen. What I loved is that you go through exactly the same thought processes that much greater minds than your own—Einstein and so forth—went through. How does this work? They worked out the theory and everything. Then it's presented in a nice pedagogical fashion. It's not like real research where they're blind alleys, and you fumble around to find the truth. It's explained in a nice linear way. I loved that, sitting and thinking about these things. How does this work? Like, quantum mechanics, well, nobody understands quantum mechanics.

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

But, nonetheless, I just really, really enjoyed it. I really, really enjoyed it. Of course, I was always interested in astronomy, so that was the way I was going to go. But I enjoyed the physics.

Zeron:

How did the astrophysical education work? Did you decide which physics courses you took, and then you decided to turn towards astronomy?

Jakobsen:

It was very much obligatory back then. There's much more choice today. But it was very obligatory. Everything was in big chunks; one-year courses. In the first year, you do elementary physics, and you do this math, and then you do this math. Second year—what was it?—second year, it was mechanics for a whole year, advanced mechanics and everything like that, mostly. Then third year, it was quantum mechanics. What else? I forget exactly how it was laid out. But it was obligatory, and I liked that. I'm a little strange. Nowadays, people can choose all sorts of things. The idea then was you had to learn to walk, and then to run, and then you can start sprinting and doing research. You had to know the fundamentals. I still subscribe to that. You have to know your basic stuff, and then you can start thinking about more advanced things. Astronomy would be put on later because you have to know a lot of physics to do astronomy. They don't do that now. Now they start with astronomy. Sometimes it's a little superficial in the physics because of that. But, anyway, I'm just old school, that's all.

Zeron:

When did you start getting more interested into astronomy as well?

Jakobsen:

Oh, I was always interested. It was pretty clear I was going to go that way. But it was a risk because, at that time, the choice was either you get through the eye of the needle and become a researcher, which was very few, or you become a high school teacher. No offense, I hated high school. For me, the thought of being a high school teacher [laughs] was, I mean, so it was a very, very dangerous thing to say, “I'm going to be an astronomer.” How the hell do you make a living off that? But I managed, thankfully, with help from some professors, of course.

Zeron:

You said that, after you finished your courses at the University of Copenhagen, you did your master's in France.

Jakobsen:

Yes.

Zeron:

Can you tell me a little bit more about that? I know you were explaining a little bit earlier.

Jakobsen:

It was to be at a space laboratory, a laboratory where they did space research. In that laboratory at the time, they were flying balloons and doing ultraviolet astronomy. I participated in a balloon flight that had a camera that took a picture of the Andromeda Galaxy, and participated in the publication of that. That's where I got interested in ultraviolet background radiation. The French taught me that, and I got interested in that, and wrote my master's on that problem. I had very good mentor, a guy called Jean-Michel Deharveng, who was a very, very good mentor, and really taught me a lot, and set me on the right way.

Zeron:

That was your fellowship with the Danish Space Board?

Jakobsen:

Yes, it was. I think it was, yes. My stay in France was definitely funded by the Danish Space Board, as was my stint in California No, that's not true; that was a university grant. I had a Danish scholarship or something like that when I was in Berkeley.

Zeron:

When you finished your master's, you came back to University of Copenhagen, or how did you decide what to do after that?

Jakobsen:

The French sent me straight to Berkeley, and I got the scholarship, and went straight to Berkeley with that.

Zeron:

Why Berkeley?

Jakobsen:

The French had a connection with them. They were collaborating with them. That's how these things go. I was sent to Marseille because one of my professors in Copenhagen knew the—I don't know if he was director at the time; I can't remember—from his youth. That's how these things go. You have connections, and then you send students to them —we still do that today. It's like that. They had a collaboration with Berkeley so, with their recommendation, I got sent over there. Then I decided to do my thesis there. I got offered that. It was in the Space Astrophysics Group led by Stu Bowyer. I owe a lot to him. It was a very, very interesting group to be thrown into because—how can I describe it?

In that group, it was focused on building hardware, and flying things, but it was really self-driven. The grad students there did everything. Bowyer was a great mentor in the sense of figuring out who could handle it and who couldn't. But you got thrown in the deep end. Either you managed it or you couldn't. Most people could manage it, because he had a very good eye for this. We really worked amongst ourselves, the grad students there, to learn everything, and helped each other prepare for courses and things like that. It was an extremely good group. Indeed, most of the graduates from there ended up in NASA as project scientists or PIs for other things. It's gone now, and Stu Boyer is deceased, and the group isn't there anymore. But, for a time, he was really cranking out people in the space hardware business. That was quite dominant. It was a good thing to have come from that group. That's why I got hired by the European Space Agency. I was home for a year after my thesis.

Wife:

How about [Danish] statistics and Berkeley?

Jakobsen:

It's a fun story.

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

When I came, I had my Danish master's When I decided to do a PhD in Berkeley, I had to pass my qualifying exam. But I was arrogant enough to think, “I know enough physics and astronomy to handle that because I have a Danish master's.” But I had to fulfill some course requirements. Being an arrogant guy, I said, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to learn statistics.” I took two or three years of graduate-level mathematical statistics in the Statistics Department there, which I loved. I loved the topic. So I'm trained in mathematical statistics on top, which I still use to this day, and argue with the kids. “No, no, that's not how you do it.” [laughs]

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

Berkeley were good years. They were good years, they were.

Zeron:

That's funny. How did you decide what your dissertation was going to be on?

Jakobsen:

My what?

Zeron:

Your dissertation.

Jakobsen:

Oh, that was what was offered. They had a big sounding rocket coming up, and Bowyer said, “You can put a secondary experiment on here.” I got some money from the Danes to pay for the hardware, and we put that on, and we flew it out in White Sands. That's how that came about. It was what was on offer, what hardware training was available. My thesis advisor Stu Bowyer basically decided that.

Zeron:

After you successfully defended that dissertation, what did you do next?

Jakobsen:

Then I came back to Denmark. I was still on my scholarship. The university had said there would be some senior scholarships, and I was lined up for that. But it turned out that they suddenly didn't have any money. I went, “Oops, what do I do now?” I was home for almost a year, I think. Then when word came out I was looking for a position, one of my Berkeley mentors, Francesco Paresce, had joined the European Space Agency and was working on Hubble. Once he heard I was available, he started saying, “Why don't you come here? Why don't you join ESA?” I had the training. That was quite an interesting thing because I got hired in the end as a project scientist, basically, because I had the hardware training in space—not many kids had that—even though I was just a young punk. They hired me in '84. Was it '84? Yeah, 1st of February, '84 I think I was hired as Project Scientist for the European involvement in the Hubble Space Telescope. My predecessor, a guy called Duccio Macchetto, he moved to the institute, to the Space Telescope Science Institute—you may have heard of that—that ran the thing. He wanted to be the head of the ESA delegation over there, and so the project scientist job was available. That's what I got offered then, even though I was a young kid. [laughs]

Zeron:

Were you working on site here in Denmark for that?

Jakobsen:

No, once I joined ESA, we had to move to Holland, to a big center called ESTEC that's kind of the equivalent of Goddard Space Flight Center, but it's down in Holland.

Wife:

Not anymore, though.

Jakobsen:

What?

Wife:

[inaudible]

Jakobsen:

Yeah, parts of it have moved.

Zeron:

[laughs] Like you said, could you talk about your role in the early development of Hubble, the European perspective?

Jakobsen:

I obviously came on rather late. As I said, I came on in '84. At that time, everything was designed and built. The European contributions to Hubble in the beginning had been negotiated in the '70s when I literally was in university, so I had nothing to do with that. But the contributions were one of the initial instruments, the Faint Object Camera, which is what I mainly worked on, and then the solar arrays that provided power, and then people in operations. That was Europe's contribution in exchange for nominally fifteen percent of the observing time. That was the deal that had been struck back in the '70s. The Faint Object Camera, I mainly worked on the testing and commissioning, of course, because it had already been built. It took several years until we flew. It was in '86, I think, that Challenger exploded, so it took a while. We didn't get up before '90 when we finally flew.

Then I was heavily involved in the commissioning to get everything to work, and that was fine. What I will say about the Faint Object Camera, it was a bit of a funny one because it had a very advanced detector in it that was built by Professor Alex Boksenberg at University College London, in the UK. It was a very advanced detector. It was a photon-counting—to get technical—two-dimensional detector, and it was very advanced. He had gone to Caltech with this detector, to work with another rather famous astronomer Wal Sargent. They had put it on the Palomar, which was the biggest telescope at the time, and done a lot of amazing work that I greatly admired on quasar absorption lines Pretty much everything we know about that topic today, they pioneered with that detector which was joined to a spectrograph. But the Faint Object Camera was a camera. The main camera on Hubble, the American camera was based on CCDs and had a wide field of view. It was like your wide-angle camera. It was the main workhorse camera. Then the Faint Object Camera was like a zoom lens. You could use it to zoom in on things in the ultraviolet. To be brutal, it was a little bit niche-y. In my arrogant young mind, I was slightly annoyed that Europe hadn't built the initial spectrograph for Hubble, because that detector would've been much better employed in the first spectrographs, since the American detectors were only one-dimensional. There were two spectrographs on board Hubble to start with. A spectrograph takes and spreads the light into its colors so you can analyze it. It's astrophysics, as I say. [laughs] There were two spectrographs, and they both used so-called digicon detectors, which are also photon-counting, but they're one-dimensional, and that has technical ramifications. You never know what the background is. In my arrogant young mind, I thought Europe should have done the Faint Object Spectrograph with its advanced detector. It would've been a far superior spectrograph. But, anyway, in the '70s, Europe had very little space experience compared to the United States. It's obvious NASA was not going to give the spectrograph to the Europeans at that point. But, anyway, I can't complain. We did very well with the Faint Object Camera, and it did actually have some spectroscopic stealth modes that were built into it that were used successfully.

Zeron:

What was your particular role as a project scientist?

Jakobsen:

It was mainly to oversee the commissioning, to get the instrument up and running. Is it working? Is it as sensitive as it's supposed to be? Where is everything so we can point it to where we want, that type of thing? That was basically what I was involved with.

Zeron:

What was your reaction when the spherical aberration was discovered?

Jakobsen:

That was a fun story because, as you know, we couldn't focus the thing. When I say “we,” we scientists weren't supposed to do that. That was the task of the engineers from Perkin Elmer. The Perkin Elmer Corporation had made the mirror, so they were supposed to focus it. There was the so-called Fine Guidance Sensor, which was one of the instruments that was supposed to keep the telescope steady during observations that had some modes built into it that could be used to focus the telescope. Most of the scientists weren't involved with that. We were just waiting for the engineers to say, “OK, guys, it's in focus. Turn on your instruments.” But it took months, and nothing happened with them, so we were getting impatient on the science side. Then the American team with the American camera, which was the prime camera, at some point said, “We've had enough,” and shoved the engineers aside—not really. But, anyway, they said, “Let's do it the way we do it on the ground.” What we do is we just point the telescope at a bright star, and then we run the secondary mirror back and forth, which is how you focus, and take an image at every position, and see where it's best.

They were doing all sorts of fancy stuff with the Fine Guidance Sensors, and it was all interferometry, and very complex. They said, “Let's do the dumb thing,” the American team, and that's when they discovered that when you go through focus, the image was asymmetrical. That is a sign that there's something wrong with the mirror. That was a shock. I remember the meeting that NASA had called. One afternoon, we were called down to Goddard, everybody. You could have heard a pin drop when the NASA guys got up and said, “The telescope is aberrated. There's something wrong with the primary mirror.” [laughs] I remember walking in the room when one of the colleagues from the US team called me over and said, “Look at this,” and he showed me this asymmetrical focus plot he had made. I asked, “What does that mean?” He said, “It means we have Spherical Aberration. Then everybody looked at us – the second European camera – because the problem might have been only in the American Camera. So we had to scramble all night to get a well exposed image of a bright star with the Faint Object Camera. It took a while, because we had already done the first light with the instrument. I had noticed the first images were underexposed. It's quite complicated, because we were just seeing the core and the light in the middle, so they looked OK. But we knew the telescope wasn't in focus. But all that faintlight in the outside, which was the unfocused, that was missing. You couldn't see it in our images. We thought everything was all right, but then we finally got a well-exposed image. I remember at the morning meeting with NASA, showing that image. “Here's what we got last night. Look at this.” It was exactly like the American camera. It was then clear it was the telescope that was bad. But it was quickly diagnosed. You could relatively easily figure out what was wrong. It was the primary mirror. You must have heard that story. It was because of a manufacturing error.

Zeron:

I have not.

Jakobsen:

Oh, the primary mirror was ground wrong. It's around two-thousandths of a millimeter too shallow at its outere dge. The reason is a little technical, but it's because the telescope of Hubble is a so-called Ritchey-Chrétien telescope, which has hyperbolic shapes of the mirrors. They don't have a focus when you test them, so you have to give them a focus with auxiliary equipment. You make something out of the lenses that's carefully matched to the telescope so that the combination has a focus and you can test that. But if you screw up the external thing, then you screw up the primary, and that's exactly what happened. The kit was still sitting there at Perkin Elmer. What happened was that there was a lens that was in the so-called null lens. A null lens goes together with the mirror. It's what gives the mirror a focus when you test it. There was a lens that was supposed to be positioned very accurately. They'd made this fancy invar bar that was supposed to say, “This is where the lens goes.” When you read these things off with a theodolite, you had to look at the end of the bar. But somebody had rounded the end of the bar for some reason, and one had to look at the middle. To make sure people did that, they had put a cap on the bar end with a hole in it so you could only look through it and see the middle of the bar and get everything accurate. But a piece of paint had chipped off the cap, so when they went and looked at it, they focused on the chip, the shiny part of the cap where the paint had chipped off, which was 1.2 millimeters, I recall, wrong. That lens got put 1.2 millimeters in the wrong position. So the null lens was wrong, and it gave the wrong shape to the primary mirror, and that's how it came about. It was all just sitting there when the investigative commission later looked at it. It was interesting. I had nothing to do with that. [laughs] I was in school. [laughs] But it was a shock.

Zeron:

I bet. What was your input on the repair missions?

Jakobsen:

The repair was a twofold thing. Once the optical fault was diagnosed, everybody looked at their instrument design to figure out how can we fix it? What can we do? How can we give the instrument spectacles, so to speak, that can repair this, compensate for this? The American camera team were rather fortunate in that they already had a second instrument being built. There was always the intention that the astronauts would change the instruments. Every three or four years, there'd be a visit by the Space Shuttle, and they'd put new and better instruments in. There was already a Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, the American camera, in the works. Looking at their optics, they were very lucky that it turned out that some small coin-sized mirrors were in the right location to correct the optical problem. They just had to put the opposite error on those mirrors in the new version of the camera, and everything would be fine. It was a little more complicated than that since they needed to be able to steer the replacement mirrors to make sure everything was aligned correctly. They immediately set forth on doing that. But that left the other four instruments. What were we going to do? That was the Faint Object camera, the European instrument, the two spectrographs, and also something called the High-Speed Photometer. There was a bit of a pecking order there amongst the instruments. I have to admit, NASA was very gracious to the Europeans. They could've just said, “Sorry, tough luck” but they didn't. They really went out of the way to say, “We know we've got to fix this.” They didn't waver one bit on that. The question was, how do we do it? Then several people came up with the idea that you could sacrifice one of the instruments, the high-speed photometer, which was the lowest on the totem pole [laughs]—

Zeron:

Yeah, I heard. [laughs]

Jakobsen:

—and replace that with an instrument whose sole purpose was to employ an arm that deployed some mirrors that caught a new picture, corrected it on a second mirror, and sent that into the openings of the existing instruments. That was called COSTAR. It was a Dutch engineer at Ball Aerospace named Murk Bottema, who came up with that optical solution, actually. It was very clever. He was old school. I loved working with him. He was ill at the time when we worked with him to figure this out. He was dying from cancer, actually. He died before the flight, but he got his name on the side of COSTAR instrument at least. [laughs] He was a really impressive guy. He'd do everything the old way. I loved it. He used paper and pencil, and then he'd fine-tune the design in the computer. He was impressive.

Anyway, once people realized that was the way forward, that's what we did. The COSTAR was developed by NASA. What we did on the European side was that we had an engineering model of the Faint Object Camera available. It was an early prototype that was made to make sure that one could build it and test it and things.. It had all the optics in there. What we did was we refurbished that model, and used it to test the COSTAR in real life. A simulator that had the bad image that went into the real COSTAR was also made. Could we move those mirrors correctly? It all went fine, and - the tests showed that the corrected image received by the engineering model was near perfect.

Zeron:

You tested it?

Jakobsen:

We had a big campaign out in Ball Aerospace to test COSTAR. It was great because we got really good at lining it up. We could look at the image and say, “No. You've got to move that mirror by X arcseconds.” We got really good at that in the end, and t it demonstrated that COSTAR worked.. Then when COSTAR was employed on orbit, it took us one or two tries, and we had the thing in perfect focus. That was what I was involved with there. It was a nice project because there were several dozen people that were heavily involved in it, because many colleagues were afraid of it. Nobody thought we could pull this off. [laughs] Many people thought COSTAR was just too risky. [laughs] But it worked like a charm. The repair mission flew in December '93, COSTAR was installed, and we very quickly got it into focus, and everything was fine. That was fun. I liked that project because it was small, you knew everybody involved, and there was no pretense. If you thought something was wrong, you'd say, “I don't like this,” and we'd sit down and talk the issue through. It was good. It was really good. I enjoyed that.

Zeron:

Once the spherical aberration was fixed, could you talk about the initial science results after that?

Jakobsen:

We had guaranteed time. I can't remember how many hours it was anymore.

Zeron:

Was it 15%, you said?

Jakobsen:

What?

Zeron:

Fifteen per cent?

Jakobsen:

No, 15% was that the minimum amount of open time to be given to Europe in competition, because the bulk of the time is astronomers competing worldwide, or at least the countries that are involved in it. We compete on a yearly turnaround, and send in proposals, and they're then peer reviewed. The fifteen percent clause was just something that was put into the agreement in the case that Europe didn't get enough proposals through. Europe back then, I guess, had a bit of an inferiority complex, or didn't trust the selection process or whatever. It's never been an issue. We've always gotten more than fifteen percent. We have the same thing on James Webb, I can say already, but there it has also never been an issue. We're up there near forty percent or something, [laughs] now that the selection is blind. It's double-blind. [laughs] No problem. Anyway, that's where the fifteen percent came. But every team that had built an instrument for Hubble had a certain number of hours—

Zeron:

Guaranteed?

Jakobsen:

—of first use time. We used that for all manner of things. It had been what I call balkanized. The program had been divvied up so that every team member had their own little pet project. They weren't all equally successful because when a mission takes a long time, you think of something ten years in advance, and then ten years comes by, then maybe the science has already been—

Jakobsen:

—passed by, and it's not really that interesting. I wouldn't say that's the case always. But, anyway, the planned observations weren't all equally good after spherical aberration. But we did a whole series of papers. For example one I got involved with was Supernova 1987a that had happened, you know, the first really close supernova not in our own galaxy but in the LMC, the Large Magellanic Cloud. That happened during my lifetime, so to speak. I happened to be in ESO La Silla when that was discovered on the big telescope there, so we had to go look at it. I was involved in a funny way with that, even though supernovae are not my main thing. We also looked at that with the Faint Object Camera, and discovered that the ejecta was in the form of a ring that was being lit up. That was fun. That was good fun. My own claim to fame—and this was something I even wrote in my thesis about—is I wanted to detect helium between the galaxies, because helium is produced in the Big Bang. There's lots of material out there—hydrogen and helium—between the galaxies that hasn't really formed into galaxies yet, and that helium had to be there. That was a prediction. It's more technical than that. It's more complicated than that. But, anyway, that could be done with the Faint Object Camera. It could also be done with the US spectrographs. But we managed to do it first, and that took everyone by surprise. Everybody was going, “How could they do that?” We had a little prism in there. That's my big claim to fame that we did that first, and that was fun.

Zeron:

I'd like you to explain the initial science results. How were those aligned with the initial science goals just for Hubble in general?

Jakobsen:

I think they fit pretty well. I used to say, again, in my youthful arrogance, that the first years of Hubble were good. There were lots of things done, but most of the science, if you wanted to be critical, you could say it was incremental. In the sense that it was an extrapolation of what we'd done beforehand, and it was more or less predicted. Hubble started out as a very arrogant project. There was hubris galore. I mean, this was God's gift to astronomy. That's why I was lured to it. Everybody knew this was going to be fantastic. The coffee mugs used to say “Conscious expectation of the unexpected”; pretentious as all hell. [laughs] We were all smitten by that hubris. But, nonetheless, a lot of the early science, yes, they did the distance scale, theyhey measured the Hubble constant. But that was all in the books since the '70s that we were going to do that. But the first surprise that came to me, I think, had to do with gamma-ray bursts, which I had nothing to do with. Gamma-ray bursts were these—in gamma rays, you suddenly see these flashes on the sky that last a second or something. There are different types. When they were first discovered, they were discovered by a military satellite, and people thought it was the Russians doing atomic testing somewhere first. Then they figured out they came from the sky. Nobody knew what they were. People thought they were probably from within our galaxy, probably neutron stars doing something weird or whatever. But the first thing that Hubble established was that, no, they were actually coming from external galaxies really far away. Hubble contributed in a vital way to that. I mean, it wasn't only Hubble. But that was the first thing where we said, wow, I would've sworn, right? That was the first big surprise. Of course, later, we had dark energy and things like that come out, where Hubble also played an important role. Those were the surprises. But, otherwise, there's a lot of very, very solid but still incremental science, things that we had anticipated that we'd do. Maybe I'm just being a moody Dane here in terms of evaluating everything. But it's been very, very successful. But the fun stuff is where you say, wow, I hadn't expected that. There wasn't that much of that, really, I think, with Hubble; not that much, really.

Zeron:

From your CV, you mentioned you were a study scientist for ESA's Lyman phase A study. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Jakobsen:

That's a long story. During the years, after Challenger, while we were waiting for Hubble to fly, I wasn't allowed to just sit around and twiddle my thumbs at ESA. They're always looking at new missions, and those new missions are in competition. I got landed with one, I guess, because I'd been working with the Americans my whole career. It was, again, a joint one that was supposed to be with NASA for a UV spectroscopic mission—which is in my ballpark—that went to very short wavelengths, shorter wavelengths than Hubble can handle. It has to do with optical coatings and things like that. But it's a very important region because there are some very important atomic transitions of the molecular hydrogen and other species, and also hydrogen itself in that wavelength region. It was a very focused mission, and I was the ESA Study Scientist for that. We did the studies, and planned the mission in joint, like that. I had to eat humble pie in the end because we lost spectacularly. Being young and arrogant, I wasn't really used to losing. I mean, I survived it, but what hurt the most [laughs] is that we lost to a competing gamma-ray astronomy mission. Let’s not get into that. But, anyway, it was a bit of a disappointment. But you live and learn. The mission did survive, thankfully, in the US but under the name of FUSE. It was the smaller mission that we originally anticipated, and that was quite successful. It did happen in the US only, and ESA had nothing to do with it. That took a couple years off me, but that was fine. You learn.

Zeron:

It's an experience.

Jakobsen:

Yeah.

Zeron:

When did you first hear about the Next Generation Space Telescope?

Jakobsen:

When did I first hear about it? The idea of a successor to Hubble had been floating around even before the launch of Hubble. Depending on who you talk to, how did it start? If you talk to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, their version of course is that they played a central role—and they did, in the sense that they had a very powerful director, Riccardo Giacconi, at the time. In 1990, before Hubble had launched —'89 or '90—he told his henchmen that they should organize a meeting about the successor of Hubble. At that point, Hubble had been delayed and delayed because of the shuttle accident, and its own problems, and was costing billions more. It had an albatross air to it, and there was all this hubris and everything. I thought this was insane. But they called for a meeting to talk about the Next Generation Space Telescope. I remember, at one point, I was at dinner in the US with a bunch of US astronomers. I happened to say—I was young and arrogant—that I thought this was the wrong people at the wrong time at the wrong place talking about the wrong thing, because [laughs] we can wait until we get Hubble up, and then we can perhaps talk about the next one. But, anyway, this actually got back to Giacconi, who complained to my boss [laughs], so I got my hair washed for my big mouth [laughs]—which wouldn't be the first time. [laughs]

Zeron:

[laughs] Who was your boss at the time?

Jakobsen:

My boss was a guy called Brian Taylor in ESA. It wouldn't be the first time I got in trouble for mouthing off. [laughs]

Zeron:

[laughs] Where, would you say, that conversation started in your—?

Jakobsen:

I didn't take that meeting seriously. I didn't attend it. If you look at the proceedings, which are out, there wasn't a lot that looked like what eventually became James Webb. It happened at the same time when the first Bush administration Vice President Dan Quayle—who had reputation of being a bit of a joke—was charged with making a lunar initiative, you know, bring the US back to the Moon back then. Nobody was really taking it seriously. A lot of the proposals, a lot of the things discussed during that meeting were crazy lunar observatories. As far as I'm concerned, there were a lot of colleagues prostituting themselves on that account, talking about putting all sorts of things on the Moon, and, yeah, yeah, right. [laughs] I didn't take it seriously at all, and none of us in Europe took it seriously. But then what happened was—if I get the timing right—once we'd repaired the mission, repaired Hubble, and we could take deep images, the US cameras started taking deep images of the universe. It was quickly noticed that these images looked like they had measles. If you looked between the big galaxies, you see all these small little things. It was really strange. This was surprising. What the heck was that? It was clear it was galaxies, but how could they be so small? What is this? There was a lot of discussion back and forth. But then the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Bob Williams, decided, “Let's get to the bottom of this.” He devoted—I don't know—a couple of weeks of time, of director's time made to make the so-called Hubble Deep Field, where the telescope did nothing but look at the same little stamp-sized part of the sky for several weeks in all sorts of colors with the American camera. Lo and behold, it was realized that the speckles were indeed galaxies at very large distances.

This was very surprising because everybody had thought galaxies would be big and fuzzy at all distances. The thing about Hubble is it concentrates the light in a very small area. It's like a magnifying glass, if you will. If you look at a wall with a magnifying glass, it's still a wall. You don't see much of anything. It doesn't help you. The same thing, if galaxies were big and fuzzy, and you took at them with Hubble, which is a relatively small telescope, it's 2.4 meters, even though it has this sharp image, it wouldn't really help you. You wouldn't see anything. You'd still see a smooth wall. It wasn't really expected that Hubble would do much in remote galaxies. But since they were small, really small, Hubble did help. From the ground, you couldn't see them. They were smeared out by the atmosphere. This was a big surprise to realize that, whoa, we can actually look far back in time, and we can start seeing what galaxies were like back then. There was a very, very nice report about this written by a team led by a US colleague named Alan Dressler.

Zeron:

HST and Beyond?

Jakobsen:

What?

Zeron:

HST and Beyond.

Jakobsen:

Yes, it’s very well written report that explained that it was obvious to any astronomer with half a brain—including me—that if we're going to study these small galaxies, we're going to need a bigger telescope, and it's got to go into the infrared because they're redshift and they're moving away from us. This was just clear. It was obvious. Alan Dressler and his committee—I had nothing to do with that committee—wrote a very nice report explaining these things. That report, I would say, was the birth of James Webb. When that came out, it was just clear that we needed a new one. But Hubble had just been repaired only a few years earlier. It took a little time. But, anyway, reading that report, very interestingly, you can feel their pain in the sense that the committee members thought, how big a telescope dare we ask for? We know it has to be bigger than Hubble because we need to go deeper. We need more light; catch more light. Anyway, to make a long story short, they ended up saying, “Should it be four meters? That's probably right. Hubble is 2.4 meter in diameter. Let's go for something four meters. We can probably handle that with rockets, so let's go for four. That doesn't sound too nuts.”

They proposed that to NASA. Then something very, very, very bizarre happened, which I don't think has ever happened in the history of space astronomy, and that is that NASA's administrator at the time was a guy called Dan Goldin. He has a wild side to him. He is very flamboyant. At a meeting of the AAS, the American Astronomical Society, where you had thousands of US astronomers sitting there, quite often the NASA administrator gives a speech on what's going to happen in NASA and astronomy. Dan Goldin got up, and said, “Alan, I read your report. Very nice,” in so many words. I can't remember what he said verbatim. But he said, “Why are you being so modest? Four meters? That's nothing. Eight meters, go for eight”. sSo you had these 2,000 astronomers [laughs] sitting there with their mouths agape, [laughs] well knowing that the price of a telescope grows with some enormous power of its size, as you can imagine. “Eight meters? We'll take it!”. So James Webb started out as eight meters. At that time, we barely had eight meters on the ground. It since shrank to six and a half meters. That was the practical limit. But, nonetheless, it grew bigger, thanks to Dan Goldin Thank you, Dan! [laughs]

Zeron:

He was a visionary man.

Jakobsen:

Yeah. I don't think that's ever happened before. Normally, it's the other way around. The astronomers start out with something, and then the engineers come back and say, “It's too ambitious, and it'll cost a bomb. We can't do that. You can't do this.” Then you take a couple rounds, and you end up with something that's more modest than what you thought but, OK, it's still good enough. Not this time. It was weird.

That's when James Webb really started. Again, in Europe, we hadn't really been taking it seriously. But then in '96 or '97—I can't remember exactly —the first project manager on the NASA side came to ESTEC, the European Technological Center, where I was, and wanted to meet with us ESA Hubble veterans, and invite ESA to get involved. You can argue the motivation for that. But, of course, it always helps NASA to say the allies are in there with Congress. But even back then the NASA and ESA science programs were joined at the hip, and were increasingly becoming so in that there is hardly a mission on either side that doesn't have some contribution from the other agency.

Zeron:

That was my next question. Why do you think it was recommended that it was a joint project?

Jakobsen:

I think it was just because we were very much building on the Hubble mold. Hubble had been a great success. It had been a good success for Europe, in spite of my youthful misgivings about the initial instrumentation. It had been a great success for Europe, and it had been a great success for everybody. They said, well, let's repeat this with Europe. Europe had been growing stronger in astronomy, and NASA recognized that. I'm sure it was earnest. They wanted us to be involved. Bernie Seery, the first project manager, came and visited us at a low-key meeting, and met with the few Hubble veterans we had around, and some of the engineers on the future projects, and gave us a sales pitch. We had trouble believing everything he said, since it was going to cost 3.95 and fly next Friday. This was “faster, better, cheaper” - the NASA mantra at the time. I must admit, we were very, very skeptical. [laughs] But we did see that it sounded like the Americans were serious, and we had better get involved. So we had meetings internally in ESA, and we had a few committees of outside experts looking at it.

They said, “Yeah, go for it.” I was a Hubble veteran, so I got charged on the science side of being responsible for that, and a ESA Study manager was also appointed So we got started from there It was a bit rocky in the beginning because we hadn't agreed on what the observatory and instruments should look like in detail. But ESA got involved, and we paid for various studies during what I call the initial “let 1,000 blossoms bloom” stage We didn't know what the instruments should look like, and what was the best approach to the instruments. There are many ways of making different instruments. We paid external groups and industry to explore all sorts of ideas, and cost them, and see what the complexity was. Then we would choose from those, and back and forth. It was very fruitful. We had a lot of discussions with the Americans on these things. But early on, I was certainly focused. I thought, we want the spectrograph. This time, Europe wants the spectrograph.

Zeron:

[laughs] Yeah, it's your chance.

Jakobsen:

I did not want a niche instrument, due to what I had been through. We were very keen on getting the spectrograph. That was also where all the external committees told us, “Go for the spectrograph. Europe was big on spectroscopy.” [laughs] Anyway, what happened then next, we had a competition. There's only so many slots when there's a new mission in ESA; the same in NASA. There's competition between the different projects Like I was telling you about Lyman, where we lost, and we had to compete for a European participation in James Webb.

But this time, we won. But it was awkward because we hadn't negotiated the instruments, and we didn't know exactly what Europe's contribution would be. We were just saying, we want to be involved in this, and here are the options. We had a big meeting in Paris, I remember, where we presented the project. Then we were basically on board, but we still had to negotiate our contribution with NASA. First, we were involved, of course, with all the study groups. There was a science working group in the US that advised NASA on how the observatory was supposed to look, what the instruments were supposed to be like. We were heavily involved in that. That group had recommended that there should be a camera, and there should be a spectrograph, and then we'd also like to have a long wavelength instrument–MIRI–and so that was fine. Then the time came to negotiate between ESA and NASA about who does what. That happened at a meeting held at the Wye River Resort. I think it's a private facility now. But it's where I believe it was Clinton who got—Netanyahu and Arafat to shake hands on one of these land-for-peace deals? [laughs] It was a quite historical setting. It had little huts in a conference room. We were a small ESA delegation, I think there were five of us or so that went there. Because of my background, I was regarded, I suppose, as the NASA whisperer, so I had to do the formal talking.

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

[laughs] First NASA got up, and said, “Here's what we propose. NASA does the camera, NIRCam.” That came as no surprise because that's what gives you the above-the-fold pictures in the New York Times. Of course NASA wanted the camera. We knew that. “We also do the spectrograph, NIRSpec. Europe can then provide the long-wavelength instrument, MIRI.”, It's not that we didn't like MIRI, but it scared us silly, since we didn't know how to cool it. It had to be cooled to a lower temperature than the rest of the observatory. We were at the time talking about taking—I think it was 300 kilograms of solid hydrogen on board to cool it, which is basically a bomb. It scared the living daylights out of us, that instrument, and we really didn't want to do it alone..

Besides, NASA headquarters didn't like MIRI. The associate director for science, Ed Weiler, who I greatly admire, by the way—he was fantastic on Hubble and one of the guys who kept his cool during spherical aberration. He didn't like it. That had to do with the fact that NASA was saying “faster, better, cheaper” at the time. NASA HQ kept telling us, don't make this into a Christmas tree, you know, and put all sorts of bells and whistles on it. Focus on what you want to do. You want to do faint galaxies? Do faint galaxies, and make the two instruments—the camera and the spectrograph—and just get on with it. This is how we get this through. There's some logic to that, although “Faster, better, cheaper” didn't really work. But, anyway, that was mantra at the time. Fine. Headquarters didn't like that instrument. We liked it scientifically, but there was no way in hell we were going to take it on as the risky niche instrument. So I got up, and replied, “Ain't going to happen. That is completely unacceptable to us.” Privately, I had warned my NASA colleagues beforehand, “Look, you can't invite us to a party, and expect us to sit in the kitchen.”, but seemingly to no avail. “We want the spectrograph and then we can talk about procuring MIRI jointly” We stressed that we there was nothing in the world that said ESA or Europe had to contribute to James Webb on the hardware side. We could just walk away, and say, “No, we won't have anything to do with it.” ESA and NASA have this Open Skies agreement that our member state scientists can always apply for time on each other's projects no matter what. We could have just taken our chances, and let NASA build James Webb, and then let European astronomers apply for time on their own through NASA. You may not get the fifteen percent but—

Zeron:

You'd still get some time?

Jakobsen:

Who knows, right, who knows? Especially now that everything's double-blind, we would've probably done fine. We didn't have to contribute, so we made it clear we weren't bluffing. We then called KLM, and flew back to Holland the same evening. It was a very short meeting. [laughs] Nobody knows about this. It's quite fun to think about. I forget how much time then passed but certainly a couple months, I believe. That's how I remember it. Time passed, and then, suddenly—thanks partly to my ESA predecessor on Hubble, Duccio Macchetto, who was over there. He was greasing the system, and talking back and forth to NASA. We got word from NASA, “OK. You get the spectrograph under one condition, and that is that we provide the detectors.” That was fine because these all come from military hardware, and the American detectors are far superior than anything we had in Europe. That was — a “Thank you. Yes, please.” from us.

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

Then it gets very technical. In terms of the selection device, where NASA also insisted on providing something called the Microshutter Array, which is this high-tech, quarter of a million little doors the size of a hair that you can open and close to choose what light from what galaxies you want to put into the instrument. That was fine too. It scared the living daylights out of us, but it was the technically least bad solution. We said, “OK, fine. If you want to provide that, that's fine too, we'll go for it.” That's how we ended up with the spectrograph having these two key American components, which were actually great in the sense that the European optics are outstanding, and the US components are also the best you can make. I think we probably ended up with the best spectrograph the world could produce, I think, in all modesty. It's a very, very good instrument.

Zeron:

Like you said, when the first US talks began with Europe, you said that was the project manager—?

Jakobsen:

At the time, Bernie Seery. He came over. I wouldn't say it was unofficial but a quiet overture, and that's how it started. After discussing it, we agreed, yeah, this is probably serious. We should try to be part of this. Then after a little rocky start with the instruments and everything, everything ended up fine.

Zeron:

I wonder, before the formal science working group was established, did they send other scientists from the US to those meetings as well?

Jakobsen:

The science working group consisted of outside US scientists and outside European scientists. I forget how many we had. We had three or four. Then the ex officio ones, such as myself, we were on there, so there was European representation through everything. Also, when we had a committee to decide something, there were Europeans involved in that. It was fine. It was open.

Zeron:

Then after that, everything was formalized in the memorandum of understanding?

Jakobsen:

Yes, it was formalized in the memorandum of understanding, and then it was just a question of getting everything built on time. On the European side, we witnessed, of course, one delay after another from the NASA side. I have to say though, sometimes, we were quite relieved by the delays. [laughs]

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

We had our own issues. The NIRSpec instrument, as it's called is the biggest instrument by far of the three on board. It's a really big thing, and very complex. It's made out of ceramics, which is a European forte. It's all made of ceramic, and baked in ovens, and then the pieces are fit together. We had issues with things cracking. We had all sorts of issues. Sometimes those NASA delays were quite a relief [laughs] because you don't want to be the one causing a delay. But we definitely lived in the shadow of some of those, and said, “Whew, that was lucky. OK.”

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

But it was fine. The other interesting thing that happened, by the way, and that is on Hubble, which was the model we used, right, was that we'd provide instrumentation, but then we also had to provide something more mundane, part of the spacecraft or, like we did the solar arrays on Hubble. Then we provided personnel for operations, so making sure we were in there on a day-to-day basis. Originally, my engineering colleagues in ESTEC had proposed that Europe build the whole spacecraft by cloning one of our spacecraft—build the whole satellite part that everything is bolted to—because we had a mission called Herschel that also went to the same distant orbit, and also had a big telescope on it. They said, “That can handle James Webb as well, so we'll do the whole satellite.” I always thought that was quite audacious, but why not? In some way, building that part is standard these days. It has to be able to point to this accuracy, blah, blah, blah. NASA originally said, “OK, fine.” They were a little taken aback too, but, initially said OK. But it turned out, of course, that their prime contractor, Northrop-Grumman, hated it, which I can well understand, because they have to have system responsibility, and it's a foreign spacecraft. They didn't like that at all.

Jakobsen:

I wasn’t surprised at all. At the time, they also had something called ITAR to deal with, which was—what is it?—International Trade Regulation in Arms.

Zeron:

Traffic in Arms.

Jakobsen:

It was a pain in the butt. It was absurd. It was just completely obsessed. They were seeing reds under the bed all the time, and crazy things would happen. Like, we Europeans would write a technical report on something, and we'd send it to NASA, and then they'd classify it as ITAR-sensitive, and then we weren't allowed to see it ourselves. That's the level of absurdity we got into at the end, so I can understand that was just untenable to do that.

Zeron:

I was going to ask, how did that make collaboration harder?

Jakobsen:

It was insane, it was really silly, because we're damn allies. We're not going to give things to the Iranians. They know that. Our big companies that were doing things for us, they have their trade secrets too. It's not as if we're alien to that whole thing. We understand damn well, no, we don't want to tell the Chinese how to do this. Of course, we're not going to tell them. The Americans don't have to tell us not to do that. Come on. It was just absurd. You would have these lawyer types suddenly on the NASA projects who would just sit there like hawks looking at everything, going, “ITAR.” [laughs]

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

I hated every second of it. But, anyway, it wasn't surprising that Northrop Grumman did not want us to do the spacecraft. Then the big issue was, what do they want now? What does NASA want us to do instead of non-hardware? We can't just provide the payload. We need to do something. Then came back something that I really had not seen coming—I don't think anybody had seen coming. They said, “We want you to launch the observatory on an Ariane 5 rocket. We went, “What?” Then we had to remind them—I think it was a few years earlier—the first test fight of the Ariane 5 had exploded [laughs] quite spectacularly over French Guiana. “Really? Do you really want that? Where is this coming from? Who's asking for a rocket?” I We got back, “It's coming from Ed Weiler, the associate administrator.” Ed's an old hand at this, and a very smart guy, so we responded, “Oh, that's different”, “ But can you please remind Ed that the thing blew up?” We got back almost immediately “Ed says: Yeah, that was the test flight. What do you expect? By the time we fly, the Ariane 5 is going to be the most accurate and most safe launcher on the face of the planet. We want that.” I was quite surprised by that. Ed turned out to be absolutely correct, what he said, absolutely right. I thought this was interesting, also politically because, first of all, Ariane 5, it's almost as if it was made for it. You have to take six tons, and fly it one and a half million kilometers in the anti-Sun direction. Ariane 5 could do it straight away. No fancy transfer orbits; it could just go straight out there. It's not built for that; it's built for launching communication satellites and stuff. But once you looked at, it was exactly the right launcher.

My ESA engineering colleagues didn't like it particularly much because they wanted to do something interesting. If they're going to work on some project, they want to build something interesting. I don’t see a clone of the spacecraft as interesting, but, OK, whatever. Ariane is a funny story because it's developed by ESA, and then it's handed over to a company called Arianespace. They say, “Here, you commercialize this. Don't worry about the development costs. They're already covered by ESA. The member states are behind it.” I mean, the US also has indirect subsidies by the military, and all sorts of other stuff, so it's not really that different. I mean, it's very political, the launcher business. My engineering colleagues didn't think that handing a big check over to Arianespace was particularly glorious for them to do. It turned out there was a lot to do, launching James Webb on the Ariane. Stuff, with cleanliness, handling and also other things. There was a lot they needed to do down there in the jungle to get it off. They did a gorgeous job, by the way. It was absolutely first class. But, anyway, they were opposed to it at the time, but I thought it was an interesting idea—also politically. If nothing else, here we have NASA flying its flagship science mission on a European rocket being launched from French Guiana, and with a countdown conducted in French. [laughs]

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

This was going to be live on CNN. As I told the ESA director of science: “This may not be worth much to the ESA science program, but it's got to be worth something to ESA.” He agreed with me, got the engineers knocked into place, and took it to a higher level. So in the end we agreed, “OK, we'll provide an Ariane.” It was one of the last ones because it took so long. But it was very accurate, as you know. The flight was spot on. It was very impressive.

Zeron:

Didn't they launch a recent one?

Jakobsen:

That was an Ariane 6. It's the next one. They just did the first test flight of that.

Zeron:

That was interesting.

Jakobsen:

Yeah. Anyway, that's how that came about. It was funny. But, as I said, there was a lot of more work for the ESA engineers to actually make sure that worked out.

Zeron:

Like you mentioned, how does that science cooperation work within ESA, just because there's so many different member states that are part of it?

Jakobsen:

That happens at the higher level. In the science program, well, ESA's a funny animal like that. But in a way, it has a lot of autonomy. The member states run various governing boards, so to speak. There's something called the Council, which is the top level, with representation from every member state. They control the whole agency. But we're talking about the science program, which is just a subset of this. I forget what it is. I don't even know what it is nowadays. But it used to be like 10-20%, of the ESA budget, which is for pure science, and it's a mandatory part of the program. We get an annual budget, and we do our science programs from that. It’s controlled by something called the Science Program Committee, which also is a delegate body with members from each member state. They're the top level. Then there several advisory committees that are made up of external scientists from the scientific commuity. It trickles up from there. They approve things, and then it goes to the top level, and gets approved, and the Council approves in the end. It's basically like that. But ESA compared to NASA, I don't even remember how many member states there are these days.

There's probably twenty now or something because it's like the EU; it just keeps growing. It's burdensome. But, at the same time, ESA is an entity on its own, if you will, because it has a fixed budget. They don't have to go to Congress every year. The budget is laid out some years in advance. Of course, it's nowhere like NASA's budget. I forget what it is nowadays. I used to know this. Let's just guess it's probably a fifth of NASA's or something. But at least it's steady. NASA has to go beg Congress. Congress gets in there, and says, “No, that mission can't go, but that one can.” You really pity them there. It's so political. ESA is a little above that, I mean, I wouldn't say completely without outside influence, but it's a little more autonomous.

Zeron:

How do they determine how much each country contributes? Because then, for example—

Jakobsen:

That is per GNP. There's a formula for that. It's just a question, if so-and-so country is this rich, it pays so-and-so much. But that's for the mandatory part. There's a minimum subscription, and then there's the à la carte program, as we used to call it, which is if Denmark wants to participate in the Ariane 5 development, then they say, “OK, we're going to give X million to that.” Then they try to make sure that we get industrial contracts for that much in return. It sounds very heavy. You get what we call industrial return. Every member state expects to get back industrial contracts close to what they put in. It's sort of hidden government subsidies, if you will. It works. It's remarkable. It works reasonably well because the big companies, the big aerospace companies, they know this. They know how it works. They know that, if we've got a big project, we're going to have to find a Danish company. They have contacts with Danish industry, and they know, OK, these guys can make this box, and they make sure their proposals have the right distribution. It works pretty well, actually, which is surprising.

Zeron:

That's the interesting thing to me. At the same time, you have internal diplomacy in that sense, where you have to select your contractors, your scientists, from the different countries. But, at the same time, they represent the one agency, and it's one body, when you negotiated with—

Jakobsen:

Yeah, and it goes through everything. When I put a science team together, I have to get it approved, of course, by the delegates. I can't just do whatever I want. Indeed, I have to make sure that there's a good representation of the different member states in the different countries. Not only do they have the competence that I want, and be people I can work with, but we have to make sure that there's a geographical balance —I can't put all Englishmen on or something like that. But it works. In a way, ESA has been very good in developing high-tech in Europe. Back when I started, I remember Spain, there wasn't much aerospace in Spain at all at the time. We used to joke they provided the toilet paper, which was harsh—but now, wow, I mean, they have all sorts of aerospace companies, no problem, whatsoever. That is no doubt because of these investments. It works, it does really work. It can be burdensome, but I think it's a success story.

Zeron:

Could you talk a little bit more about your role as ESA Project Scientist for James Webb?

Jakobsen:

I had a science team that I chaired. They would be my board of directors, so to speak. When we made decisions, they were supposed to keep me honest. The way we worked—and it's the same in NASA—there's a project team, which are engineers that actually build things. Our hardware gets built out in industry and the project team oversees that part of it. Then there's the science oversight part, where I'm supposed to work with the engineers to make sure that they do the right thing. When there are trade-offs to be made, and the engineers come back and say, “Look, we can't do this. What are we going to do?” Then I have to sit down and think about what the science impact is, and what I think is the best solution, given the constraints, the technical constraints, the financial constraints. Then I have to explain these to my science team so they understand why we're actually not being able to do it the way we first thought. Everybody keeps each other honest like that. That works fine. I actually enjoy that work, and I've always gotten along very well with the engineers, because there is a fiscal reality and there's a technical reality that exists.

Zeron:

A clash of cultures.

Jakobsen:

You can't just be a head in the clouds astronomer and insist, “I want a 20-meter telescope on the Moon.” “Yeah, right.”

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

You have to be realistic about getting the best bang for the buck you can for the money. That sometimes means compromises. But I enjoy that. I actually enjoy trying to understand what the engineers' problems are. I've always been, I think, in all modesty, quite good at that.

Zeron:

How did the development of the initial designs and the science goals for the NIRSpec—?

Jakobsen:

The science goals were obvious. They also came from way back, from the original science working group in NASA. There were some level-one specs, as we called them, put on the instrument: it has to be able to observe so many galaxies at that this brightness and this spectral resolution, blah, blah, blah. That was all clear. We had participated in formulating those requirements. Then our job was to come up with a design that met them, that was able to meet these requirements. We did that by, I mean, we had all sorts of wild and crazy ideas from the beginning. But we'd always settle on what was supposed to be the right approach, and then industry would then do the detailed design, and come back to us and say, “This is what we think it looks like.” We had competition there.

We had two consortia working on the initial design of NIRSpec. We would give them the requirements, and then the engineers out in industry would come back and say, “This is how we propose to design this part, the optics, and this is how it would perform.” Then at ESA, we would say, “No, we don't like that. Your design doesn't meet this requirement.” Actually, there's a story. I'd love to get it in here, actually. We had a German consortium, which is now Airbus, that was based down in Munich. We had another competing consortium in Alcatel, who were based somewhere on the French Riveria. I forget where it was exactly. But, anyway, the German consortium—I mean, there were other nationalities involved, but it was based there. Their chief optician was a guy roughly my age, maybe a little younger, Wolfgang Holota. He was an East German. We're talking around 2000, where some of the Eastern Germans would be working in Western Germany. They called them Ossies. They were originally from East Germany, and they had a completely different culture. He had been in Zeiss Jena, if I recall. Zeiss is a very famous optical company. That had been broken up after the war, because when the Americans rushed through Germany, they grabbed as much as they could of Zeiss, and moved it west.

Zeron:

To the other side. [laughs]

Jakobsen:

There was Zeiss West, and there was Zeiss Jena, which is the old Zeiss. He had been from there, and his English was not all that good at the time. Then in the French team we had all these young, bright French optical engineers, who came from all these fancy engineering schools —called Ecole Superieure Ecole this or that. They were using all this advanced software, this state-of-the-art, $100,000 software to design things. It was interesting because there was a real clash of culture.. The Germans came up with a design for the first stage of NIRSpec. They had to reimage the telescope focus onto the slit plane, and it was quite complicated. We had some quite strict requirements. It had to be really, really good imaging—really good. The Germans came up with a design that did it very nicely. The French, these brilliant young things, they couldn't come up with a design that worked. They were using all this software, and they just couldn't get the focus good enough. They just couldn't do it. We were a little perplexed by that. Again, I was project scientist, so my job was to work with the ESA engineers to get in there and understand why this was.. At one point, we put the German chief optician—Wolfgang—in a room and I fired up my school German, which was horrible. [laughs]

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

Thankfully some of the ESA engineers spoke better German I did. We put him in front of a blackboard, and said, “We're not leaving until we understand why your design works.”

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

Wolfgang kept talking about something called “Scheimpflug”. What the hell is that? Anyway, it turns out that what he had done to get the optics correct was using an ancient trick from optics that goes back to bellow cameras. If you think of these old cameras with the glass plate in the back, they'd have these bellows, and you used to be able to tilt the front lens if you wanted. If you did that, you could get a focus all along the street, so to speak. You could focus something that was crooked onto your plate. This was invented by an Austrian army officer named Scheimpflug. The old cameras used to be able to do this. This condition, which is simple optics, but nobody uses it anymore. Of course, our Eastern German classical educated old-school guy knew this. He looked at the telescope, and said, “It's got this really crooked focal plane. It’s got to go here, and it’s got to be flat. I need Scheimpflug.” He put this into the design, and that's why it worked. The young opticians, all these bright young Frenchmen, their software wouldn't tell them in a million years that they had to do that., So they claimed, “We can't do it. It can’t be done.” They didn't know this dirty trick. Of course, I was tempted to walk over to the French, and whisper, “Scheimpflug” into their ear..

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

“Look it up.” But, of course, I couldn't, because it was a competition. I love that story, and I tell it to the kids nowadays: don't trust your software.

Jakobsen:

You can't just run off to the software; do it first by hand. It was the same way COSTAR was made; it was designed by hand first, using basic optics, working it out, and only then you go to the computer, and you fine-tune it. It's a wonderful story.

Zeron:

It's fascinating.

Jakobsen:

Wolfgang’s design is pure genius. When I look at his optics—I'm only an amateur optician—when I look at his design , I'm just awed by the cleverness of it all. It's because he knew all these classical dirty tricks. Only later did he use the computer to fine-tune it. It's a fun story, Scheimpflug. [laughs]

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

That's one of the reasons why NIRSpec is so amazing, because it images very, very well.

Zeron:

I wonder now, that you were talking about industry earlier, how do those contractors get selected for ESA when they—?

Jakobsen:

Competition. They put in a proposal in response to a call from ESA, and then there's a selection procedure. There's a whole process for that, you know, secret grades and blah, blah, blah. That's how it's done, because it's done competitively. But, on the other hand, there's so few companies now left that are big in aerospace, so it's like one or the other, and it's often in the cards who is due to get the next contract. “Well, now it's their turn.” But ESA does the best it can to be fair .

Zeron:

In 2002, the Next Generation Space Telescope was renamed as the James Webb Space Telescope—

Jakobsen:

Oh yeah.

Zeron:

—[laughs] after the former NASA administrator, James E. Webb. What was the European perspective?

Jakobsen:

Oh, we weren't asked at all. Nobody was asked. Again, not being in on the American side, I can only speculate from what I heard happened.. But this was under the second Bush administration, W. At that time, one of Dick Cheney's henchman, Sean O'Keefe, had been appointed NASA administrator. To my knowledge, he knew little about space before becoming the NASA administrator. I'm guessing, at some point, when he got that job, he said, “Let's look at the history of NASA.” Then he certainly must have come across James Webb, who was the first administrator. You can find wonderful pictures of him and John F. Kennedy, “We choose to go to the Moon,” Camelot and all that. He was the guy who basically put NASA together, and got them to the Moon as administrator. There's no doubt he was a brilliant administrator.

I'm assuming O’Keefe must have thought, “He's a guy worth honoring.” When the time came to ask for a new large mission in NASA, the scientists usually go, hat in hand, a all the way up to the top, and ask, “Can we have a new start? Can we start this mission now as an official thing?” O’Keefe must have said—I'm just guessing— “Yeah, but it has to be called the James Webb Space Telescope.” He just decreed that. We scientists were really disturbed because, first, we don't like to name things that early in the process. It's bad luck, if you will. It was then called the Next Generation Space Telescope, which is Star Trek-y, and a horrible. Anyway, we don't like that, and we certainly don't name our missions after administrators.

Zeron:

It's after astronomers.

Jakobsen:

We name them after scientists. We thought, what's next? The Richard Milhous Nixon Observatory? But we were told—and this was by Ed Weiler—who in so manay words told us, “Look, this is the Bush administration. This is Cheney and his gang. Don't fight them. If you want your mission, that's what you're going to have to do.” Orders from above. Now, fortunately, some of my NASA colleagues then started looking into James Webb. [laughs] Of course, he was admirable. He was a good administrator in getting NASA to the Moon. That was unbelievable what they did back then. But what they found out also is that apparently when Kennedy told Webb, “You create this agency, you know, NASA,” he replied, “Yes, but I don't want to only fly meat.” Those are my words. “I don't want to only fly manned spacecraft. NASA also has to have a basic research program, a space research program.” Apparently that's what he insisted on. He started the whole science program, which is why we're here. ESA has the same thing. So we quickly learned to love him. That's what we have since used in explaining why it's called James Webb, because he started the science program, which is true. Of course, then he got in trouble later on, which is a very bizarre story.

Zeron:

Yeah.

Jakobsen:

You know that story, right? There's no evidence that—again, I'm not firsthand on this—but there's no evidence at all that he had anything to do with the Lavender Scare——when they were firing homosexuals in NASA, which was horrible. But, to my understanding, there was only one who got fired, and Webb probably never even heard about it—

Zeron:

There's no connection?

Jakobsen:

—because it was one guy or something. There is a very interesting article I read. I think it was the New York Times or Washington Post. There’s a Black NASA scientist who really got into this, and thought this was horrible, and wanted to look into it. It wasn't only the NASA historian who looked into it, but apparently this guy was also given access to everything. He looking at the records, and he said, “I couldn't find evidence that James Webb was gay-bashing at any point whatsoever.” To the contrary, he discovered—and this, I didn't know—that James Webb at the time, you know, Marshall Space Flight Center is a big center in Alabama. That's where they put the Germans, von Braun and those guys, after the war, Redstone Arsenal. Apparently, James Webb really went out of his way to racially integrate Marshall Space Flight Center over the Alabamans [laughs] at the time, and did a lot for Black rights in. So this NASA scientist came out and said, “I actually admire the guy [laughs] much more than before. I haven't seen any sign of any wrongdoing,” which is interesting. But NASA's not going to change the name, and I think that's probably the correct decision. That's what it is now.

I hate it in the sense of people saying, “I work on the Webb.” “What's that?”

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

But, anyway, what can you do?

Zeron:

I wonder if you could tell me more a little bit about the proceedings or just the relationship you had with other members in the science working group.

Jakobsen:

I was an ex officio member, so I was a project scientist, so it's a little different from the outside people. Of course, I had very close relationships—I feel—very close professional relationships with my NASA counterparts, with John Mather and the other instrument scientists at NASA, and also Eric Smith, the Program Scientist. I think even personal friends, I’d regard them as. No, it was fine. If anything strange came up, I think we were able to talk very frankly about what was going on. A lot of the external outside scientists, they were also—it was good fun. They wouldn't always know as much as us inside guys, of course, but it was fine. But it did last an awful long time. There were years and years and years of these meetings, because everything was delayed constantly. It was always two years to launch, always. [laughs] You started to get tired of it, in a way. For some people, it became a way in life. [laughs]

Jakobsen:

It was a little dreary in that sense. But, as I said, I retired relatively early. That was at the end of 2011.

[unrelated conversation]

Zeron:

In 2006, you were appointed a senior advisor to ESA. How did your responsibilities change?

Jakobsen:

They didn't really change. It was a strange system. I mean, I benefited quite well from it. But in ESA, how can I put this? When I came to ESA, the scientists were respected quite a lot, and then there was a period where the engineers ran the science program, and they sort of pooh-poohed the scientists. That was very tiresome. That changed slowly, also. But then it became worse as ESA became more and more bureaucratic; the whole world did. There was much more management, and all the new hires were in administration. Then at one point, instead of having the personnel department—we still had the personnel department and, in the old days, they were quite helpful. I need to hire somebody? They would help me find the right person. Of course, we had to worry about the geographical distribution… I understood that. But they were quite reasonable, I thought. But then we suddenly also got Human Resources—or “Human Racehorses”, as we called them..

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

Oh my god, for me, it was just awful. I don't like rules too much. I would say, we scientists work 24/7 always. And when you work with NASA, you’d have six hours to the East Coast, and nine hours to the West Coast, so I'd quite often do some things in the evening or night to avoid a 24-hour turnaround. That meant I might roll into the office late in the morning. My bosses, they knew we worked like crazy, and they didn't complain at all. We were given autonomy to do the job, and I'd been doing it for 20 years or something. Then we got these human resources people. They started making new rules. You have to be in the office at certain hours, and this, that, and the other. These 20-something year-old girls would call me up, and ask, “What had you been doing last Monday? Why weren't you in your office?” I was going, “Come on, I've been doing this job for 100 years.” Anyway, that's one aspect. I can get back to that if you want. But, anyway, the system became more and more bureaucratic, and back then it was normal that, as a scientist, you could only advance to a certain degree. You got promotions and you got your automatic advances, but there was a certain pay grade, as a scientist, you couldn't go above—unless you had managerial responsibilities, and I refused that. I refused to be promoted into management. That was not my forte. I see myself as a scientist, very much a scientist. I hate people problems.

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

[laughs] I like to work a little chaotic, in a sense, and take care of what's most pressing. Then ESA at one point introduced a system where scientists and other strange people who were technically competent—it was also for engineers in principle—and who remained technically engaged could get higher grades without having to go into management. NASA has a similar thing, actually. They introduced that, and that's what I got after a while. I got appointed one of those—and it sounds very pompous—Senior Advisor to ESA. I mean, the management does not want to hear what I think about anything. That's not quite true [laughs] because the science program does, but not the rest of ESA. [laughs] They couldn't care less what I thought about anything. They didn't even know who I was. That was just that. Was there a responsibility that went with it? Not much. I mean, I was doing science related things for ESA Headquarters a little more, but I was probably doing that anyway, technically, because I knew the directors so well. I was in a strange situation because I was rather senior and rather old for a project scientist. I never wanted one of the management positions, so colleagues who were younger than I took the management positions, so I had bosses that were less experienced and younger than I was, which is not good. It wasn’t good for them, and it wasn’t good for me. I kept forgetting they were there. I'd be talking to the director directly, and I'd say, “Oh, I forgot to tell you, we agreed on this.” It was not tenable. I could see that.

Then I had the pay grade to go with it. [laughs] But, anyway, to get back to those human resources. I wasn't getting any younger. ESA used to have—my contract went to 60. That used to be our retirement age, which is very young. I could have stayed some more years. But, anyway, I was getting rundown by these human resources. I remember one thing that really did it for me, and that was I had some 20-year-old call me up and say, “Oh, Mr. Jakobsen”—they didn't want to use honorifics or anything, at ESA, we're all the same—“Our system shows that you weren't at the office before 11 last Tuesday. Where were you?” I said, “I have no idea. Do you want me to find out?” “Yes, please.” So I went back through the diary to figure out what the hell had I been doing that day. Oh, I know, I woke up, and there was a mail from the director. “I'm getting on the flight to NASA from Paris at noon. Could you send me three slides on the topic we discussed last Friday so I can talk about it with Ed Weiler?” So what do I do? I stay home, I make the slides, and send them off, so I make sure they get to the plane. Then I went to the office, and I get shit from human resources. I explained this. I said, “This is just part of my job. I have these time delays with NASA, and everything. If you're telling me I'm not doing my job, that's one thing. But who cares when I'm in the office?”

Zeron:

You're getting it done.

Jakobsen:

Yeah. “I'm working like crazy. Ask my wife. I'm working 24/7.” Anyway, that really—and they just said, “No, no, no, you have to be there.” Then they started hating me in personnel because I went to the doctor. We had a doctor on site, and I liked him. He was American, by the way. I asked him, “Look, can't you tell them that their system is doing my health in?”

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

“I have to be able to sleep in in the morning.” He did. [laughs]

Zeron:

[laughs] He did?

Jakobsen:

I got medical exemption. Oh, they hated me in personnel. They hated my guts. [laughs] “Leave me alone, damn it. Come on, I'm doing a good job. I know that.” But, anyway, it became very, very bureaucratic. Then I decided, ah, James Webb is going nowhere. There was another delay, and another delay. There was this whole mess on the US side. That's when I decided to hand over to my successor, who I had hired previously, Pierre Ferruit. But I stayed involved with NIRSpec on the science side of it but not the day-to-day business, obviously. My wife was happy to come home. She really wanted to go home. Twenty-eight years in Holland was enough for her. The kids had left home, so that's why.

Zeron:

Going back to, like you said, all the delays and stuff that happened, what was your perspective on the growing budget and scheduled delays that were happening in 2010/2011?

Jakobsen:

I can't say that I'm an expert in fiscal matters in terms of management and stuff like that. But I will say that I personally believe that a large reason for these enormous delays on the NASA side was that the mission was seriously under-costed from day one. As I told you, when Bernie Seery came over and invited us to join, it was going to cost 3.95 and fly next Thursday. It was like that forever. They were always really strapped for cash on the NASA project side, and so the NASA project managers were given impossible jobs. There was one called Phil Sabelhaus, who was a very interesting guy and very experienced and he was just given an impossible job to run this, and make any advance with so little money. It was eating up everything in the NASA science program, it really was. It was an expensive program, I mean, six and a half meters telescope, so what did they expect? There was a lot of new stuff that needed to be developed, and there was never enough money to do it. They kept postponing and postponing the start of this and the start of that. That's my impression of what was happening. I think that's much of what it was. They were just never given enough money to finish the job, it and just dragged on forever.

Zeron:

How were the potential cancellation threats in the US felt in Europe?

Jakobsen:

Fortunately, I think, if I remember correctly, the Tea Party Republicans wanting to cancel James Webb was after I had l retired. I was resigned to my fate. No, I wasn't prepared to give it up at all. Holy crap. We had this beautiful instrument sitting there waiting. But what can you do, right, when one political party decides to take leave of its senses, in the US? [laughs] That's where we are today. It was demoralizing. It was crazy. I can't really claim to be an expert on exactly what went wrong, except I think they just needed a big pot of money to get things done.

Zeron:

I know, at least in that side, for the congressional issues, the US played a big part in the scientific community advocating for the telescope, and I know they asked for some help from the European side as well in—I don't know—maybe like letters or something.

Jakobsen:

I don't know exactly what happened there. Also, Barbara Mikulski came out fighting for it. She definitely played an important role. I don't really know enough about US politics at that level to say what really mattered, because this is outside even NASA. This is congressional stuff, which I don't know much about.

Zeron:

Then after you decided to, well, actually before that, you joined the—did you join the faculty of the University of Copenhagen before you retired?

Jakobsen:

That was in my waning days at ESA. I was getting a little uncomfortable with the situation and how bureaucratic things had become. I needed a relief. So I took leave a couple of times, and went here on science leave, and talk to some scientists, and talk to Copenhagen. They said, “Why don't we make you an adjunct professor?” They call it affiliate because “adjunct” has other connotations in the US.

Zeron:

Yeah. [laughs]

Jakobsen:

They call it affiliate. That means they gave me the professor title. I had to go through the hoops to be qualified as a professor. But they don't pay me a salary because I'm well-funded by my ESA pension. [laughs] That was fine, so I got an academic position here, that I still have. That's nice. I enjoy that. There is a Dark Cosmology Center and also the Cosmic Dawn Center, and I was involved in getting that started up. They built that on James Webb quite a lot, so that was fine. I don't run in there all the time, but I give lectures occasionally. I certainly don't participate in the bureaucracy of the university. If they're not going to pay you, you're not going to do that!

Zeron:

Yeah. [laughs]

Jakobsen:

[laughs] That has also grown. It's not just ESA that has became more bureaucratic, I mean, NASA became more, and the university here became more bureaucratic. It's just everywhere and the whole, ah, New Public Management thing. Don't get me started on that.

Zeron:

[laughs] It's a lot. Like you said, you announced your retirement from the European Space Agency in December of 2011. How did your involvement with the mission change, or how aware were you of things or how involved you were with everything?

Jakobsen:

I have a very good relationship with the team I left, the team I had set up, and so the science part of the team. I also have a very good relationship with the engineers, and I still do. It was clear that I would still remain involved on the technical side and on the science side. him. Pierre Ferruit put me on the NIRSpec team, on the guaranteed time team, and that's been fine. I've done, in all modesty, a lot of technical work, and also on the guaranteed time program, especially on being able to manage these quarter of a million doors. I've written software that plans all the pointings that we've done in the guaranteed time program. It's been good. Then I've been participating in the science reduction, so it's been fine. I've mainly been focusing on technical things, because we have a whole team of external scientists, I mean, Roberto [Maiolino] would be the first to admit that they don't know that much about the subtle technicalities of NIRSpec. Roberto's on the science team, and very good at exploiting the data. But when it comes to, “Why is the instrument doing that?” he doesn't always know that, but the ESA people do. I'm one of the few technical people left on the team now. some are now at the Institute. But on the team, the science team and the guaranteed time team, we had some very good ESA people, and all those guys and gals, they've since been put on other projects, of course [laughs], because they're really good. They're really good.

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

ESA has tons of other programs. As soon as they say, “oh, off you go.” I sometimes sit here a little alone, and I think, “Oh man, who am I going to ask about this, because I don't know the answer to that one? How did we do that? Where is that hidden?” [laughs]

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

But it's OK. I. We manage. We've done quite well. We haven't failed anything in our programs. The science has been very good.

Zeron:

That's great. The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on Christmas Day of 2021.

Jakobsen:

Yeah.

Zeron:

Could you walk me through your recollection of that day?

Jakobsen:

Oh yeah, we watched it upstairs. We have a little home cinema upstairs. We watched it on NASA TV. It was fun. I had been contacted by a Danish science journalist. How'd that happen? I can't even remember how that came about, actually. I'm not one to walk around, you know, trying to be in the public sphere. I had my 15 minutes of fame in Hubble, when we repaired it, and I was on Danish television, and my mother got to see me on television.

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

I've been there, done that. [laughs] Check that one off. I don't really care about that stuff. But, anyway, there was a Danish science journalist of the Weekendavisen that I subscribe to and is one of the more serious publications here. I had contact with her, and she was asking me about the launch. Oh, I actually turned down an invitation from ESA to go down there because it was in the middle of COVID, and it was during Christmas, and I was not going to do that to my wife. I also knew that, in all modesty, everybody I loved to hate in ESA would be there. [laughs] These things can be unpleasant, really.

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

I said, “Thanks but no thanks, guys.” They were going to fly me down there but, anyway, I didn't go. We watched it up here with the journalist, and that was fun. She made a little article about it, which was fun, where I explained about Bernie Seery. He was in the audience. It was a strange transmission, I mean, that NASA sent—it was bizarre. There was a lot of fumbling with microphones. They were going to go around the world, and then the cameras didn't work in India.

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

It was a bizarre event. Oh, sorry, that wasn't the launch, was it, when I think about it? That was the later presentation of the first science results, which was also a very strange story.

Zeron:

We can get into that one too after.

Jakobsen:

For me, it was strange because here you had these teams who'd built the instruments, and knew how they worked. But, at the same time, you have the [Space Telescope Science] Institute there who's supposed to run things long-term. The idea is that they learn from the instruments, they take the information they need from the instrument teams, and they run it long-term. We eventually disappear once we're done with our guaranteed time program and stuff. It happens that some of the instrument people get employed there. But the Institute, I think, has always been—I can say this—they've always been a bit arrogant, and they always had this “not invented here” attitude. It's not quite true when you get to the working level. We had good relationships with them in working with them. But they don't particularly like the guaranteed time teams, because we know the instruments, we built them, and they're supposed to do so. They're supposed to be the center of everything for the outside universe, so they want us to wither up and die and go away. They can't wait for us to be done with the guaranteed time, which is understandable.

But, anyway, on this mission—and the other thing is, when you get up there, and you commission the instrument, you have a whole series of tests to perform. This is what we do to figure out where the image is, and this is what we do to figure out how that is, and then we test this procedure for doing that, and we test this procedure for doing that. The Institute did that in collaboration with us, but it was always weird because they'd never tell us what they were doing on their side. We were quite open on the ESA side. I participated in the commissioning of NIRSpec. I was a spare brain to my successor Pierre Ferruit, and I sat here at home. We have fiber optics so I had perfect internet and everything so I could do this. He would send me little tasks, “Can you think about this?” He was running around like a chicken with his head cut off. I had time to think about it all. It worked really well. He would send me, “Can you do this?” “Yeah, sure, I'll look at it.” I was involved in the commissioning, and following the different tests. But the Institute would never tell us what the hell they were doing. There were some things that they took on, and they would just never tell us. It was weird. How did we get into this? [laughs]

Zeron:

When you say the Institute, you mean Space Telescope?

Jakobsen:

Space Telescope Institute. There's this tension. There's always been this tension there. It was there on Hubble too; not invented here. Not at the working level. There's a lot of very good people there, obviously, or they wouldn't be able to pull it off. They're very reasonable. But, as an institution they want us to go away. Why did I get into this stream? This is a contentious issue. [laughs] I forgot.

Zeron:

We were talking about the launch, so remember—

Jakobsen:

Oh yes, the first science. Right. In my universe, which I guess is just so old school, it's our job as instrument builders to commission the thing, and to teach people how to use it, and then hand it over to the Institute, basically. Part of that is also doing the first science observations so you can show, “Look, this works. We can actually take a spectrum where we can actually do this, and here you go.” Also on Hubble, there were these early release observations. In spite of the spherical aberration, we tried to find some things that would work, nonetheless, in spite of the aberration. They were done by the instrument teams, in collaboration with the Institute, of course. What are we going to do first? Let's look at this and let's look at this. But, in the case of JWST, the Institute took that all on its own, the first science. They wanted to control it completely, without the instrument teams, and they even appointed external teams to do the first science. We have guaranteed time programs that are designed to do the first science. We were perfectly open that, yeah, a lot of that science should be opened up to the world, and explain how it works and everything. But, no, the Institute wanted to do it themselves. They had these early release observations and a complete science program for outside people who didn't know anything about the instruments. Weird. It was weird. It was very strange. Now, it turned out that at least the teams using NIRSpec, they all came to us and said [laughs], “Can we talk?”

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

“Yeah, sure, we can talk, of course.” It wasn't that bad in reality. But the very first images, of course, are so political and so PR-heavy that they controlled that themselves at the Institute. Even those of us, who had built the instruments, had no idea what they were going to look at. They wouldn't tell us. I was sitting there with the journalist—these were the first science observations—and I said, “I have no idea what's going to come. I do not know what they're going to show us.” They had shared these images with Biden beforehand.

Zeron:

I know, they did the advance showing with the President.

Jakobsen:

It was all very weird, because I'm well aware that spectroscopy is not—you can't easily do PR with spectroscopy. It's almost impossible to explain to the public what it is. You see these things with a bunch of lines, and people go, “What the heck is this?” I know this, and that's fine. But they kept saying, when they met with Biden, they kept saying—what was it?—they were saying 12.3 billion years; whatever number it was . I was like, “How do they know that? They have to take a spectrum before they can know that. Where's the spectrum?” They didn't explain it when they presented it to Biden. But then later, during that press conference, the first spectra, when they came out, I had no idea what they were looking at. I looked at it, and I said, “Well, that's nice, all the lines, so that's good. I'm happy.” But I had no idea what they were going to do. It was strange, in that sense. Then when we looked at the data afterwards, how they'd used this microshutter array, how they'd set it up, it was all a little bizarre.

Zeron:

But the interesting thing, like you say, I would've thought they would've shown that to the team even before that.

Jakobsen:

At least collaborate with us or ask us to look at the program, look at the technical things. No, no, no. They kept it close to their vest. Hubble wasn't quite like that. It was more collaborative. It was very strange.

Zeron:

Interesting.

Jakobsen:

Yeah. These teams they had created do the early science, we only got to appreciate what they were doing and have input because they came to us, and we had meetings with them, and helped them out. We said, “We can do this for you if you want, but figure out how you want to do it.”

Zeron:

Interesting.

Jakobsen:

Yeah. There was some odd sociology, it was strange, and it's still there. But, of course, we have a fuse. We're soon going to disappear. We don't have much guaranteed time left. We've almost used all of it now. But I think we have been very good at giving our stuff out to the public.

Zeron:

Exactly.

Jakobsen:

That was something very important in the beginning when we were setting up the guaranteed time program on NIRSpec. Having learned from the Faint Object Cameras, I said, “That one was balkanized.” The individual members had their little pet projects. I had said early on, “I don't want that. This is a survey instrument. We have to put all the time together and do one thing coordinated.” As it t turned out collaborated with the American camera team, so we put all our time in the pool, and made sure it was a coordinated, coherent program. It's called JADES. Very, very successful. That worked out great. It wasn't Professor X rolling in. “Where's my data?” No. It's all held together, and it's all coordinated together, and it's worked like a charm. Very, very good.

Zeron:

That was my next question. How do you feel about providing open access data to the scientific community early in the mission?

Jakobsen:

The winds of the time, so to speak, are that there shouldn't be proprietary access at all. But, at some level, having worked on this for 30 years, I think those of us who have done that actually have a right to the first observations and the very first analysis of the data. It shouldn't be endless, and it isn't; it's finite. I also think, in the very early days, we need to think about what we're seeing, because we don't fully understand the instruments, and there are lots of funny things going on.

Zeron:

You can't explain it if you don't know it?

Jakobsen:

If anybody's going to figure out what's going on, it's those of us who built the instruments. We need time to get things right and check them out. There's been some dubious claims coming out of James Webb that's just been hasty stuff coming out. James Webb has been very, very open about putting data out on the street quickly. Certainly, in terms of NIRSpec, it's a very complicated instrument, and there's still things that are not widely known about the instrument and how best to use it. We're still learning ourselves. At some level, I think, we should be a little careful about just throwing stuff out there, because there are a lot of ambitious young people [laughs], and they're hungry. That's fine. But there's also a lot of very hasty things, papers that are not very good, I think. It's a tough one, that one. On the other hand, we can't monopolize everything, of course not. We built this for everybody. We're well aware that. But the bulk of the time is in the general observer share. The bulk of the time is in the open competition, which is as it should be, of course. We built this for the community. We're well aware of that. On the other hand, I think we do deserve a little bit of privileged access in the beginning—

Zeron:

Since you built it. [laughs]

Jakobsen:

—also because we need to debug everything.

Zeron:

I agree.

Jakobsen:

It's a balance.

Zeron:

What was your reaction when you saw the first, I guess, when you were able to see for yourself the first images on what you had planned from the beginning or maybe in conjunction?

Jakobsen:

That's actually a fun story. At one point during commissioning my successor, Pierre Ferruit, sent me a mail, that said, “We have the telescope tonight. We have a chance to do something. We can look at the Galactic Center. We can't point yet, but we can hold it steady. Can you make me a pattern from these quarter of a million little doors that captures as many spectra as physically possible?” That's what my software did. “Then we'll point at the Galactic Center, and there's enough light from everywhere that we'll get a spectrum in every one.” I did that. It took me 30 minutes, because I had already written the software, to do so. This was the first time we ever did that. Then the next morning, there was an image waiting. Here's what we got. It was just gorgeous. You could compare my computer trace of what it should look like, and what it really looked like. Then when you zoomed in there, you could see all these hydrogen lines. I immediately went in there, and measured where are they? They were exactly where they were supposed to be.

I looked at these first data, and I thought, “This is going to be good. [laughs] This is really going to be good.” That was the first time, we tried taking many spectra at once and it brought tears in my eyes. It was fantastic, after 30 years of waiting for this, and everything was working exactly as it should. That was good. Then, of course, we got more and more sophisticated. The other fun thing is the collaboration with the American camera, we have very good collaboration with Marcia Rieke and her NIRCam team, It's been very fruitful. We have this game of tag, where they take an image of the sky void and go very deep. They use different filters and different colors, and then they analyze those different colors, and figure out which galaxies are probably very far away based on, you know, this one's very red, so it's probably very far away. Then they give us the positions, and we go get spectra of them with NIRSpec. We can confirm whether they're right or not. We've been doing that, and because I developed all this stuff for pointing and opening these doors, we could do all sorts of dirty tricks the Institute didn't know we could do. When we were setting up the very first such observations, we’d agree, “We're going to look at this one, this one, this one, this one. Then we’ll have to point the telescope like that and open these shutters,” and everything was set in stone. But we were actually able—it was like three days before or something—to change some of the shutters, because our NIRCam colleagues had said, “We think we’ve just found better ones in there. We now have new James Webb pictures, and it looks like they're even further away than the ones we had from Hubble.”

Since we knew how to do this, we went in at the last moment and opened and closed the shutters needed to those galaxies. It turned out, bingo, right away, the ones that our NIRCam colleagues had found we indeed really far away, much further away than we'd ever hoped for. On the very first try. Bingo, the furthest galaxies anybody had ever seen before—and on the first attempt.

Zeron:

That's incredible.

Jakobsen:

Yeah. We had four of them on the first attempt, record-breaking, really far away. It was amazing. It was just, wow, this is incredible. The sensitivity of NIRSpec is really, really good, and that's thanks to industry. They were really good at making sure all the mirrors are perfect and so forth like that. It's a very, very good instrument, and it has been like that all the way through. This happened in the second round too, more recently. We didn't have to be as stealthy this time because there was time to do it right. But the NIRCam colleagues came out and said, “We think we have some that are even further away. We don't really believe it because they look—they're a little too bright. They didn't fully believe in them, but we we took spectra of them on anyway They're all correct. [laughs]

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

We beat our own record within the first two years. Now we have the furthest galaxies yet again. Another paper came out in Nature now, where we have—is it three?—yeah, the three furthest new record. We beat our own record. We have the furthest galaxies ever looked at. They're oddly, bright—which is not expected—and things like that. In the sense of being able to look back in time, it has been far beyond our expectations what we are able to do with NIRSpec. We thought we'd slowly be clawing our way out there, further and further. But, no, boom, we went straight out there—[laughs] whoa—and it worked first time. It's been really successful in that sense. A lot of these galaxies are now being looked in detail. There's some weird stuff that gets very technical to talk about. But we're analyzing those data, publishing the results, and it’s all quite exciting

Zeron:

It's so interesting.

Jakobsen:

Yeah. It's been very, very successful. This game of tag we've been playing with the American team has been really, really good.

Zeron:

I wanted to go back really quick to the launch. I remember we talked about the countdown being in French [laughs] in French Guiana. How worried were you—because I know this is a different perspective than the Americans—about the single-point failures or just the launch in general or anything happening?

Jakobsen:

I'm just a dumb astronomer. I'm not an engineer, and I'm certainly not a risk engineer. I mean, I was aware of the many single-point failures. Putting anything on a rocket, which is a controlled explosion, is dangerous. But it's not my department. I can't do anything about this, but I do have a lot of faith in my colleagues who do. [laughs] The thing could have exploded, but Ariane V’s hadn't failed for ages. They really know what they're doing down there, so I wasn't that worried at all. I was just thrilled. It was so accurate that my ESA engineering counterpart immediately sent me by mail the report of how accurate it was, just an hour after the launch. Arianespace had done the orbit determination, and it was 1% accurate. I thought, wow. [laughs] NASA was impressed by that, there's no doubt about it, that Ariane could fly that accurate.

They really pulled out all the stops down there to do that. Now you can't get the rocket anymore, so I hope the new one is just as good. [laughs] It was very important for James Webb, you see, because James Webb is a funny one because it has to go one and a half million kilometers away from Earth, and go into this big lazy orbit around the L2 point. You can't just sit there; you have to go in a big orbit. But it's a little unstable. When you look at the gravity and the centrifugal forces, it's as if there's a crest, there's a hill there. You can't go over the crest. You have to be sliding around on the slope in front of it. You can't go too far away because then you go over the crest and then there's no return. But you need to maintain the orbit . That's why there's fuel on board to maintain doing the ski slope on this slope. You keep circling around L2. But it was very important that the rocket was accurate because if it put too much oomph on it, you couldn't stop, and it would've flown over the crest, and you'd lose it forever. If there was not enough oomph from the rocket, then it would have to use too much extra fuel to get there, and you wouldn't have enough fuel left needed to keep the orbit later when you get into place. The thing about James Webb is, because it's got a sunshield, and it's got the business side with the telescope on the cold side, you can't have thrusters on that side because they will contaminate the mirror. All this hydrozine that comes out is nasty stuff.

You've got to keep it away from the optics, and it's just a big, open mirror. All the thrusters are only on the Sun side, so you can only push away from the Sun. You can't brake. There's no rocket on the cold side that can be used to say, “OK, we're going too fast. We've got to stop.” James Webb is flying without brakes, and it has to go into this orbit, getting on the ski slope, without going over the crest. It was very, very important that the rocket flew as accurate as it could. It did, it flew so accurately that it saved, I don't know how many kilograms of hydrazine, so we had much more left than expected. It's never going to run out within its lifetime, presumably. It was all very interesting. But had the Ariane V flown too fast, we could have lost the mission because it made it over the crest, and there's no brake.

Zeron:

It had to be very exact.

Jakobsen:

There are no brakes. [laughs] It's an interesting thing.

Zeron:

Oh, it's impressive.

Jakobsen:

Yeah, it is impressive. It's interesting.

Zeron:

Yeah. I know you talked a little bit about the initial science results, but what can you say about what Webb has already achieved in conjunction of the science goals that they envisioned from the beginning?

Jakobsen:

I think it's over-performing, I think James Webb is. I mean, I'm NIRSpec-centric. There's a whole bunch of stuff happening with exoplanets. That was a recent addition we did in 2009. I made a decision to punch a hole in the instrument for the exoplanet people—it's a long story, what they do. But what they do is, they look at these eclipsing planets where the planet goes in front of the star, and then goes behind, and then goes in front, etc,. When the planet is in front of the star, it maybe blocks a millionth of the light, or maybe 1 part in 10,000th of the light. They take a spectrum when the planet is in front and then again when it's in back. They measure, say, a million photons when it's in front, and then a million and one photons when it's in the back. They subtract the two, and the one photon is their signal. I mean, I'm exaggerating, but that's basically what they do.

Zeron:

[laughs] Yeah.

Jakobsen:

We made a big hole in the slit plate, and gave them a dedicated part of the detectors they can use for this exoplanet stuff, and it works great. I'm not an expert in that at all, but they're making tons discoveries observing different planets with NIRSpec. Then there’s all the remote galaxy stuff which is also very, very interesting. The dust is still settling on that topic. It's pretty clear that we're not—I don't think cosmology is broken, but it shows that we don't understand galaxy formation, really, that well. We're still scratching our heads about this. Why? How can this be? That's good. Then there's a whole bunch of other results I don't know the first thing about, I mean, the cameras doing all sorts of things on any topic you can imagine. It's a wide—

Zeron:

It's very extensive.

Jakobsen:

I can’t think of something offhand, I can't even be—and I'm so tied up in this remote galaxy stuff.

Zeron:

That's OK.

Jakobsen:

Oh, we've seen remote supernova. That's also fun. But we've also done that on our own team. Because we have our guarantee program, and it's all coordinated, we've been able to go back and look at things a year later, and look for anything that changes. There are a lot of things that change in brightness, and it's probably all supernovae, OK, exploding stars very far away. We've found some, and we even took spectra of some of the record-breaking ones. Supernova are important because all the heavy elements, all the metals and everything are made in a supernova, and scattered out.

The universe started out pure hydrogen and helium, and everything else, all the iron and everything else is all made inside stars and supernovae, and blown out. It's very important that we understand how that works. That's been successful. It's a fun thing because, if you look at a supernova in our own galaxy, you may see it for a couple of weeks. It may take a week to become brightest, and then it starts fading out. But when things are very far away, the time is slowed down, by relativity. It could be slowed down by a factor of 10. If things are so-called redshift 10, then it's slowed down by a factor of 11. What that means is, when we take an image and look for transients, as we call them, we have to wait a year to see a supernova, you know, change by one month of its life. It's a very, very slow business, and it's quite fun, in that sense.

Zeron:

It's very exciting. [laughs]

Jakobsen:

But we can do it now, and we've done it, because we have this coordinated program that goes back and repeats things. It turns out there's lots of things that are changing out there, so that's quite exciting, also. There are many, many balls up in the air on the science side, which is good. What else can I say? Well, I will say, you were talking about the—[laughs] this is also an interesting thing—about the delays and all the other stuff. Because we were in this weird environment where they were always strapped for money, what happened was that, for example, in the case of NIRSpec, when I was in charge, I had to report every month to NASA on what the projected sensitivity was, whenever we got new components coming in from industry, new measurements. I had this big spreadsheet—it wasn't a spreadsheet, but, anyway—a calculation of, well, if that component performs that well, then that means we can integrate this deep, and so forth. Then we compare that to the requirements. I had to show, every month, that we were able to meet the requirements as soon as we got new things delivered. It turns out the calculation is so complicated, there was plenty of room to hide margin, which we did, because you don't want to promise high, and come in low. That's not the European way. You want to promise low, and come in high, then you're heroes. Also, we might well need the margin at some point if we ran into trouble somewhere else, because there were many factors going into that calculation, and maybe there was a problem with something, and you wanted to be able to absorb it.

So I was basically lying to NASA. Every month, we just lied. We hid margin, and there was a reason for that. It was their own fault because the environment was such that if I came in and reported I had a 20% margin on the requirements, they would've immediately said, “Oh, we can shrink the telescope, or you can have bad detectors, or we can save on something else.” It would have immediately resulted in something bad because they took the requirements as God-given. If we exceeded them, “No need for that. We can immediately cut back and save money.” I was having none of that on my watch, so I had to lie through my teeth. The interesting thing was, when we were doing the commissioning, of course it came out that we were more sensitive than we had advertised and everything. We knew that. That was fine. Everyone’s happy. We're good. We're heroes. Then I hadn't really followed what was happening on the other parts of the mission because I was just focused on NIRSpec, sitting here doing that. Then Jane Rigby of NASA wrote this—collected this big paper from all the different components about how everything was performing. I read that with great interest when that came out, and it includes our report on NIRSpec. I didn't even read that. I read about all the other parts, and it turned out [laughs] that everybody else had been doing the exact same thing [laughs]—

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

—because they were also intimidated by this environment. They also had to maintain some margin, and weren’t going to have it taken away, so everybody was doing it. All components, pretty much, were over-performing for the same reason. [laughs] They were doing exactly the same thing. Of course, we'd never admit to anybody we were doing it until the end. I don't mind now. But it was quite interesting. [laughs] In a way, I suppose you could say this bizarre environment might've been good for something. [laughs]

Zeron:

Wow. [laughs]

Jakobsen:

That's why it's performing so well. Above expectations. The telescope is better than advertised. Everything's better than advertised, which is curious. [laughs]

Zeron:

Yeah. [laughs] It really is the most powerful telescope ever built.

Jakobsen:

Yeah, it's very impressive. It's really impressive.

Zeron:

What do you see as the future of great observatories?

Jakobsen:

Oh, don't ask me. I have had the luck to have the age where I could actually participate in two of them. There are new ones on the drawing board. There's this—what do they call it?—the Habitable Planet Observatory or something, which is a gigantic visible light version of JWST I think it used to be called—I forget what it used to be called—LUVOIR or something like that. Good luck with that. [laughs] I wish them all the luck in the world. It's beyond my horizon. It's beyond my sell-by date. I myself certainly don't have the stamina for another project like that, that's for sure. It'd be nice if it worked. It's very ambitious. I must admit, again, without being a real technologist, and just being a dumb astronomer who's been involved in this stuff for a long time, if you want to be critical, I think, I might be willing to claim that James Webb is probably at the limit of what humanity or what the Western world can muster. I think it might be at the edge of what we can do.

Zeron:

Barely got through it.

Jakobsen:

Yeah. Going far beyond that? Hmm, I don't know. I don't know.

Zeron:

We'll see.

Jakobsen:

I can't think about that right now. [laughs] But trying to do all this, if you go to the optical, everything has to be so much better. I don't know. I don't have an opinion. I don't follow that.

Zeron:

Given your experience with this project and with Hubble, what can you say about the impact of the international partnerships on the success of extremely complex scientific missions?

Jakobsen:

We pulled it off.

Zeron:

[laughs]

Jakobsen:

I mean, NASA mostly pulled it off, but we've also f done our part, and our parts certainly worked well What can I say? I'm very proud of that, and it's very good. It was a long haul. I don't know what to say; platitudes. It's a good thing we do this, I think. It's a spot of joy in some pretty terse times. [laughs] We can actually do something constructive with all our technology.

Zeron:

What is the value of having a multinational team when developing a project of this magnitude?

Jakobsen:

Could NASA have done it alone? Of course they could. Could ESA have done it alone? No, because we don't have the money. We probably could have, technically, we probably could. It would've looked a little different. There's only so much money for science, and I think it is very fruitful that we pool resources between the US, Europe and Canada. As I said, we're already joined at the hips, so it's not alien to us at all, and they're used to it. I also think the technology flow is not just one way anymore. The more brains that think about things, the better the ideas. I think it's quite fruitful. I don't see any downside to it at all, to be honest.

Zeron:

What is your current role? I know you talked a little bit about the Cosmic Dawn Center at the University of Copenhagen. How active—?

Jakobsen:

Oh, I'm just freewheeling there, because I don't want to [laughs]—you know. I'm basically focused completely on NIRSpec. I must admit, I've been working like crazy. My wife is sick of it. I've been sitting in there 24/7 and doing this, that, and the other on the instrument and its data. A lot of it, I find very interesting, and I still find it interesting. But I need to throttle down a bit. I turned 70 last year. But I do have a bunch of things I'd still like to do, and some papers I need to write, but as long as I'm having fun with it.

Zeron:

Exactly.

Jakobsen:

It'll be strange when there's no more NIRSpec in my life, that's for sure, after 30 years. [laughs]

Zeron:

Yeah. [laughs]

Jakobsen:

But I should be able to do it. I don't know. I feel I'm a real scientist at heart, so I'll probably die with my nose in the keyboard one day.

Zeron:

Oh. [laughs]

Jakobsen:

[laughs] But I can't imagine not doing something. But I have a lot of interests. Once I get interested in something, I usually get into it. We'll see.

Zeron:

Unless there's anything else you'd like to discuss, that was my last question.

Jakobsen:

Not really. It's been fun. I've been very blessed in my career, I must admit.

Zeron:

Yeah. Dr. Jakobsen, thank you very much for this long session. We will not release the tape or its transcript without your express approval, in terms of the forms that you'll be receiving for the project. Thank you very much for your time.

Jakobsen:

That was probably too long, but cut away.

[END]