Matt Mountain

Zeron:

This is Montserrat Zeron, and this is an interview with Dr. Matt Mountain. Today’s date is June 12, 2024, and we’re recording this in Dr. Mountain’s office in Baltimore. To start, if you could please state your title and institutional affiliation.

Mountain:

Right, well, I’m Matt Mountain. I’m the President of the Association for Universities and Research of Astronomy. It’s a not-for-profit organization that runs astronomy for NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Zeron:

We normally can begin with your birthdate and place of birth, so I didn’t have this information at hand, so if, for the record, you can tell me where and when you were born?

Mountain:

I was born in the UK in a little town called Stannington in 1956 on the 15th of June, so yes, my birthday’s on Saturday. [laughs]

Zeron:

Oh, my gosh. [laughs] So, what is your family background? What did your parents do?

Mountain:

My father was a teacher. My mother, who was Swedish, I think was basically a homemaker. They met in Spain way back when. My father was British, went through the traditional British system. He served in the Army for a while and then came into the teaching profession.

Zeron:

What exactly did he specialize in teaching?

Mountain:

He taught lots of things. He taught English. He also ended up working at a not-for-profit organization for kids from all over the world called the Pestalozzi Village in Sussex. It initially started with war refugees. Then, in the 60s, there was this idea of having people from Tibet, and India, and Vietnam, and so forth. So, he was the director of studies there, and that’s where I was brought up, in Sussex.

Zeron:

Was there a library in your house? What kinds of books did you read when you were growing up?

Mountain:

Books were very much part of what we do, my family. Certainly, my father, who really believed in those things. I’m dyslexic, so it took me a long time to learn to read. So, I think they were a little bit desperate. [laughs] So, they would have to bribe me to read. I didn’t really learn to read properly until I was about 9, and if you talk to any of my colleagues, they will tell you I’m still quite dyslexic. My assistants will correct my emails, spell checkers and so forth help me through all of that.

Zeron:

Did your parents or any other family members encourage an interest in science?

Mountain:

Very good question. My father was a historian, he taught history and geography, so there was no science in our background. It turns out my grandfather on the British side had been an engineer and my great grandfather had also been an engineer in the north of England, and in fact worked for Brunel. So, my father was always quite keen on… though he knew nothing about science himself, he thought it was very important. So, he would help me build little circuits. And especially as I was dyslexic, I wasn’t really good at writing and reading, I think he used to encourage me to play around with things. From an early age, I actually think I developed an interest in science and technology. And in Britain in those days, there were a lot of programs on the television about science and technology. And ultimately, of course, like a lot of people, I was one of the few people who got up at 4 o’clock in the morning to watch the Moon landing in 1969 on an old, gray, black-and-white TV. And I found that really very inspiring. And I think I discovered that I was better at maths and science than I was at English or history, and so that’s where I kind of gravitated, my interests.

Zeron:

How was your high school growing up?

Mountain:

Well, again, we moved a few times because at one part, when we lived in the north of England, which is where I was born, they didn’t really recognize what dyslexia was, so I was the dunce in the class. And then my parents moved south to Sussex, a little town called Battle, for the Battle of Hastings. And there, they actually understood that I had a reading disability. I didn’t really know I did, to be honest with you. I just got special classes to learn to read, and my teachers were very forgiving. And I think that helped encourage me a lot, and that’s when I discovered that working in a laboratory, and I was reasonably good at math… I found those were strengths, and I was encouraged in those areas, so that was my high school. And then, in Britain you have to specialize very early on before you go to university. So, I studied maths, physics, and chemistry as the three main subjects, which is the way Britain worked in those days. And I had very, very encouraging, good teachers—physics teachers, chemistry teachers, and maths teachers—who really helped me through those years and high school. In Britain, it’s called sixth form. And I think I emerged with a reasonable set of exam qualifications, and I was offered a place at Imperial College in London, which is a very tech-y place in London, and that’s where I studied physics.

Zeron:

Did you expect from an early age to go to college?

Mountain:

Well, my father, of course, had been to college. My mother had not. Yes, actually, in Sussex, the town where I went to school, if I remember rightly—this is before what’s called sixth form, which is the final two years of high school in this country—there was a class of about 40 people, and in 20/20 hindsight, I realized only three or four of us went on to college. We’re talking about the ’60s here, right? I was in Battle in 1966, which was the celebration of 1066. Of course, then, I went on to what’s called a sixth form college, which prepares you for university. A lot more people, of course, were very focused on going to university. But in hindsight, yes, I realize now that… well, it was encouraged by my parents, of course. They knew that college education was very important. My mother may not have gone to college, but her brother and sister had, and her brother was an engineer in Sweden. I think my father always hoped… I think he’d once hoped to do science and engineering, but in Britain in those days, gentlemen didn’t do that. So, after coming out of the army, he went on to do… and I think he always regretted not doing it. So, I think he always sort of encouraged that. It was a good encouragement because otherwise, if I’d followed the history, geography, English, it would’ve been a disaster with my dyslexia. [laughs]

Zeron:

What about particular teachers? Did they also encourage the specific science focus?

Mountain:

It was the ’60s, and teaching in those days was very progressive because it was the big change. This was a state school I was at, it was not a private school. I always remember my English teacher at the time encouraged me to write, even though I made mistakes, and so they recognized, I think, my dyslexia. I remember writing an essay once where a friend of mine looked over and said, “Wait a minute. Every time you’ve written ‘is’ you’ve put ‘in,’ and every time you’ve put ‘in’ you’ve put ‘is.’ And they didn’t mark you down?” And so, I went to the teacher and gave it to him, and he sort of looked at me, “Yeah, I’m just interested in your ideas. I’m not really interested in your spelling at this stage,” which, in hindsight, was incredibly encouraging. And then, again, the physics teachers and the math teachers were always very positive and very encouraging. I think I was at least curious enough, and so I think that helped. So, yes, I think teachers were an incredibly important part of my life, actually, in hindsight. Without them, I don’t think I would be sitting here talking to you about being part of the James Webb Space Telescope. [laughs]

Zeron:

That’s lovely. So, what made you choose Imperial College London?

Mountain:

Well, in Britain, you’re only allowed to pick five colleges. You have a form, so you pick five. And quite literally, I was going to the library, and this white book fell to the ground, a prospectus. I thought, “Oh, that looks cool. Oh, and it’s in London.” So, I put that down as my first. [laughs] I had others in there. And I had taken a year out to go work in Sweden. I actually went to work at Bofors, which is the Nobel factory. The guy who actually developed dynamite worked in a civilian factory that funds the Nobel Prize. So, my mother had organized for me to go away to work in Sweden for a year in this chemistry lab in Bofors in Sweden, so I had a year out. So, I applied as a semi-mature student.

With my grades, apparently Imperial College just “yeah, yeah, here you go,” gave me a place. It was called unconditional. And I was thinking of going somewhere else, and a friend of my parents, who happened to be a chief engineer at a big electronics firm, came to tell me and said, “Why are you thinking of turning down Imperial College? You know it’s quite a prestigious place?” I said, “Well, this other place”—I think it was Lancaster—“has a really nice campus, and you know.” “Matt, Imperial College is a good place. Go there.” So, that’s how I ended up at Imperial College. [laughs] And I had a great time, actually. I found that the style of teaching suited me well. It was quite relaxed. It was very anti-Cambridge and Oxford. I had previously applied to get into Cambridge and didn’t get in, just so you’re aware, because you had to write all these essays and all those things. Which, I have to tell you, I’m very grateful I went to Imperial instead of Cambridge because it was an ideal match for me, frankly.

And then, I stayed there and got my degree in physics, and my physics supervisor was asking, “What do you want to do?” And I was thinking of doing particle physics. And they actually sent me for a summer course at CERN to spend the summer at CERN, the big nuclear physics place. And I decided, “Oh, I don’t want to work in these huge, big teams.” So, my supervisor said, “Well, we have a small telescope in Tenerife. Why don’t you come work in that? It’s just a small group of us.” Imperial College had a telescope in Tenerife, and I literally picked it because I didn’t want to work in big teams, which is very ironic when you now look at what I now run. Anyway, like all of these things, there’s a bit of a random walk and people encouraging you.

Zeron:

Going back to when you first got to Imperial College London, did you, at that point, know that you were going to major in physics?

Mountain:

Yes. In Britain, you have to pick.

Zeron:

So straight away from the beginning?

Mountain:

Straight away, boom. You don’t get all these choices you have in this country. I don’t know if it’s still like that, but in my day, you applied to do physics. And I developed an interest in physics, and I was reasonably good at maths. I wasn’t great at maths, but I was reasonably good at math. I didn’t want to do chemistry. I found that a bit boring. And Imperial College physics was very broad, a very big physics department, lots of options. And they’d offered me a place. So, yes, physics is… and I reckoned I didn’t have to write a lot. Turned out to be a little bit wrong. So, that’s why I chose it.

Zeron:

Do you remember any of the courses you were taking there?

Mountain:

Yeah, actually. First of all, the maths teacher was amazing. He was actually a theoretical math teacher from the maths department, but he had a really powerful way… I still have his notes in my bookcase here. That shows you how much I thought about him. And he had an incredible way of explaining maths for physicists. And the most interesting thing was, my roommates were engineers, and they were all learning this calculus stuff, the way engineers do. Rote learning, lots of reading. And he used to show us all these shortcuts to get through integral calculus and stuff, and I would use them. My engineering friends would look over and say, “What are you doing? That’s cheating!”

And I always remember the maths professor saying, “Guys, the purpose of math, if you’re going to do physics, is to solve the problem, not worry about how you arrived.” So, I think that was very good. And we had good lab courses. My supervisor was also a theoretical physicist, a guy called Tom Kibble, who was very smart. He should’ve probably won the Nobel Prize ultimately for the Higgs Boson, but he was one of the people who did that. I didn’t realize how smart he was at the time. And he used to just show us how to think about physics from first principles and how to think about things. So, I actually found it a very good education. I hated electromagnetic waves, I remember that, because I was horrible. And, ironically, I remember a course on general relativity from a professor who literally came in the room with yellowing pages and would read from these yellowing pages and scribble on the blackboard, so I never really grasped general relativity in my undergraduate years very well and was not great, and so had to go back and learn that since.

Zeron:

Were there any students at that time doing the same program you remember that influenced you and the future of your career particularly?

Mountain:

There was a cadre of us that worked in the lab. And remember, this was the beginning of the computer revolution. This is how old I am. [laughs] Microprocessors were brand new, and one of my friends was really interested in computing. And we realized a lot of these lab experiments were really boring, and we realized that we could computerize them, learning how to use these very early microprocessors. So, he and I started working on these microprocessors, and we managed to persuade the lab organizers that we could build a system to take radioactive data and then plot it, so we didn’t have to do all these stupid things by hand. And he and I spent a big project in our final year building a microprocessor system from scratch. And those were the days when you literally had to load the code in number by number. But it was a very good education on how computer programming worked, the order and everything. And it was completely new. The microprocessors were completely new. So, that’s kind of how I got more into the tinkering of machines and building things less than theoretical physics. And I really didn’t have the mathematical attributes to be a good theoretician, but I discovered I really liked building things, and I liked working with people who built things.

And that’s kind of how I stayed at Imperial with my supervisor, a guy called Mike Selby. Because he offered me the opportunity to build an instrument for a telescope in Tenerife. And literally, you had to work in the workshops… as a PhD student in Imperial College, you had to do a session in the workshops, and we literally built these instruments from scratch, individual infrared detectors we had to solder ourselves. And I actually enjoyed that. And there was a group camaraderie of other PhD students and postdocs building things, and I found I really enjoyed working with the technicians and engineers at Imperial and my fellow people, and I found that I was good at building instruments and working with people.

And people seemed to value that. I was literally recruited to the Royal Observatory Edinburgh by the Astronomer Royal. I never applied for the job. He walked into the lab one day, looked at what I was doing, and said, “Hey, Matt? Do you fancy coming to Edinburgh?” He said, “Well, I’m building an instrument group up there, and you’d find it great fun.” And a friend of mine had already gone, a colleague had already gone. And that’s how I ended up in Edinburgh building instruments for the UKIRT telescope. Which, in fact, my professor had originally designed.

Zeron:

So, this is during your PhD?

Mountain:

PhD, yeah. We built instruments during that period. For my PhD, I built an instrument.

Zeron:

What about astronomy classes?

Mountain:

In the Imperial College days, [laughs] astronomy classes were optional. It’s less structured than it is… probably more structured now. But there was a very good professor who ended up at University of Hawaii who taught astronomy at Imperial College in physics. I enjoyed his lectures as an undergraduate physicist. So, I thought, “Oh, astronomy’s cool.” I didn’t join it because of astronomy. I joined it because I could build instruments, and I was a physicist. And many people who worked in the infrared, which I did… we were physicists, so we were used to electronic detectors. We didn’t look at optical plates, or imagers, or eyepieces. That was all, “well, astronomers did.” We were physicists coming into astronomy, and that suited me. And this guy called Professor Bob Joseph got me quite interested in parts of astronomy, and he taught it very pragmatically, again, as a sort of, “yeah, yeah, you don’t have to worry about all these spherical coordinates. That’s just a transformation. What we care about is, why do the stars do these things?” And he encouraged me to keep building things, and that’s how I got to know my supervisor, and that’s how I ended up doing a PhD there. Very lazy. [laughs]

Zeron:

I understand your dissertation was astronomical spectrometry in the near infrared?

Mountain:

Yeah, I think it’s sitting right over there. [laughs]

Zeron:

Oh, wow. [laughs] How did you choose this?

Mountain:

I kind of didn’t really choose it initially. 1988, Jesus Christ. [laughs] So, the project that my supervisor gave me was to build an infrared spectrograph. And we had this telescope in Tenerife, a 1.5-meter telescope—didn’t have a spectrograph, and infrared astronomy was new. And we were beginning to realize that doing spectroscopy, that is, looking for the individual lines, gives you insight into physical processes. Everybody was used to the optical region, but the infrared gave us real insight into how plasmas worked in H II regions, how star formation regions worked. So, naively, we thought it’d be easy to build a cooled spectrograph. This was taking a spectrograph that you might have in the lab, then cooling it all the way down to liquid nitrogen temperatures and making it all work.

Turns out, the engineering challenges are somewhat hard to do that, just to do it in a physics department machine shop, where you can’t use oil and it’s all in a vacuum. It was a real learning experience of how do you know where the grating was. And so, that was my project. We eventually got it working, [laughs] after a lot of work. And the telescope wasn’t great in Tenerife either. But as a result of that, because the telescope was very crude, you literally moved around the sky by hand and then tracked it. It was built as a testbed for UKIRT by my supervisor and his group. I learned an awful lot about telescopes because you had to, right? Because you’re sitting there with all this stuff, which never worked. [laughs] You had to get it working before you could observe. So, I learned a lot.

And in the end, we actually used the spectrograph to try and measure the absolute flux from Vega. One of the problems in astronomy is, we make stars, and we make relative measurements. The real issue is, to turn it into physics, you actually want to know, how many photons are you measuring? And you do that by checking it against calibration stars. The question is, how many photons are coming from the calibration star? And it turns out, in the infrared, those numbers are very uncertain, so there was this project called the absolute calibration, which was to compare the flux of a calibrated star with a calibrated furnace from the national laboratory.

You knew how many photons were coming from that one, and the idea was to actually absolutely calibrate Vega, which was the brightest star in the sky. So, we could actually turn these strange units called magnitudes into actual photons per second coming from the star compared to a calibrated furnace, where we knew how many photons were coming from a black body. So, my supervisor and I looked at this project: “Oh, yeah, one summer’s work. That should do it.” Well, four years later, I got my PhD out of doing that project. [laughs]

Zeron:

I was going to ask how long it took you.

Mountain:

Yeah, we thought it was going to be a quick summer job. [laughs] Turned out to be a very hard problem. But it was fascinating, so that got me into the whole idea of physics, and instrumentation, and telescopes, and what we could do if you could do that stuff. And so, that’s what my PhD was. It’s called “Astronomical Spectroscopy in the Infrared.” It was one of the very first infrared spectrographs to be made. And the project was to absolutely calibrate Vega. (It’s somewhere in here. My God, look at all this stuff.) You had to understand the properties of the atmosphere.

Zeron:

When was the last time you looked at that?

Mountain:

It’s very dusty, so probably at least decades. [laughs] There it is. The wavelength, one micron to five microns. This is the observed flux, that’s the photons compared to what the model said it should be. And this was one of the first published “this is how many photons you’re actually getting.” And photons are important because they tell you physics rather than just saying, “That star is variable.”

Zeron:

You’re being very exact.

Mountain:

I’m being very exact. I’m a physicist, not an astronomer. So, it was bringing physics to astronomy, was absolute calibration. It turns out, absolute calibration is really important. Years later, when I came to Space Telescope, Adam Riess was doing his Nobel Prize work, and he was really caring about the absolute calibration of the Hubble Space Telescope because he was trying to measure distances. Therefore, you need to know how many actual photons are coming to get the distance. So, it turns out that my knowledge of absolute calibration was actually quite useful because there was this team of people involved in absolute calibration in the basement of Space Telescope that always felt nobody cared about them, but the new director did. [laughs]

Zeron:

So, after you got your PhD, you said you got recruited to go to…

Mountain:

To the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, yes.

Zeron:

This was 1984?

Mountain:

Well, this was published 1983. Yeah, 1984, you’re right. 1984, 1985, somewhere around there, yeah.

Zeron:

So, what was your research focus there?

Mountain:

Very interesting. It was run by a very visionary person who’s still going strong, a guy called Malcolm Longair, who was Astronomer Royal. He was actually an electronics engineer originally (like my wife), became a physicist, and studied radio astronomy at Cambridge. And then, many years later, after he became very prestigious, became the Astronomer Royal of Scotland. And he was trying to build up the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh to be a center of infrared astronomy and submillimeter astronomy. And they had a telescope on Mauna Kea called UKIRT, UK InfraRed Telescope, and that was their job. But he didn’t have any people who knew anything about infrared astronomy. They were all old-fashioned optical astronomers who looked at big photographic plates, and measured shapes of galaxies, and all that strange stuff.

And he wanted a bunch of physicists to transform the infrared, so he hired a bunch of people who had experience—my colleague who’d been ahead of me in Imperial and other people—and we all came to Edinburgh in that period, and it was a magical time, I’ll be honest with you. Because what he also did, he realized that technology was really important, so he appointed a chief engineer, a guy called Donald Pettie, and said to me, “Matt, I need you to build a spectrograph. And here are 35 people.” I go, “What do I need 35 people for?” “To build your spectrograph, Matt.” [laughs]

What he did was, he got rid of a lot of the projects. He discovered each scientist seemed to have their own project. And he realized to make big projects work, you had to have a group of engineers working with one scientist. His rule of thumb was one scientist to 10 engineers. That was the idea. I wanted to build a spectrograph, and I got to know the chief engineer, and I got this team of people. I’d never run a team of people before. And so, we started working on this, to build an even bigger spectrograph. And it’s still on UKIRT today, it’s called CGS4. It’s a big monster of a machine.

And I always remember, the chief engineer, after the first few months there, coming to me and saying, “Matt, do you know David X”—who was a mechanical engineer—“he knows a damn sight more about mechanical engineering than you do. And by the way, Engineer Y, she knows a damn sight more about electronics than you do. Worse, Dr. Such-And-Such”—who was an optical engineer—“he knows a damn sight more about optical sciences than you do. So, work with them as a team and stop telling them what to do.” And it was a very enlightening moment for me, when I realized that our job was to be scientists, to work with the team, but not to be the expert of everything. And if you think of it, at the time, I was barely 30 and was running a group of 30 people with the full support of this amazing new laboratory that’d been created by Malcolm Longair and his chief engineer and basically built this monster instrument with the full support. And we had all these other people who were doing similar things. And a group of us who were in Edinburgh, a lot of them you’ll find at JWST today.

Zeron:

That’s very interesting.

Mountain:

It is very interesting, and it just happened to be a magic time where it was a lot of very smart people who knew how to guide our crazy young people like me. I look back at it now, I’m horrified. And the Royal Observatory has transformed itself into the Astronomy Technology Centre. It’s still in Edinburgh. It’s now building space instruments. It built the MIRI instrument for James Webb, right? Many of the people on the MIRI instrument, I knew when I was at Edinburgh.

Zeron:

Was Dr. Wright?

Mountain:

Yes, Gillian and I had offices next to each other at Imperial College.

Zeron:

That’s amazing.

Mountain:

It’s a very small world. Gillian and I went our separate ways, and she went through something else, and then she ended up running ATC. Gillian actually submitted my thesis for me, because I was observing and I missed it. So, she actually drove it, or took it by bus, to submit it for me, so I was very grateful to her for that. [laughs] That’s how long we’ve all known each other. So, it’s a very small world, this British infrared world. I think the American one is, too, actually, from hindsight. We all started, and we all went through Edinburgh. It’s fascinating.

Zeron:

So, you started first there as a postdoctoral fellow, and then you moved into project scientist?

Mountain:

Yeah.

Zeron:

And this is all for the development of the UKIRT?

Mountain:

Yeah, well, the idea was, Malcolm Longair said, “You need to learn a bit more science.” And so he gave me a postdoctoral fellowship and just said, “Do stuff.” So, I worked on UKIRT, I worked on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope for a few years, doing research, learning some stuff. But I always knew that I would end up in the instrument program. But I had two years to play, was what Malcolm Longair told me. And that’s when I discovered I couldn’t write papers for shit. And that’s where I got these very nice PhD students… some of them are still here. There are four black theses all sitting down there from that period. One of them is Suzanne Ramsay, who now runs the instrumentation program for the ELT in Europe. The other is Phil Puxley, who used to run Gemini South and now works for me as my vice president for projects. Again, we’ve all gone through this amazing school that was created in Edinburgh.

Zeron:

Now, moving on to your time at Gemini, you joined in 1992 as a project scientist.

Mountain:

I did.

Zeron:

What was the present situation like when you got there?

Mountain:

[laughs] So, why did I become project scientist at Gemini? Very good question. There was a big debate going on in Britain at the time when I was in Edinburgh about, where should Britain invest in its big telescope? And the competition was between the Royal Greenwich Observatory, who wanted to build an eight-meter telescope in La Palma, compared to the Royal Observatory of Scotland, who wanted to join the American project, building a telescope on Mauna Kea. After all, we had UKIRT on Mauna Kea, so we knew how good that site was. It was a big debate going on. This was before I moved. The last few years, after I built CGS4, this instrument from before, I was involved in trying to decide how to… well, there are two parts to this story, believe it or not. There were there were two projects I got involved with. One was to work with this group in Britain to decide where the next-generation British telescope should be, which partnership to join. Unbeknownst to me, in my thesis, I had the key data that compared Tenerife with Mauna Kea.

And so, I pointed out that, “Actually, the Mauna Kea atmosphere is far better, and there’s the data.” I got myself in a huge amount of trouble with the guys from the Royal Greenwich Observatory because they were very mad at me. And so, in the end, that decision was taken to join Gemini. I don’t think it was called Gemini at the time. In the end, the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh essentially won that competition, and the science agency of the UK decided to become a partner in the Gemini project. The only reason I’m pausing… at the same time, my sort of supervisor at the Royal Observatory got involved in an infrared space telescope called Edison, which was a passively cooled telescope—the first time anybody thought of passively cooled—a guy called Tim Hawarden, who got to know many of the people who now work at JWST, and proposed this to the European Space Agency.

And I remember I was in Hawaii trying to get the CGS4 working, and Malcolm Longair called me up and said, “Matt, I need you back at Edinburgh.” I said, “What for?” He said, “Tim Hawarden has proposed a crazy project to the Europeans, and I have no idea what it’s about.” So, I literally flew back and sat with Tim for a week, and we discovered Edison. But he’d come up with this whole idea of passive cooling, which we now use on JWST. If you look up Edison, the space telescope, the idea of passive cooling was invented by Tim Hawarden, and many years later, we were able to pay tribute to him… he died, unfortunately, but we were able to pay tribute to his family because he came up with this original idea of having multi layers of [inaudible], so there was another connection here. I keep that in the back of my consciousness. So, anyway, we’ve gone to all this trouble to, um… how public is this thing? [pause in recording]

It is an interesting story how I became the project scientist for Gemini. I went to a conference on big telescopes. And the Europeans were presenting their VLT, and the Keck Observatory, Jerry Nelson, very famous guy at the time, was presenting his. And then, a US scientist was presenting the Gemini, which we’d just joined. And he’s somebody a lot of people know. He didn’t do a great job compared to the other two. And I remember turning to my colleague, this Tim Hawarden guy, who was my supervisor: “Oh my God, we went to all this trouble to this, and this is what we get?” He looked at me and said, “Well, Matt, put your money where your mouth is.” I said, “What are you talking about?” “They’re looking for a new project scientist.” I said, “Really? Oh, I’ll apply,” thinking they’ll never appoint a Brit to this project. So, I applied. And to my utter amazement, I was then interviewed. One of the people on this interview committee was this Malcolm Longair, the Astronomer Royal of Scotland who had hired me originally. And it turned out, for reasons I do not understand, the majority of the people they were interviewing were optical astronomers. I was one of the very few infrared people, and Gemini was very much an infrared telescope.

Zeron:

That makes more sense.

Mountain:

Yeah, so Marcia Rieke, who is from James Webb, was on that panel, so she asked me a whole bunch of questions about the infrared, which I just answered trivially. And she basically said, “This guy understands the infrared. [laughs] So, what, why aren’t we hiring him?” And they hired me. That was amazing. And I think nobody quite knew what to do with this Brit that they’d suddenly hired. [laughs] I didn’t quite know what to do either because I’d never really worked in the United States. But ignore the personal side of things for the moment. My wife and I weren’t wife and husband, but she was saying, “well…” We couldn’t decide what to do. I said, “Well, I’m going to move to America.” So, she came, too, in the end.

And so, I ended up being appointed as the project scientist to the Gemini project at the ridiculous age of whatever I was in 1992, and nobody in the United States had even heard of me. So, it was a very brave move on their part, absolutely. But it was because I had experience in instrumentation. The other international members at least knew something of me, and I was quite clearly an infrared astronomer who understood instrumentation and telescopes because of my experience. So, I was very, very fortunate, and I think the person with the greatest courage was Sidney Wolff, who was the current director of NOAO and the Gemini director. I didn’t even know who she was, but I was sitting at the pool at this hotel, and this woman came and sat beside me and chatted for an hour, and then I realized, “This is Sidney Wolff.” [laughs] And Sidney had put a lot of trust in me and hired me, and that’s how I ended up being the project scientist.

Zeron:

I’m just curious, now that you mention it, was your wife involved in science as well?

Mountain:

She was an engineer at Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. And that’s how we met, ultimately. Like a lot of things at that age, it wasn’t always very linear.

Zeron:

So, when you became the project scientist, what was your role for the project?

Mountain:

Well, I think the first thing was, it was quite clear they didn’t have a clear definition of what the science requirements were, and they were too [tall?]. And we had a fixed budget because it’d been mandated by Congress—and I’ll come back to that, because it’s a very important part of my story in my evolution, is what I learned in those first few years as project scientist. The second thing was, there was a huge debate about what mirror Gemini should pick. It was a half-US project, Britain, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Chile. And it was based out of Tucson, and Sidney was the director. And they had run a competition to pick the mirror.

And everybody assumed they would pick the Arizona mirror, which was literally the factory next door. The selection committee picked the Corning mirror, right? And I didn’t know enough about mirrors to think, “wow.” I assumed they were going to pick the Arizona mirror, too, because it was there, it was a big machine. And they picked the Corning mirror. And I go, “oh, that’s interesting, oh well, okay,” not knowing the politics that would unravel with all of this. And this is where I really began to understand how the US system worked in a very, very big way. And Sidney was an enormously powerful mentor in that side of things. So, what we have to understand in the United States, as you know, there are two ways science gets funded. The president proposes a budget, but Congress actually pays the money, and that duality turns out to be crucial for keeping science going in this country.

When I first arrived in the United States, I went to my very first AAS meeting in 1992, brand new person, never been to the famous AAS meeting in my life, sitting around, looking completely bewildered and lost. I go, “My God, what have I done?” [laughs] And the head of radio astronomy at the time, who ran NOAO, a guy called Paul Vanden Bout, came up to me, and introduced himself. He said, “Well, Matt, welcome to the United States. Hey, you’ve got a fascinating project,” and so forth, and “yeah, yeah, yeah, the NSF. Let me give you one piece of advice.” I said, “Okay.” He said, “We do astronomy in this country despite the National Science Foundation.” I go, “Really? I mean, don’t they fund us?” “Yes, but not necessarily willingly.” And I… “Oh!” “Learn how the American funding system works.” And he walked off.

I went, “Strange thing to say!” [laughs] I was used to the UK, which is very linear, top-down. And some months later, Sidney Wolff, I was saying, “Sidney, what is this?” She said, “Ah, let me give you a book.” And that’s the book over there, The Cardinals of Capitol Hill. She said, “You need to read this. This explains how key staff make the key decisions for science in this country in Congress. The NSF and NASA propose budgets, but in the end, it’s Congress. And understanding how that works is going to be really important going forward. Believe me, it’s going to be really important.” So, she gave me this book called The Cardinals of Capitol Hill. It’s about the appropriations process. It’s a little bit dated.

Three people in there turn up in NOAO’s history. Bill Smith, who was on the House authorization committee, became president of NOAO before me. Kevin Kelly, who is in there, is a lobbyist still. And Dick Malow, who was the vice president for strategy, who was appointed when I turned up. And why this matters is this big mirror debate. Arizona challenged the selection of this Corning mirror, and they went to the US Congress to say that this Gemini had done the wrong thing. And this guy called Dick Malow, who was the clerk of the House Appropriations Committee, looked over and said, “Well, what is going on here? Why have I got Arizona complaining?” And Corning, who are a big aerospace company—which I discovered—also wound up saying, “This is bullshit. This is a real selection.” And so, Congress demanded a review of this, which mirror.

And Sidney Wolff turned to myself and a guy called Jim Oschmann, who became the project manager—he was the first systems engineer that we’d had on the project—looked at me and said, “You guys have to run this review.” And I go, “Okay.” [laughs] “Oh, and the fate of the project hangs on it.” And the only reason we were run on it is that we were the only people who didn’t have any time for Christmas. Because we were brand new, we had no vacation time. And Jim Oschmann had come on board because, when I got offered the job of project scientist, I realized, “I don’t actually know a lot about running the project.” I was in Hawaii, and I went up to see Jerry Nelson, who’d been the project scientist of Keck.

And he says, “Matt, before you start, you need two things to do a project.” I said, “Okay.” He said, “You need an error budget and a systems engineer.” And I said, “What are they?” [laughs] He just looked back in horror. So, then—I give Jerry full credit—he spent the whole day explaining to me how error budgets work, which are now the fundamental basis for how we got James Webb working, too, and what a systems engineer did, which is make the systems work. So, I went back to Sidney Wolff and said, “Sidney, before I take the job, we need a systems engineer.” And she says, “What’s that?” Nowadays, you look back on it, “Well, it’s somebody who makes all the pits work, and it’s an engineer, and Jerry Nelson said it’s absolutely essential we have one of these.”

They’d never had one before. Nobody ever used systems engineering on this scale of telescopes. And so, she did, she hired Jim Oschmann, who is now an old friend of mine, who became the project manager, went on to become the vice president for Ball Aerospace, recently retired. So, these are complicated stories. All these things are brought together. And so, Jim and I had to run this competition, this review between the two mirror technologies in this political environment where Corning threatened… was going to the Hill, Arizona was going to the Hill, and suddenly, I realized there was another dimension to the way the US does science. That the US Congress is a vital part of getting US science done. And that was a key lesson for me.

Zeron:

I’m curious, because there were international partners involved as well…

Mountain:

Who were baffled. [laughs] Because from the international partners, especially the Brits and the Canadians, they’d done this review, it’d been done properly, and they’d picked the mirror on good commercial grounds, so what was this Congress doing interfering? They were furious. But the US was a 50% partner, and the National Science Foundation was the National Science Foundation: “No, you must do this review.” So we did. And actually, Jerry Nelson was on this review for us, and in the end we were validated. The review committee said we had made the right decision. Neither Jim or I had been part of this decision. We had arrived after the decision had been made, but this review committee actually was very public.

We had to do this whole thing in public with a massive audience. And Jim Oschmann and I were going, “What have we got ourselves into?” And my wife and I had just gotten married, and we were in Boston for our honeymoon, the middle of winter. “What are you doing in Boston the middle of winter?” Well, because we’d been in Hawaii for years, and we were missing the snow, and we were missing culture. And we were in Boston, and she says, “You know there’s a Yo Yo Ma concert on Wednesday.” I said, “Well, I think the project’s dead, so we might as well stay.” [laughs] And I got a call that evening from Sidney Wolff: “Get back here. You made the right decision, but you need to be back here to talk to the board.” So, that’s how it happened.

Zeron:

Wow. Do you think the issue was sort of a clash of cultures…

Mountain:

Yes.

Zeron:

…between the corporate side and the more small, academic side?

Mountain:

Yes, that’s exactly what it was. It was also a clash of cultures between what I would call the scientists and the engineers. This is something that I learned, that a lot of astronomy was done on a whiteboard. And to be fair, Jerry Nelson liked doing stuff on a whiteboard. But at the level we have to work… imagine you have a 20-ton mirror, eight meters across, but the surface has to be flat to a nanometer, tens of nanometers, hundreds of nanometers. That’s actually a quite hard problem, because 1,000 nanometers is one micron; 600 nanometers is the light you and I see by.

So, the mirror had to be flat to fractions of a wavelength of light. And in the small telescopes, you could get by by using mechanical engineering and scaling arguments on whiteboards. The modern era, you needed to use computers and finite element analysis. This was a tool of engineers, not a tool of physicists. And so, it was a real clash between, at the time, physicists who felt by relying too much on engineers… that’s how the Hubble Space Telescope got screwed up, and that was actually a theme at this thing. “You’ve let the engineers run Gemini, and the engineers have picked the wrong mirror. You’re going to have the same problem we had on the Hubble Space Telescope.”

And some of the same people who’d reviewed the Hubble Space Telescope were reviewing us. And because of my background in Edinburgh—I give Edinburgh full credit here—I knew that wasn’t true. I knew that there was strength to the engineering and strength to the science, and my job was to try and bridge those two cultures. My job wasn’t to solve these problems, but it was to explain to the engineers what the problem was and to explain to my scientific colleagues how the engineers thought about it and why their solutions were valid.

And I discovered that was antithetical to the way some people at Arizona at the time thought about these things. Today, everybody accepts—and James Webb’s the prime example—engineering and science [inaudible]. But I have to tell you, in the 1993-1994 timeframe, there was still this big clash of cultures that physicists did it one way, and engineers did it another. And I think Gemini is where this tension came together. And I have to give Edinburgh full credit for teaching me that. I realized I didn’t have to be an expert in mirrors like Roger Angel and some others. What I had to be is an expert in communicating what the engineers could do and communicating to the engineers what we scientists really cared about. And that education I have to give Edinburgh full credit for, because that’s what this chief engineer told me was my job. So, interesting.

Zeron:

Yeah. How did your responsibilities change once you became Gemini director?

Mountain:

You mean other than the fact that you suddenly became responsible for the budget, and the schedule, and talking to the board, and dealing with all the partners? [laughs] Well, by that point, we’d been working as a team for almost two or three years, right? And I think they realized I wasn’t the classic scientist; I was actually used to talking to engineers. And I think that when they wanted to search for a director, there were some interesting names they were looking at, and I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting, I’m not sure.” And more importantly, some of the engineers did not want to work for some of these people, because some of these people were from that old culture, what I would call the pre-1995 culture, where scientists ran everything, and you won’t screw up. And in the end, the project team asked me to apply, which I was very touched by. And I said, “Guys, I can’t.” They said, “Why?” “Well, we’re going to have our first baby.”

Zeron:

That’s a big vote of confidence.

Mountain:

Well, it was a big vote of confidence, but I also was going to have… my wife was pregnant at that point. I thought, “This is going to be impossible.” But it was a big vote of confidence, I was very touched. And in the end, I threw my hat in the ring, and at 38, I became the Gemini director. At that point—this is why that book’s very important—I realized when they offered it to me, Dick Malow, who is in this book, who happened to have been before the clerk of the House Appropriations Committee—looked after NASA and NSF—was now working for AURA as our vice president for strategy, does government affairs... He said, “Matt, why don’t you take the job?” I said, “I don’t understand anything about the US system.” And he says, “Matt, I will teach you.”

And he did. He was my tutor for years on how Congress worked and how the agency worked. That was enormously, enormously useful. I agreed, “Okay, you’re going to teach me how the US system works. And the board wants me to do this, and the project wants me to do this. I’ll do it.” But we had to make a deal with my project team. Halloween was the project birthday. “I will not travel on my daughter’s, or my son’s, or my wife’s birthday.” And I can tell you, 30 years later, I’ve still stuck to that. And we all did the same because we were all the same demographic.

So, when I left Gemini years later, one-third of our staff were women. We didn’t know that we had done that, but we did it because we decided families were going to be really important to everybody, because we’re all the same age. Everybody in Gemini is roughly the same age. We all had kids. We all looked out for each other’s kids. But we decided that Halloween was a Gemini holiday, birthdays, your wife’s birthday, your kid’s birthday, somebody else would travel for you. And we all worked as a team. And as a result of that, when I left Gemini, one-third of the staff, engineering, and scientists, and everybody, were women. And when I came to Space Telescope and discovered that wasn’t quite true, I realized, “Oh my God, what is wrong with this place?” [laughs]

Zeron:

So, you would say that your leadership approach is merging those two cultures and sort of making that into a good environment for everyone.

Mountain:

Yeah, because we were a team of people. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. But we were all committed to making Gemini work. I think I had a lot of respect for the engineers and for the scientific vision, and I think that gave me confidence. I think the fact that I was able to articulate the science clearly to the science community, they grew a bit more in confidence and strength. A Brit appointed as a project scientist and then director. And Gemini kind of worked pretty well. We got it within budget and schedule, got it working in Mauna Kea, got it working in Chile. The first-generation instruments were reasonably good, the second generation, not so good. But that’s another story. But again, it’s very hard to be the third or fourth eight-meter telescope in the world, when Keck were there and the VLTs were there.

But overall, Gemini’s still there, and it still has its niche as really good image quality in the infrared. And I think my contribution was realizing that building telescopes is a very human endeavor. And once you understand that, life becomes infinitely easier. It was never about… you have to have good system engineering. I always remember when the telescope wasn’t working right, the system engineer and project manager would go, “Oh, gosh, system X isn’t working. I’m going up the hill to find who isn’t talking to who.” I said, “What do you mean, Jim?” “Matt, it’s always about who isn’t talking to who.” And it always was. So, I discovered that communication is key.

Zeron:

Wow. So, I’m aware that in 2003, you received the Gabriela Mistral Medal for excellence in education from the Chilean Ministry of Education.

Mountain:

Nothing to do with me.

Zeron:

Well, you accepted it, right? [laughs]

Mountain:

Yes, I accepted it on behalf of my team.

Zeron:

Right. And I know that this was the first time that this award was made outside of Chile. What do you think that means for the relationship between the observatory representing the US and Chile? Because there is a relationship there.

Mountain:

Yeah, there is a very good relationship. This program that got me this medal was the idea of a brand new outreach group. We decided that communicating science was really important. The international partners weren’t that keen. So, the National Science Foundation actually stepped up, and the program officer at the time, Wayne Van Citters, said, “No, we need to do something.” And so, he gave us extra NSF money to set up an outreach group in Hawaii run by a guy called Peter Michael and others. And we knew we were in Chile. And he came up with this innovative idea called a teacher exchange program, where we would take teachers from Chile and bring them to Hawaii, and take teachers from Hawaii and take them to Chile to experience each other. And it was an amazing program.

That’s what they gave us the award for, that program. And the teachers talked to each other across… we were one of the first telescopes that actually had video links. Because remember, these were the days before proper internet. We had actually built a really strong internet connection between Hawaii and Chile, which the NSF paid for. So, we were the first ones to work telescopes remotely from Chile. And in fact, it worked so well that one night, we actually couldn’t work out what was going wrong. It turned out that the control room in Hawaii was actually controlling the telescope in Chile and vice versa. We didn’t know. A mistake had been made. We said, “What is going on? Let me fix it.”

And so, we took these teachers, and they talked to each other by video, which was very new in those days, and it was a great experience for these teachers in Hawaii and in Chile to see how the other half lived. And that’s what we got this medal for. And I think the Chilean government just found this really exciting. And I actually hadn’t realized the full implications of this medal until I got it. At the moment, I don’t have it. It’s sitting in Chile because it was really those teams that did it. Yeah, sometimes the director takes credit for things. The best I remember is these guys coming to me and saying, “We want to do this,” and I go, “Hey, that’s a great idea. Let’s do it.” That was my contribution to this program. [laughs]

Zeron:

It’s still amazing, though. So, now, I’d like to focus on your role as director of the Space Telescope Science Institute. So, you got there in September 2005. What was happening at STScI at the time?

Mountain:

Quite a lot. [laughs] I’d been in Hawaii for a while, and it really wasn’t working that well for my family, so I realized I needed to move on. I’d been at Gemini for almost 10 years at that point. And my boss at the time said, “Well, before you decide to move, there may be an opportunity coming up at Space Telescope.” And at Space Telescope, first of all, NASA, or rather the Office of Management and Budget, had canceled the servicing mission for the Hubble Space Telescope, right? The whole history of Hubble and everything else. And the second one, about a few years earlier, my project scientist, a guy called Fred Gillette, who tragically died, dragged me into helping him calculate how sensitive this Next-Generation Space Telescope would be, it was called NGST. I thought it was really quite interesting. “Oh, wow.”

And we discovered that trying to do these calculations was actually nontrivial because JWST was so sensitive. So, we found a way to do it, and we published a paper showing that James Webb would blow the ground-based telescopes out of the water, especially in the thermal infrared. We go, “That’s pretty cool.” And he was on some committee for James Webb. And we were also thinking about the next generation of telescopes, the 30 meters and the ELTs, which we’re now doing. And I was asked to come to give a workshop to present a concept for a 50-meter telescope. I can’t remember why we picked 50, but a group of us who built Gemini, VLT, Keck were sitting around in a bar in Germany somewhere asking what was the next generation of telescopes going to be, and this is how these things get on.

And Jerry Nelson, who was still alive, said, “We need a telescope,” because Hubble had just delivered its very first Hubble Deep Field. And Jerry Nelson said, “We need to build telescopes that can take a spectrum of everything in this Hubble Deep Field.” And on a napkin—quite literally a bloody napkin thing—we started trying to work out how big a telescope needed to be to take a spectrum of everything in the Hubble Deep Field. And the numbers ranged from 30 meters to 100 meters. That’s how big it was. There was some uncertainty. And Jerry goes, “Guys, 100 is completely impossible. I think even 30’s really hard.” And that’s where TMT came up. And the ELT came from this 100-meter. So, I’d gotten this interest in this.

NASA had come to this conference and seen my presentation. When I had to give this conference, being the classic compromiser, “I’m going to pick one right in the middle, 50 meters,” because it worked in both, so I did this. So, I gave this talk on a 50-meter telescope and how it would compare with JWST, which was the key thing. And a few months later, I got a call from NASA saying, “Do you want to be the telescope scientist for the James Webb?” And I go, “What’s that?” It was a guy called Eric Smith. “I need somebody who understands telescopes and can just advise the science committee.” And I was kind of getting a bit bored at Gemini, and I said, “Oh, sure, sounds great.” No idea what I was doing.

And so, 2003, in Hawaii, I became the telescope scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, started doing some of these calculations, and built a few models, and started attending the meetings. And I was dragged in to pick the mirror technology because I had background, and I knew all about Corning glass because of our mirror. And so I joined NASA in this selection, and that’s when we picked the beryllium mirrors. And I got to know the applicable people. And so, when the opportunity to go to Space Telescope emerged—this is why this is important—it was clear that Hubble was going to be canceled, because that’s what they wanted to do, and the only thing in Space Telescope’s future was the James Webb Space Telescope. I was interested in this James Webb Space Telescope, and I go, “I don’t care that much about Hubble. I don’t know much about it. Yeah, I’ll do it.”

And nobody else apparently thought that way. Everybody else was, “Oh, Hubble’s terrible.” And I didn’t have that investment at the time. And I thought, “Well, if Hubble gets canceled, I can probably work with the Institute and turn it into a center for James Webb. Because that’s really exciting. And I don’t have an emotional attachment to Hubble, I don’t want to get into it.” And so, I applied. And that was the case I’d made. And I don’t know what happened in the interviews, but it obviously went really well, and they offered me the job. [laughs] At the same time they offered me the job, of course, NASA appointed a new administrator, Mike Griffin. And he was at the hearing, and Senator Mikulski goes, “What about the Hubble Space Telescope?”

He said, “Well, Senator, we will hold a review to see whether or not we should go back to the Hubble,” and that’s how he became NASA administrator, because Senator Mikulski was very powerful at that time. And so, I turn up at Space Telescope, and Mike Griffin turns up at NASA, and my boss says, “We better go down and meet the NASA administrator because he wants to do this review of Hubble, and you need to know him.” I go in, and I wasn’t a citizen at that point, and I wasn’t allowed to go into the NASA building.

Zeron:

Security clearance, yeah.

Mountain:

Security clearance and everything. And so, he met me outside in a conference room. And the first question he asked me, “Matt, can you tell me why the James Webb Space Telescope isn’t serviceable, why you have these crazy instruments?” I thought, “Oh, I’m not here to talk about Hubble.” Quite literally, we started arguing for two hours on a whiteboard in this room about James Webb. And then I go, “Oh, God.” And everybody else was looking for him because nobody knew where he was. And that’s how I got to know Mike Griffin. And that was my first week on the job at Space Telescope. And that’s when I also discovered, “Oh my God, all the women scientists have left, we don’t know what’s going to happen with Hubble, and we also seem to be at war with Johns Hopkins. Oh, okay, all right, then. Nobody told me about all these things.” [laughs]

Zeron:

It’s always the politics.

Mountain:

Always the politics. And it turns out very few people had wanted the job. In fact, very eminent scientists from the UK called me up and said, “Why are you applying for this job and wrecking your career, going to Space Telescope?” Everybody forgets that. That was the way Space Telescope was viewed in those days.

Zeron:

Because of Hubble?

Mountain:

Hubble, and the women problem, and just those kinds of things. And all these space guys go, “Who the hell is this guy, Matt Mountain? We’ve never heard of him.” Here I am again, coming into a completely new environment, the space side, which is great because I’d got to know the James Webb engineers and scientists from the James Webb thing. I didn’t particularly care. I needed to move, and this was a reasonably interesting job, and “I’ll find out what’s going on with Hubble.” So, that’s how it all started. And then, of course, we were lucky—a lot of luck in this—Mike Griffin came, they held this review, and decided to go back and service the Hubble. It was a very fortunate turnaround for the institute. Again, a lot of these career choices have luck. I think people think there’s a plan. There really isn’t.

Zeron:

You know the right people at the right time.

Mountain:

No, you stumble across the right people at the right time—people you’ve met before, or you decided to do something else like get involved with the James Webb. And those, “Oh, you’re coming? Oh, that’s great. Oh, good, you actually understand infrared astronomy, you’ve got to help us transform this optical organization.” I think that Marcia Rieke knew that I knew all about infrared, and I think she was on the search committee for the Space Telescope, and she said, “At least this guy understands it.” They didn’t care. The problem I was having is, many in the infrared community felt Space Telescope was far too focused on the optical. They really didn’t have enough expertise on… and here I go, I turn up having done Gemini, and they go, “Oh, well, he’ll do. [laughs] Nobody else wants the job.” And people forget that back in 2005, very few people wanted that job.

Zeron:

Once you were appointed, like you said, part of the science working group, what was the intention for you to… what was your role?

Mountain:

My role was to ensure that the telescope that was being designed by the teams—Goddard, Northrop Grumman, Ball Aerospace teams—would actually fulfill the science requirements. So, it’s like an oversight role. I’m the telescope scientist. “Will it do the science?” And so, we had to develop a lot of tools, [optical?] tools separately, which was not so hard because I was given money to hire people, which was also novel. And the idea really was just to work with telescope engineers, and scientists, and Mark Clampin, who was the observatory scientist, and just report to the science working group, “Yes, this aspect of the telescope will deliver the science you want.”

And I think the key science was detecting very-high-red-shift galaxies, and Mark and I worked on a very simple metric, which wasn’t in the science requirements, which was, “How long will it take you to measure a 1 Jansky source at 2 microns?” which was the key science, and that allowed us to track the telescope aperture, the telescope image quality, the background, the throughput. And so my job, again, was communication. Could I communicate to the engineers what was important to the scientists, and could I communicate to the science working group what the engineers were actually saying when they talked about nanometers, and interface control documents, and wavefront sensing, and error budgets? How do I take that language, that world, and turn it into, “Well, this is how we can actually integrate for 100 seconds on this galaxy at red shift X.” So, I found myself doing what I did on Gemini: I was the communicator.

Zeron:

Why do you think it was recommended that JWST be conceived as an international project from the beginning?

Mountain:

It was quite clear this was going to… well, I don’t think people realized how expensive it was going to be. Hubble was already 15% ESA… So, step back a little bit. Where did James Webb come from? Do you know that?

Zeron:

I know the early beginnings with Riccardo Giacconi.

Mountain:

Exactly. Riccardo Giacconi said, “You’ve got to find new telescopes for [inaudible].” And a member for ESA, a guy called Pierre Bely, and Peter Stockman worked together—so it was ESA and NASA-funded people—worked together and came up with the concept in those early documents, which you’ve probably seen around.

Zeron:

HST and Beyond.

Mountain:

HST and Beyond, and there’s one even before that, the conference proceedings. I think I have it. [retrieves physical copy] There’s early conference proceedings… The Next-Generation Space Telescope, 1989. But if you look at this, it’s an ESA-NASA scientists who worked at Space Telescope. The nice thing about Space Telescope is… there we go, Pierre Bely and Garth Illingworth, who was the deputy director at the time. The nice thing about Space Telescope is that ESA and AURA staff work hand-in-hand in this normal organization, and that was Riccardo’s model. And Riccardo is a very generous individual. He’d actually mentored me a little bit when I was running Gemini when he was at ESA. I’m very lucky. He walked me around a Danish castle for three hours to explain to me what it meant to be director of an observatory and what you had to worry about, and it was very generous of him.

Anyway, this is after he left Space Telescope. So, ESA had always been part of the early days, and ESA wanted to be part of the Next-Generation Space Telescope, too, because their people had been involved in this early. And NASA actually likes international partnerships. They always complain, “Oh, it’s more complicated,” but they know it gives them stability in Congress. And remember, ESA is a key partner in the space station. So, you also don’t want to piss ESA off because the space station is what the human spaceflight program really was, and they need them. So, there’s always been a mutual understanding, so ESA and NASA have always worked very closely together.

And I think the Canadian Space Agency also felt they’d been left out of Hubble, so they asked to join. And again, the Canadians and the US… it’s a smaller contribution. But NASA does actually embrace international partnerships, as long as they’re in charge. Which is fine. But they’re very good partners, actually, because when the partners run into trouble on James Webb, NASA helps out. So, there’s been this long tradition of Canada, the United States, and ESA collaborating, so it was natural for them to do this. And I think it was much more natural than it was perhaps for the National Science Foundation with Gemini, I discovered afterwards. The National Science Foundation struggled a little bit with how to make the international partnerships work, and I discovered when I arrived that NASA was actually a bit more used to it. Common staff. Badgeless staff. You can’t tell when you go to Space Telescope who works for ESA, and who works for the Canadians, or who works for…

Zeron:

Because they’re all together, yeah.

Mountain:

They’re all the same, and I think that is very powerful. We worked on it on Gemini a little bit, but it took work. It was much more natural, so I think that’s why this happened. I think all the agencies, all three knew, certainly for ESA and the Canadian Space Agency, working with NASA was important. It helped them maintain their funding. And a lot of… when we ran into trouble with James Webb, several times, pointing out that we would let our international partners down was at least a scintilla of additional motivation to Congress, right? So, it does give a degree of stability, and NASA knows how to play that card in Congress quite well, even though normally these contributions are smaller than the American contribution by a significant margin.

Zeron:

Yeah. Do you think there was an influence from the science working group to that collaboration between NASA, ESA, and the Canadians?

Mountain:

Oh, yes. Because NASA—we found this on Gemini too, actually, to be honest with you… that what I always see is that if you bring more perspectives to the table, you actually get better ideas. So, even with Gemini, the fact that the UK and the Canadians had far more experience of using Mauna Kea than most American astronomers—because there were Canadian and British telescopes there, no American telescopes there at the time, except for Keck, which was being built—helped with Gemini. Certainly, the science diversity that the Europeans brought to the table when we were doing the early specifications of the James Webb… it wasn’t just what Alan Dressler said in his book. It was the thermal infrared… MIRI, which Gillian was the PI. Europeans strongly believed we need a MIRI.

And remember, the American infrared astronomers were still in the minority compared to optical. And so, thank God we kept MIRI, but there was a very famous head of science at NASA who said, “You will put MIRI on this telescope over my dead body.” Right? The Europeans helped enormously to bring MIRI to that and really with the support of JPL and George Rieke, they managed to keep MIRI on. Now, today, it’s transformational. I think NIRSpec… it was a pretty crazy instrument, but again, multiple instrument spectroscopy. And this whole concept of IFUs, these three-dimensional spectrographs called integral field units, was invented in Europe. And now, we use them a lot on James Webb, and they brought that. And in the US, it was a little more traditional. They thought, “What are these strange IFU things that are very hard to use?” “Guys, they give you a data cube rather than just imaging plus spectroscopy.”

That was a European concept. So, it really is an amalgam. And I think the science working group… full credit to John Mather and Eric Smith, who played a real role, they really made sure that the non-US voices were heard. Though, if you’ve ever met Gillian, it’s hard to ignore Gillian, and it’s hard to ignore some of the European members. They’re all strong-willed people. Peter Jakobsen particularly, right? They were used to working with NASA. They were used to speaking up. It was always a very robust set of meetings, frankly. But it was great, it was very creative. And full credit to NASA, John Mather, Eric Smith, Jon Gardner, they let that dialog happen, and they let the arguments happen. And I’ve always found when you have very smart people arguing…

Zeron:

You get somewhere.

Mountain:

You get somewhere. You’ve got to corral it at the end, and it takes a bit of work, but I think James Webb is far better for it because we had international partners.

Zeron:

So, moving on to the 2010s, what was your perspective on the growing budget and schedule concerns?

Mountain:

This is where we actually get into a fairly confidential place, because I don’t think we’ve ever really revealed what AURA did. So, as you know, when I first arrived at Space Telescope, fortunately, I had been trained up by Sidney Wolff and Dick Malow, as I mentioned before, that Congress has a very important role. And when I first arrived at Space Telescope, it was much more explicit at NASA. At NSF, it was sort of hidden. You don’t do that. I arrived, and something like the third or fourth week on the job, the project manager from James Webb called me up and said, “Matt, we need X-hundred million dollars in FY11 [Fiscal Year 2011].” I go, “Okay.” “Matt, we need…” “Okay, Phil, thank you.” So, I called my boss, Bill Smith, and said, “Hey, Bill, I just got this weird call from the project manager from James Webb who said he needs another X million dollars in FY11.” “Oh, great. Good. Did he give you the exact number he needs?” “I’ll ask him back.”

He said, “Yeah, okay, because OMB told him he can’t have it, and he’s asking for our congressional help. We’ll go to the Maryland delegation and see if we can get that number put into the budget for James Webb.” “Oh, that’s the role Space Telescope plays here.” If you think back a little bit, when Jim Webb put NASA together to go to the Moon, he realized, because he was an astute administrator… he has all these hysterical things, but as a government administrator, he knew to get big programs through, you needed the administration and Congress. And of course, he created all these NASA centers around the country that had congressional interest. It’s called the Johnson Space Flight Center for a reason, right? [laughs] And NASA is much more used to playing the game of “the President proposes, Congress disposes,” and playing between OMB and what the administration wants, what the NASA center wants.

And Space Telescope is in Maryland and is supposed to… civil servants are not allowed to lobby. People who run not-for-profits are. And so, that is an explicit role that we are expected to play, helping our colleagues at the Goddard Space Flight Center and sometimes Hubble. So, we play that role. Now, it’s a subtle role, and it isn’t always one we make very public, but it is an expected role for AURA on the space side and always has been. So, the role of getting the Hubble servicing mission reestablished was work with the Maryland delegation and the Goddard Space Flight Center, and AURA had to play the mediating role between that. But again, if it wasn’t for Senator Mikulski, this would never happen. But she would rely on us feeding her the appropriate information from NASA. NASA would back-channel this information to us.

And that was a role that the Space Telescope director played that I hadn’t fully appreciated until I turned up. [laughs] But that’s a very important part that we keep track of. And at the corporate office, where they are allowed to… they have actual lobbyists. The director of Space Telescope is not allowed to lobby. We have to be asked questions, and then we’re allowed to answer them. So, there was always this tradition at AURA that we were supposed to be a conduit of information to the United States Congress and vice versa.

So, Kathy Flanagan, who was the mission head, and I… and John Grunsfeld joined us later as a deputy—I got to know John through the servicing missions. So, John was our deputy. Kathy Flanagan was in charge of James Webb. We were seeing increasing overruns in budgets, that people weren’t delivering and had to rebuild. And we were wondering, “Where’s the money coming from?” James Webb was piling up debts, basically, and running into trouble, and we knew there was trouble, and we didn’t exactly know why this was happening. And so, when the House first canceled James Webb, we thought, “Oh, God, here we go.”

Zeron:

The zero budget.

Mountain:

The zero budget. And OMB had already flattened it, and the House canceled it. And this is the bit I would not want in the public domain just yet. [Here there is a five-page segment of the interview that is currently restricted.]

Zeron:

I’m curious, when was it designated that STScI would be the science and mission operations center—sorry, when did the building in preparation for that begin?

Mountain:

So, I joined in 2005. Already, because Space Telescope was part of this [pounds on conference proceedings], Space Telescope was seen as the natural place for it. And it was a sole-source. NASA Goddard felt that Space Telescope was the right place. The mission operations center was much more interesting, because we’d had the Hubble operations center and it makes the building a little bit difficult to operate, right? And in the end… and really, we didn’t have a lot of control over it. And then, Goddard, for security reasons, just after 9/11, wanted all this stuff back. So, we thought, “oh, all right.”

Now, the team—Kathy Flanagan—were very keen to have the operations center—not just the science but the operations center—in our building because James Webb is an active telescope. It’s not like Hubble, which is much more like a traditional telescope—not like Gemini, like the old-fashioned telescopes, you know, point and shoot. Space Telescope’s much more like Gemini, where everything is variable, and how the telescope performs and how it moves actually affects the science. So, it’s much more like Gemini than Keck. VLT and Gemini are the new generation. And the team made the very compelling argument, “Matt, you know, this is a fully active telescope. If you move the slew around, the performance of the telescope changes, therefore the science changes. We need to be fully integrated into this.”

I go, “But yeah, we’re going to have the operations center. It’s going to cause chaos.” “Yeah, but scientifically, for these very active second-generation telescopes—you know better than anybody, having run Gemini—you have to understand the telescope and the science together; they’re not separate.” “Okay.” And I still wasn’t 100% sure it was the best of ideas. So, I would go down, talk to the Goddard center director, who was Chris Scolese at the time (so you can look up when that was), and say, “Are you sure you don’t want the operations center?” [laughs] Because I knew what all the security would mean. “Well, no, I think it’s a good place for Space Telescope.” And the project manager also said, “You’ve got the space. Let’s do it.” So, the decision was made just after I left that it would be the operations center.

It was just after I left, but it was what the team wanted, and it turns out, what the project wanted. But it did create an awful lot of security challenges in the building and a lot of angst. And then, of course, COVID hit and made it even worse. A lot of the tensions around James Webb operations resulted from that. In hindsight, I think it still was the right decision now, but it changed the culture of the institute somewhat to a much more operational environment rather than just a science environment. But in hindsight, it’s much more like a ground-based observatory, where we are responsible for the telescope and the science. And because the performance of the telescope is intimately linked to the science, and how we operate the telescope is intimately linked to how the science will perform, yes, I think putting it all together in the same place was a really good idea.

Zeron:

Now that you mentioned it, what was the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the operation and development?

Mountain:

It was terrible. Because everybody had to train remotely, and there were these restrictions, how many people… lots of tensions between the project team of how many people we could have into the control room, and did we have the right ventilation. And some of this had to be hands-on. When you have very complicated problems, you really need smart people in a room to talk to each other, like we’ve talked about before. And James Webb is really complicated. It is probably the most complicated telescope we have ever built, and if you don’t have people in the room who can talk to each other like, “Oh, no, wait, wait, did you just say that? Oh!” So, that was very antithetical to the COVID requirements, and I worried a lot that we weren’t going to be solving these complicated problems.

COVID kind of started turning down a bit, people could have masks. Thank God we had these reduced restrictions as we were trying to commission this instrument, right? Because that’s when it mattered for us. Up to the launch, there was nothing to really do—lots of rehearsals. And the rehearsals were really showing that people weren’t communicating. We’d have these rehearsals, and people would throw in their—like an admission here—throw in a bad idea, and how would the team react? Well, it didn’t actually react always that well. I was watching from a distance by this point because I was no longer director. But during commissioning, thank God we could meet people every day. We’d meet in the conference room at Space Telescope, sit around the table, sometimes with masks on, and try to solve problems collectively, and I think that made a huge difference. So, thank God COVID began to turn down during the 2022 timeframe.

Zeron:

Like you mentioned, JWST was launched on Christmas Day 2021.

Mountain:

Yeah, none of us could go because it was COVID. [laughs]

Zeron:

[laughs] Yeah. Could you walk me through your recollection of that day?

Mountain:

It was Christmas Day. We have a long tradition, because our family’s always been abroad, of making Christmas very special. So, even though my kids are now grown and actually live in the area, we always get together to open presents and stockings, and I’m the cook for Christmas dinner. So, that’s the first restraint: I cook Christmas dinner. And I had to get with the family and say, “Guys, I really do have to go down for the launch.” “Oh, yeah, of course you do, dad.” “Okay, if I prepare the turkeys ahead of time, can you come up, Jen”—my daughter—“and get stuff going? I have no idea how long I’m going to be.” First of all, it was just the logistics. Remember—I think you’ve probably got the thing—family has always been very important to me. Family takes precedence. So, I’ve got all the logistics sorted out of how I was going to go down to Space Telescope for the launch and then come back, and we’re going to do Christmas dinner and everything. My very skeptical wife watched me leave in the morning, thinking, “When am I going to see this guy again?” [laughs] But the problem is, COVID was still there, and suddenly there’d been some uptick in infections.

Zeron:

Yeah, the variants and stuff.

Mountain:

So, everybody had to be tested before they came in, which was kind of new. And there were NASA people, and they were all sitting in this big auditorium at Space Telescope, all spread out. It was all a bit surreal, frankly. And we’re watching the launch on the big monitors, and we’re all spread out a bit. We were supposed to have a party, and then that got canceled because of COVID. And the team was upstairs, and we weren’t allowed up there. So, it was all a bit weird. But the launch sequence and the French “nominal” was actually very moving. And I have the video on my computer still. When I watch it, it still, actually, as you can tell, brings tears to my eyes. Because there was a moment where I thought, “Oh my God, we got it there.”

The problem is, most of us knew, “Okay, that’s just the start. We’ve now got six weeks, or six months, of hell, because will this thing bloody work?” But it was such a relief. Because remember… I don’t know if you know the history, but they’d got it to Kourou finally—boats, and worrying about pirates, and all that shit—and then they’re putting some clamp on, and the clamp broke. It put a shock into the system. That’s how it kept pushing it to Christmas. And they weren’t even sure whether the French crew would work over Christmas, because there’s a big tradition of not doing that. And then, NASA was then going, “Nope, the French came up and said, ‘Our staff are volunteering to work to get James Webb launched.’” It was amazing. Everybody was down at Christmas, we watched them on the video. And then, there’s a moment when power is nominal, and then they hand it over to the guys at Space Telescope. And I snuck up to go and look at the crew, just look at them, and got in real trouble with the then-director because, of course, I’d broken COVID protocols doing it, and he shouted and screamed at me, which was probably fine. [laughs] But yeah, it was an emotional moment, and I still get quite emotional when I watch that video still.

Zeron:

That’s amazing. How worried were you about the single-point failures?

Mountain:

Very. Yes, we had tested everything, right? But remember, I’d built telescopes in the past. Now, we’d never had such a testing regime on the ground-based telescopes, but I think as one of the system engineers said to me, “The real problem is… what we’re worried about is a lack of imagination. What things didn’t we think about?” We tested the mirrors. The one thing I wasn’t worried about was the mirrors moving, believe it or not, because we’d actually tested that in this big chamber down in the Johnson Space Center, even during a hurricane, and we knew that’d work.

We didn’t know whether the sunshade would deploy properly. You go and see this thing in the clean room at Northrop Grumman, and I would go with somebody who was an avid sailor. He would look at all these pulleys and things, and he looked at me and said, “Are you kidding me, man? Are you kidding me? This is going to work out at L2? Look at all these damn cables. Look at all this stuff.” But we spent a long time testing, and the systems engineer, a guy called Mike Menzel—he had an office at Space Telescope at the time, and he would literally have a whiteboard where he would just be marking off each single-point failure as we go. And I would go look in his office, “How are we doing?” [laughs]

And it was always a relief. But I always remember one moment. We’d gotten the sunshade deployed—which everybody was “oh my God”—and then, the next day, we were going to move the secondary in place. And I didn’t think very much of this, and the optics manager, a guy called Lee Feinberg, I bumped into him. “Lee, what’s wrong with you? You look terrible.” He said, “I didn’t sleep.” “What do you mean you didn’t sleep?” “I woke up at 2 in the morning and realized”—I think he had COVID as well, it was worse than that; he’d just had COVID, so he was kind of restricted where he could go—and he said, “Matt, I realized we never tested the unfolding of the secondary mirror completely. We tested each component, we tested each thing, each motor. Because it was so lightweight, we convinced ourselves we didn’t need to test the whole thing—because we’d have to gravity-relieve it because gravity would’ve bent it and everything. I go, “Oh, it’ll be fine.” He said, “Yeah, I know, but what happens if it isn’t?” [laughs] And of course, it all worked. So, there are always those moments.

I think the most amazing moment for me, though, was, finally, the mirrors had all moved off. It took weeks to get them off. And the final alignment of the mirrors, we had a single star, and you get the mirrors all lined up, you have all these 18 stars, and then you move all those mirrors together, and you have one. And then, you’ve got to do what’s called this wavefront sensing, where you’ve got to get the edges to be less than the wavelength of light, so the light no longer sees the edges, right? And it’s called phasing. We’d always ignore it. And then we got it phased. Suddenly—[snaps fingers] literally like that—it becomes a single mirror. And you saw this star just shrink, become this famous six-pointed thing. I go, “Oh my God.”

The most amazing moment wasn’t that. It was, the engineers were looking at the whole screen, looking at the background. There were all these dots and speckles in the background. “Matt, what is this? Is this cosmic rays?” I was having a look, and I went, “Jesus shit, they’re galaxies.” [laughs] And that’s why I have it on my phone. On my phone, I still have it today, all the galaxies in the background. And that’s when I realized James Webb would really work because here was a 30-minute exposure. The background noise was galaxies. I go, “Oh, shit, this is really going to work.” It was an infrared image, looking at a star, and all the engineers were looking at these background objects, and they weren’t little specks, they were actually galaxies. You could see that.

Zeron:

That was my next question, what was your reaction when you saw the first data come through?

Mountain:

At that point, when I realized that famous phrase, which you probably don’t know because you’re too young… in 2001, there’s this phrase, “the sky is full of stars,” he says, right? Our perspective was, the sky is full of galaxies. The background noise was galaxies. Remember, we designed this thing to look for galaxies. And in 30 minutes, all of the speckle in the background was galaxies. And that’s when I realized, “Oh, shit, this thing works.” That was an amazing moment, yeah. To me, that was the most profound moment, actually. Because I went over to look at the screen with them, “What are those background noise? Oh, shit.”

Zeron:

Now, in its third year of operation, what can you say about what Webb has already achieved and the potential for the future?

Mountain:

Well, there’s a very good paper that… a colleague of ours, Antonella Nota, held a meeting in Bern called The First Billion Years where they brought everybody together, and they’re showing that galaxies are more enriched, have more elements, and are brighter than we expected. We now know that big black holes were around early on. So, this whole conundrum, was it black hole or galaxy? Chicken before the egg? But it looks like black holes were around. The very fact we can see back almost 13.5 billion years—incredible, right? And we’d done the calculations, but to actually see these galaxies? I think the sheer interest everybody’s had and the fact that teams are working so well together, that PhD students are getting time on the James Webb Space Telescope… so it’s a dual-anonymous review thing, right?

And then, of course, we really began to make progress in exoplanets. Because telescope science, my group, has just gone very deep on TRAPPIST-1e, and they’ve just sent me the first data which has literally just been reduced in 16 hours. “Okay, we can’t detect…” But it’s not a flat line, so we’re getting to find out whether or not there is an atmosphere on rocky planets in the habitable zone around M stars. It’s wonderful just to see that kind of… I think it’s to see the public excitement, too. I was stunned how many people stopped me in the street in my neighborhood and said, “Matt, James Webb really works.” It wasn’t so much the launch that got me excited, the science results got really… I mean, Dennis Overbye wrote in the New York Times he was wrong about James Webb. [inaudible] He once said to me, “I don’t believe James Webb’s going to do that well.” This is Dennis Overbye from the New York Times.

Zeron:

Proved wrong. [laughs]

Mountain:

Not so much that. Dennis is a smart guy. It’s that, “Well, you’ve produced all these beautiful images with Hubble. How are you going to better that with James Webb?” Well, they did. Because they practiced. And the science stories behind them are incredible. So, Dennis wrote this beautiful article one day, “I was wrong about the James Webb Space Telescope” [“How the Webb Telescope Expanded my Universe”]. That was very big of him, too. And I think all of us have been… I think the sheer breadth of science that we’re doing, whether you’re looking at… and one of my favorite pictures is of Neptune and Uranus, where we’ve never seen the… it’s Uranus. Uranus is on its side. You see this old dusty ring, right? That hasn’t been seen since Voyager went past. But that’s not the only problem. You see this, and in the background, you see galaxies. You’ve got the whole dynamic range from our solar system to galaxies outside our galaxy and stars. It’s an incredible three-dimensional view in a snapshot with this six-meter very cold telescope sitting out there. So, yeah, I’m very pleased it’s worked so well. As a telescope scientist, I’m blown away. Or not blown away, I’m really pleased. It works better by a factor of 10.

Because I had originally been part of the team that descoped the optical performance to save money. I’d run the team at NASA, just before I joined Space Telescope actually, and I’d been asked to help descope it because it was running out of money at the time—this was already in 2004 or ’05—and we had said, “You have to relax the optical requirement.” Because the optical requirement was driving the polishing to a ridiculous… but because I was used to talking to the engineers, I’d be visiting and talking to the optical engineers, and they’d tell me, “I don’t know why you have this one-micron requirement, Matt, because you have it at two microns, and physical optics demands you have to have a certain performance of one micron. You don’t need the one-micron requirement.” I go, “Oh, yeah, you’re right.” So, I went back to the space where the scientists were working and said, “We don’t need the...” And the optic guy: “No, you’ve got to have that.” “Guys, you don’t need it. The physics of the surface will give you…” And we have now great performance at one micron.

Zeron:

That’s incredible.

Mountain:

It’s incredible, and thank you engineers for telling me, “Go descope there, Matt, it won’t make a difference.” Because if we had the one micron, we’d have to double cryo polish to meet this requirement, and we wouldn’t have gained anything. But again, fortunately, I was well-trained way back from my days in Edinburgh and then my days on Gemini: always talk to the engineers and see what they think. And I got to know them quite well as a telescope scientist because I had to go to these meetings in California, and the flights back to Hawaii were always at midnight. And so, I’d drop off at Northrop Grumman to wait for my plane, and they would all be there, and I’d sit and talk to them in the afternoons every three or four months, so I got to know them. And they would say, “Ah, this is ridiculous.” “Oh, really? Yeah, okay.”

Zeron:

Well, that brings me to my next question. Given your extensive professional career, what can you say about the impact of international partnerships on the success of extremely complex scientific missions?

Mountain:

This whole study, that diverse groups work better than monolithic groups, right? It’s not just a diversity thing. I think what the international partners bring is a very diverse range of experiences. If you have a common cause, like James Webb, the fact that the Europeans thought about how to build instruments a little bit differently, have a different science perspective, that richness makes a better mission. It’s the same statement that diverse teams work better than monolithic teams. The international partners bring that diversity. Because all of us in our fields of science, whether it be US, or Britain, or Canada, we all get trapped into kind of national groupthink scientifically. Now, I know everybody says, “I read all these papers,” and all that. No, you don’t.

Because your day-to-day life is dealing with your department, or your society, or the Royal Astronomical Society, or the AAS, or the Canadian, and your own colleagues. International partnerships require you to think a little bit out of the box. “Oh, yeah, I didn’t know. This guy is a pretty smart scientist, and he’s saying this. That’s interesting.” We see this at ESO as well. And I think there are a lot of very smart people in this world, and if you can get them together to work together, it’s important. Because the way Britain, or Canada, or France, or Germany is funded is very different, so they have to think about things very differently and how they make their cases very differently. If we didn’t have the international partnership, as I told you earlier, we wouldn’t have rescued James Webb. It isn’t just, “Oh, international partnerships.”

They actually have roles to play occasionally, like the fact that the British Astronomer Royal knew as a personal friend the head of OSTP, who none of us had any access to. But Britain’s a slightly smaller place. You have access to these people. We see this in Chile. When we work in Chile on the ground-based side, Chile is a smaller place, but the fact we have access to the highest levels of government in Chile, because we’re an international partnership, can be very helpful. When I go down, I go and visit the American ambassador, not because we’re some big deal in the United States, but in Chile we’re a very big deal.

Zeron:

And you have a relationship with them.

Mountain:

Now, we have a relationship. And I think the US sometimes forgets how big it is. But sometimes, that bigness isn’t enough. Sometimes, you need other partners who are not used to being quite as big who can think about things a little more agilely. Or you go, “Oh, really? You get funded like that? That’s interesting. Hm.” And I do think that science has been pretty good about working together. The thing that really annoys me a little bit about science is the lone genius model. That isn’t how science gets done anymore. Hubble sitting in his telescope, yeah, okay, that was the model of the ’30s. I think CERN works well because it’s a big international machine, and they found the Higgs, right?

Fantastic international partnership. James Webb works well because we had this international partnership from ESA, from Canadians, from European industry, from American industry, NASA’s culture, the Space Telescope culture. Those were all brought together in this firm. When you walked through the building during commissioning, you saw these people, some of whom I knew from my days in Edinburgh, very different roles, but everybody was badgeless, everybody was committed. If we didn’t have an international perspective—Pierre Bely—we wouldn’t have had James Webb. He’s an ESA person, and he was thinking out of the box with Garth Illingworth, who is a traditional American astronomer. The two of them worked together and did this.

Zeron:

Right from the start.

Mountain:

Right from the start. Would that chemistry… maybe. But if you throw different people into the cauldron… and what this country is very good at, as you can tell from me, they’re very accepting. Look, I’m a Brit. I have run Gemini, I’ve run Space Telescope, being the telescope scientist for James Webb. Nobody cared in this country I was a Brit, as long as I committed to the project. That’s something, I have to tell you, the US does better than anybody else. Believe it or not, the US is very good at international partnerships.

It’s not something that people widely think because they always think America is this big country that dominates everything. No, if you are committed to the mission and to the team, you’re just one of us, suddenly. And other than my accent occasionally being teased, it has never been a barrier for me in this country. Nobody has ever said, “Why is a Brit sitting here?” They go, “Okay, why is the Space Telescope director here?” That’s my role. Not, “Why a Brit?” Oh, look at Nicky Fox: there’s a Brit running NASA [Science Mission Directorate] right now. This country doesn’t… and I think that’s still a unique power the US has. It is still a great convening authority for international projects. Irrespective of all the politics going on, the US is very good at convening international partnerships, because we tend to rally behind ideas in a way that is quite powerful.

Zeron:

Now, since 2015, you’ve served as the president for AURA. How has all of this professional experience throughout your career impacted the work that you do now?

Mountain:

It’s made me aware that many in our community do not always appreciate that we have to have these other skills. Because I worked directly with university communities through our board and everything, it makes me aware that when I have new directors, I have to remind them that some of these skills are very important, that what they were taught in graduate school…”There’s a whole bunch of stuff you need to know that you weren’t taught in graduate school, like the US Congress matters, [laughs] like relationships matter.” Yeah, I think it’s taught me that to do the complicated things we need to do takes a village, and trying to get that village organized is really important. And not to ignore our partners, whether they’re international partners… ESA is a very important partner for JWST. Japan is a very important partner for the TMT, so we have close relationships with Japan. Canadians are very important for JWST and for the ELT. And making sure that their voices are heard, both with the agencies and in Congress, is actually, kind of what we were talking about earlier, I think it is important. Understanding that science is necessary but not sufficient to get big projects done. If you don’t have the science case, you’re doomed, but great science ain’t enough. There have got to be other reasons to do big projects—international partners, jobs, national security, leadership.

And you have to play in that space and understand that space to get the kind of projects that we do, whether it be the Gemini telescopes, or the James Webb Space Telescope, or servicing the Hubble, or getting the next Habitable Worlds Observatory, or the US ELT program, or the Rubin Observatory, or DKIST that we do. Once you go over a certain number… John Casani, who wrote that original report, was the one who said, “Matt, once you need over a billion dollars, science is necessary but not sufficient.” That was a very useful piece of advice he gave me. The federal government… there are lots of calls on billion-dollar buckets: FBI buildings or other things—not even in the military space—grants for police forces. You’re competing with all of those things, and you need to be able to make your case. And what we scientists do better than anybody else is tell stories about science. If the science isn’t there, we shouldn’t even start, but it’s no guarantee to success.

Zeron:

So now, for my last question, what do you see as the future of great observatories as recommended by the 2020 decadal survey?

Mountain:

So, we think the Habitable Worlds Observatory is very important. That was a top recommendation. That came out of an early study that AURA did back in 2006-07, right? And so, we have been using the same tools we’ve used elsewhere to maintain that interest and so forth, so we’re very pleased Habitable Worlds emerged. I think Habitable Worlds builds on the power of James Webb and some of the ground-based things we do. Finding life is a motivating idea, so I hope that goes forward. I hope we can get the technology. I hope the X-ray community can begin to really come up with a visionary mission. We’ll try and keep the technology program going.

We’re fully committed to raising all science boats. The current budget cycle has not been great for science. NSF got cut, NASA got cut, to pay for other priorities the administration had inside the NSF and inside NASA, and they aren’t necessarily science driven. So, reminding our community not to shoot inwards, but to work together to tell the story of science to everybody, to the public, to Congress, to the administration. Science is very much part of what we do in this country. It always has been. That’s why Congress has been very interested. It’s quite bipartisan, right? Ever since that amazing report from Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier, that has actually been a powerful motivating factor through several generations in Congress.

Science—putting aside climate science for the moment—is still reasonably bipartisan. And telling great stories is a very important part of that, and that’s what we need to keep doing. Otherwise, our trajectory is not great, because Europe has caught up with us, China’s trying to catch up with us. Particle physics already went to Europe. I would rather not have observational astrophysics go to Europe as well. And space, we’re still fine. On the ground, I’m worried. Even my European colleagues are building a 39-meter telescope. We can’t get our act together to build a 30- or 20-meter telescope still, so we need to change that dynamic. And the tools that we have are the same ones we’ve been talking about for the last two hours, but you have to recognize you have to use those tools. Because at the scale for us to compete, science is necessary but not sufficient.

Zeron:

Yep. Perfect. Well, Dr. Mountain, let me thank you very much…

Mountain:

Do not call me Dr. Mountain, call me Matt. [laughs]

Zeron:

Matt, thank you so much for this very long session.

Mountain:

I hope that was useful for you.

Zeron:

Yes, of course. And to say on the record, we will not release the tape or its transcript without your express approval.

Mountain:

Yes, most of that stuff about James Webb, that is a little more delicate. That can come out at some later date.

Zeron:

Yeah, that’s okay. [laughs] And then, I’ll make sure you get all the forms for the project.

Mountain:

Thank you.

Zeron:

Thank you so much.

Mountain:

You’re very welcome.