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Interview of Edward Weiler by Montserrat Zeron on August 15, 2024,
Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,
College Park, MD USA,
www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/48494
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This is an interview with Edward Weiler, who served as chief scientist of the Hubble Space Telescope from 1979 to 1998, as NASA Associate Administrator for science activities from 1998 to 2004 and again from 2008 to 2011, and as director of the Goddard Space Flight Center from 2004 to 2008. The interview focuses primarily on his work relating to Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope. Subjects addressed include his work developing international collaboration, and he explains the value of his strong working relationship with David Southwood of the European Space Agency. Weiler details his involvement with the correction of the spherical aberration afflicting Hubble’s primary mirror. He highlights NASA Administrator Dan Goldin’s role in establishing the scope of the Webb telescope, and he offers his views on the project’s troubles and the 2010 review chaired by John Casani that diagnosed sources of its cost growth and schedule slippage. Weiler also recounts his motivations for retiring from NASA in 2011, his activities since then, and he expresses his perspective on matters such as human space flight, lunar exploration, and the value of international partnerships in space science.
This is Montserrat Zeron, and this is an interview with Dr. Edward Weiler. Today’s date is August 15, 2024, and we are recording this in Dr. Weiler’s home in Vero Beach. I would like to note on the transcript that since you’ve already done other oral history interviews in the past, I would like this interview to focus on your role with both Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope. To start, we know the JWST is the most powerful telescope ever built, but it also comes after the great legacy of Hubble. After arriving at NASA in 1978, you later became the chief scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope. Can you tell me about those days?
Actually, it goes back before that, because in 1976 I got my PhD from Northwestern. And little did I know that fate had set me up, because my first job after my PhD was a research position at Princeton University under this guy—I had used his textbooks, but I didn’t really understand his connections—Lyman Spitzer was my first boss at Princeton, who, as we all know now, is the father of the Hubble Space Telescope. [laughs] So, I went from not knowing much at all about space, or space astronomy or anything, to Princeton, and I was working on Lyman’s—I was director of operations for his satellite, Copernicus, which was operated out of Goddard. So, my first job was actually at Princeton, but I lived in Maryland because I spent my days at Goddard: one week a month to do research at Princeton, and then three weeks at Goddard. The key point about that was getting into space astronomy with Copernicus, getting to know Lyman, getting to know his love of ultraviolet astronomy and space, his history, that he thought up Hubble back in the late ’40s. He really deserves all the credit for coming up with Hubble.
So, I moved to NASA. Nancy Roman, whose claim to fame is she was chief of astronomy, and she was the only chief of astronomy [up to that point], and she was a woman chief of astronomy starting when NASA started. So, I was the first male chief of astronomy, and that’s in the 1978, 1979 timeframe. She retired almost when I came. I guess she had planned to retire and didn’t tell me, but she had kind of brought me in to make sure that there was a smooth transition. She was of course the chief scientist on Hubble, so I took over the job in the 1978-79 time frame. That was even before the Space Telescope Institute was created, so I lived through those early days with Riccardo Giacconi and all the politics that involved, so it was quite a ride. Little did I know that I was taking on a job that, one, was supposed to launch in ’83. I came in ’78. Of course it wound up launching in ’90. A lot of people don’t realize this because Hubble was such a wonderful success—nobody even talks about this—Hubble overran by 400 percent. Nobody remembers that! Hopefully in 10 years nobody will remember that JWST overran 400 or 500 percent. But yeah, it was a tough ride, and there were some times it was almost cancelled just like JWST.
I slowly—unlike today’s young people, I didn’t change jobs every three months or six years. I was at NASA my whole career. I just kept moving up the chain. I went from staff astronomer to chief of astronomy when Nancy left, then I became a director of the Origins program for a short time. That was during the Dressler committee timeframe. And then in 1998, my boss, the Associate Administrator of NASA who answers to the Administrator—he or she is only one step from the President. It’s the Associate Administrator, the Administrator, and the President. My boss quit. Dan Goldin, who was the Administrator at the time, who of course has some fame with JWST, called me into his office and said, “I want you to be the Associate Administrator.” I said, “No thanks, Dan. I’m a single father with a child that has emotional issues. I can’t travel.” He said, “Okay. Well, help me find somebody.” So, for two or three months he was looking and talking to people, and then finally one day I called him on the NASA jet. He was going out to California. I said, “Dan, I’ve been looking at the people you’ve been looking at, and frankly I don’t want to work for any of them. I’ll do the job.” [both laugh] So, he said, “You got it.” So, I became the Associate Administrator at NASA. At that time I was still kind of chief scientist for Hubble because it was still under me, but I had to kind of let the day-by-day things be done by people younger than me. So, that’s kind of where I still was in charge of Hubble, but I wasn’t involved as much. We haven’t talked at all about fixing Hubble.
I wonder, were you involved in the initial collaboration with the Europeans for Hubble?
Not the initial setup of it, but the follow-through, with the setting up of what the Institute’s role was with ESA and NASA, and that kind of stuff. So, I didn’t set up the framework, I didn’t do the design of the building, but I had to build the building with the Europeans. So, the day-by-day stuff I was intimately involved with. It was the opposite on JWST; I was involved with the first architectural drawings.
And it’s not relevant to what you’re doing here, but I spent a lot of time with David Southwood working on the Mars program, trying to get a Mars program, a joint NASA/ESA program. Because we knew it was going to be expensive; we knew that we could never do a sample return mission by ourselves. I spent two years with David, and David said, “I’ll never be able to convince ESA to sign up to multiple missions. They just don’t do that.” Well, toward the end of my tenure he did. He had just gotten approval to sign up to a Mars program, and that’s where the politics in Washington went haywire. The kind of things you see going on now were just starting to go on then. And OMB, they had people who didn’t know what they’re doing in terms of they had no technical competence. And they didn’t like this collaboration, so they just said, “No, we don’t want it.” And that’s when I decided to get the hell out. That was it.
We can get into the Mars program later.
Yeah, because I spent two years of my life on that, and we had made a major victory with ESA. By the way, ESA fell off the Mars program for five or six or seven years after I retired, and by the way, they’re back in now. They figured that out. So anyway, [snaps fingers] just a little note.
We don’t have enough days to talk about all my experiences on Hubble, but the most important thing on Hubble was after we launched, there was spherical aberration, and if I’m proud of anything, it’s the role I had in leading the science team and keeping them directed to fix it. Because the rest of the world thought we were a bunch of idiots. People would stop me in the street in my neighborhood and say, when I’m pushing my kid in the stroller, “Don’t you feel embarrassed working on such a national disgrace?” That’s the kind of thing that was going on. And I can tell you, when we fixed that thing—
Oh, and I had some blood in the game too, because in 1983, little did I know—because I was chief scientist then, but I was only GS-15 or something—everybody had left for Christmas holidays, and I decided not to waste my leave, so I was in my office. And I said, “This whole concept of fixing Hubble, maintaining it, and sending the shuttle up, nobody’s taking it seriously. Marshall Space Flight Center, the project is using it as a bank. They’re not really following through on it.” So, I wrote this white paper on maintenance and refurbishment of the Hubble Space Telescope and what we should be doing, and it was the science side. We shouldn’t just be changing gyros or solar panels; we’ve got to keep the science fresh. We’ve got to take advantage of technology, the camera especially. The camera is our connection to the American people. They’re not going to understand spectrograms, but they’re going to see pictures. Pictures sell science. Whether we like to admit it or not as scientists, pictures sell. Eagle Nebula, you know? And I said, “So, in addition to building new instruments, we ought to start right now, 1983, building our backup wide-field camera,” the so-called clone. And it would be cheaper because we’d just be doing a copy of the current WFPC under construction. That of course went over like lead bricks with management because it would cost money, but somehow word got to some pretty influential scientists who lobbied Congress. I wonder who might have helped that happen.
But anyway, John Bahcall, who was my good buddy—he was a grand uncle of Hubble; he talked to a few of his congresswomen and congressmen, like Senator Barbara Mikulski, a few like that. And basically, my boss’s boss’s boss was testifying in 1984 or 1985, and one of the congresspeople—I think it was the guy from Alabama—he said, “Mr. Keller, we hear about this backup camera that some of your scientists think ought to be built because it’s so important we get those pictures from Hubble. You are planning to fund that, aren’t you, Mr. Keller?” He said, “Oh, yes sir! We were planning to do that!” Of course, he wasn’t. [both laugh] But the end of the story is, it was in the budget to next year, and the rest is history. The clone was started. Little did we know that spherical aberration would hit. Thank God we were building this clone, because contrary to bad history—by the way, I’m going to make this point: COSTAR was not what fixed Hubble. You ever hear of COSTAR?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, it didn’t fix Hubble. What convinced the American people it was fixed was pictures. COSTAR didn’t produce pictures; the clone, or back-up wide-field planetary camera was the one. So, that was what fixed Hubble. The COSTAR did the spectroscopy, and that was important too, but it was like 20 or 30 percent of the science. The Eagle Nebula, the Hubble Deep Field, all those pictures that came out in 1994 weren’t from COSTAR, they were from the back-up wide field camera. So, that’s why I’m so proud of that. I wish I could take credit for being prescient, saying, “I knew in 1983 we would need that camera,” but we did, so I’m very proud of that.
That was my next question. How did you first find out about the spherical aberration?
The stuff coming down was out of focus, and it looked like crap, frankly. There was a lot of work being done by a lot of people. The words “spherical aberration” didn’t come up until, I remember one Saturday I was out water skiing with one of the PIs, Rich Harms, who built the Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS). We were water-skiing buddies. I lived in Annapolis, so there was water everywhere just like here. Anyway, I got a call from one of my buddies. I forget who it was, but they said, “We got the final data in, and there’s no question it’s spherical aberration, and we can’t fix it. The pads on the back of the mirror to change the shape of the mirror aren’t enough pressure.” And that was just devastating. I was totally devastated.
Contrary, again, to fake news, we didn’t hold our cards onto our vest. We immediately had a press conference the next week, June 28, which ironically was my son’s birthday, and I had the undeniably great honor to be the person on the dais who talked about what the science impacts would be. My boss’s bosses talked about a bunch of politics and other stuff, but then it came to me, I said, “Okay, what will we get? And what won’t we get?” So, I basically said, “We won’t be getting any images.” The headline in the New York Post was, “Hubble Pics Nixed.” I’ll never forget that. [laughs] And a cartoon was of Mr. Magoo and the Hubble, and “The true inventor of the Hubble.” I mean, this was great time, you know? So, I did the press conference to say that we’d be getting almost no science, but I said, “But there’s some good news: We are building a backup camera, and in three years we plan to go up and fix the Hubble, and we’re going to do it on cost and schedule.” Which we did! Nobody, of course, believed us, because we never did anything on cost and schedule. Nobody believed we could fix it with this camera. Only one person, Kathy Sawyer from the Washington Post. Dear old Kathy, she was a science writer. She gave us an honest story, and she was right. Anyway, I get emotional because these were tough times.
Considering the early development, the launch, the spherical aberration, the post-repair missions, to what would come after all those years of hard work, what was the dynamic between the Hubble team like?
During the spherical aberration, a lot of scientists said, “Ah, we knew that NASA would never pull this off,” and, “It would never be that good.” And they kind of walked away from Hubble. So, there was some exodus away from Hubble. But then in 1994, we had like eight press conferences between January and June, and every single one made front page news in almost every paper on Earth. And suddenly all these scientists come flocking back! And many of the biggest critics during the spherical aberration wound up making their careers on Hubble data—without naming names, but I could. [laughs] Anyway, the dynamic was like going from the bottom of Death Valley to the top of Mount Everest. It was just incredible. It was vindication with a capital V, because all the crap that the science team took, the ones that stuck with Hubble, suddenly at least we were vindicated. So, the dynamic was really—Hubble, there was really nothing bad you can say about it after 1994. It’s probably the greatest American comeback in scientific history. I mean, we really worked to the bottom of—as I said, people were just like, “How can you work on a national disgrace?” It doesn’t get worse than that.
Would you say then that there was a huge shift between those early days and after the repair missions?
Oh God, yeah. People were—I don’t want to say depressed—they were so focused, like a laser. There was a core team: the PIs, the Science Working Group. Many of our colleagues at the AAS, the American Astronomical Society—many of our colleagues didn’t think it would succeed and weren’t very supportive, frankly. But this team was focused, and it went through, and they made it happen. Again, I feel lucky, honored to be part of that team because I’ve never worked on a team like that in my life. It didn’t matter whether you were a contractor, a Goddard person, a headquarters person, a JPL person; badges didn’t mean anything. Everybody had one focus. It was like D-Day. There was a one focus.
Moving on from Hubble slightly, when did you first hear about the idea of the Next Generation Space Telescope?
It floated around. People talked about a next generation space telescope, but until Hubble was fixed, nobody would even—they said, “Shut up! Get out of here! Nothing’s going to happen!” So, it was a taboo subject.
Would you like a sugarless mint?
Sure. Thank you.
I used to be a smoker 20 years ago. This is part of the reason I’m not anymore.
Thank you.
I don’t have a lot of memory of it because it was just so alien. How could you be talking about—we’ve got this disaster we’re trying to fix, and you’re talking about—come on, get out of here. Get out of my office. I’m sure there were people who did that. But then 1994 came, January. Mikulski holds up the picture: “The trouble with Hubble is over!” [laughs] Another classic. I’ve got that picture on my wall someplace, with her quote.
In 1990… Let me see, I actually wrote it down because my memory is not as good as it used to be. The Dressler committee, Bob Williams called me up sometime in ’94 probably, or maybe ’95. I don’t know how long the Dressler committee lasted. I was on it, but I don’t keep a diary. Anyway, Bob Williams, the director of the [Space Telescope Science] Institute called me up. Hubble was rolling; they were moving ahead. He called me up and said, “Hey, I got this idea. AURA wants to sponsor a working group to study what we should be doing beyond Hubble. Now that we know Hubble’s a success—and it’s going to do a lot of important things, but it won’t do everything—what should we be doing?” And my initial reaction was, “My God! We just fixed this thing! Why are you asking for [exasperated noises]?” But Bob and I were good friends, so we had some repartee about that. I probably didn’t say let’s do it right away. It probably took me a week or two, but finally I said, “Okay, we’ll support it, and NASA will support the Institute doing this.” They were our contractor, so theoretically we had to support things they did, so it was kind of pro forma. But anyway, so I said, “Okay, but I want to be on the committee. I want to be an ex officio member on the committee, because I want to make sure they don’t go off into left field and propose something that’s 100 meters and requires a ton of unobtanium from Avatar.” [laughs] By the way, the word “unobtanium” that they used in Avatar, we were using that at NASA 30 years ago.
That’s where they got it from?
That’s why Avatar was such a great movie, I thought. Anyway, I said, “Okay, we’ll support it.” I knew Alan from the Hubble days, so that was a great committee. A lot of my friends were on it, worked hard. We kind of worked with chains on us, because we had to propose something that would do the science or come close to doing science but had to fit on current launch vehicles. And that was a big restriction. That kept us down to a four-meter monolith, so-called, on a Titan Centaur, which in those days would cost you $300 or $400 million, so it was huge. Just think of what $300 or $400 million dollars is in today’s dollars: way over a billion. There weren’t any Falcons in those days, or Ariane 5s and all that kind of stuff.
It was a space shuttle right?
And the space shuttle was too small... Anyway, long story short, the science was impeccable. We would really like to have six or eight meters, but four meters was the largest we could build. The Dressler report was coming out, and I knew it was coming out. I knew what was in it. I was a director of the Origins program at the time, so I had some walking around money, which is rare at NASA to have some reserves. But I had about $100,000 in reserve, and I felt that this was important that we follow up on this. We can’t just take this report and, like so many things in Washington, put it in a circular file and then forget about it.
Little did I know that John Mather would win a Nobel Prize, but John and I were good buddies. I called up John. I left a message because I got his answering machine. I said, “John, I got $100,000 burning a hole in my pocket. Would you like to lead a science team to study how we would do a next generation space telescope, a.k.a. the Dressler committee’s recommendations? And if you get this message, talk to John Campbell,” who was a project-manager type at Goddard who could be on the management side. And that’s how the connection, and John said, “Yes, I’d love to do this,” and the rest is history.
Was he your first call?
Oh yeah.
Did you consider calling other people?
Actually, no. I used to give a lot of leadership courses, and I wouldn’t walk in there with the kind of [inaudible], because I said, “What do you think I do as the leader of Hubble, or the leaders of space science that come up with all kinds of ideas?” And then I said, “No, nothing. I do nothing. I find people who can do the job, I give them the job, and I let them do it. That’s leadership. Leadership is not doing the work. Leadership is finding people who are smarter than you for specific jobs, because no one person at the top can do all the jobs below them.” So many people think differently. So, that was my thing with John. I wanted John. He’s a leader. He was a leader on COBE, the Cosmic Background Explorer. He understood infrared astronomy. He was the person I wanted, and it turned out he stuck with the program. God, when was that? 1995 to... 30 years. Now, I was on Hubble 34 years. [both laugh]
I actually wanted to go back a little bit. What was your reaction after hearing Dan Goldin’s bold statement at the AAS meeting? “Why such a small telescope?”
I’m sure you’ve heard many different opinions, a lot of negative things about Dan Goldin. For some reason, despite the fact that Dan fired a whole bunch of people and created chaos, Dan and I got along like this. And I asked him, when he was leaving finally, after six or seven or eight years—and this is the guy that made me the head of science at NASA—I said, “Dan, you’ve had so many problems with so many people, and run-ins, and da-da-da, you got a lot of bad press, not that you [inaudible].” I said, “Why do you think we get along? Why did we get along? Why didn’t we have these kind of problems?” He said, “Because you did something that nobody—very few people—ever do with me: you told me no.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Do you remember the Mars airplane that Ames Research Center proposed and were trying to sneak into the budget? And you’d use an Ariane and fly a little capsule to Mars and then let it go off a plane, and they can do this for 35 million. And remember how you kept telling me, ‘Dan, this doesn’t make any sense. They’re smoking dope. They’re way under—it’s going to cost tens of millions of dollars more’ You gave me all these technical reasons, but I was so”—Dan’s speaking—“I was so enamored about the sexiness of going to Mars and flying an airplane.” And now we’re flying helicopters, but this was 30 years ago. “And you kept saying, ‘No, no, no, no,’ and finally I cancelled it. That’s when I understood that you had something. You had the guts to tell me no. Most of my people say yes to whatever I want.” He says, “As a leader, I don’t want that. What good are you to me if you just tell me what I want to hear—what you think I want to hear?” So, Dan and I had a special relationship.
[laughs] But he would still blow my mind. I briefed him on John Mather and then the NGST. In those days it was NGST, “Next Generation [Space Telescope].” And he kept scratching his head and he said, “Why are you guys so enamored with this Titan Centaur and four meters? Clearly you need six or eight meters.” I said, “But Dan, we can’t fit it in.” He said, “Well, you know...” And this is where I’m trying to remember how much I can say here. Dan came from TRW which eventually became NGST [Northrop Grumman Space Technology], and they do large projects for the DOD. And they have technologies that I was privy to and Dan was privy to—that Dan was even more privy to, because he was there doing it. And he basically said, “Ed, there are technologies out there that will enable us to put a much larger telescope in the nose cone that open up like an umbrella.” And then I remembered, “Oh!” [brief redaction, restricted during Weiler’s lifetime]
And that’s why when he got up in front of the AAS [brief redaction, restricted during Weiler’s lifetime] Dan knew exactly what he was talking about, but the astronomers didn’t know. I said, “What do you mean a six- or eight-meter telescope?!” He said, “You astronomers!”—I remember the speech; it blew [their minds] because he didn’t tell them he was going to do this!—he got up there and said, “You guys are too good.” They thought he’d get up there and say, “You guys aren’t getting any money. You got Hubble. Shut up. I’m not giving you any more money.” But this was going to use technology that he personally was involved in. See, the thing is, you got Dan’s personal thing, and if you got his personal thing, oh man, you got him! So, he got up and said, “You astronomers are too damn conservative! Why not a six meter? Why not an eight meter?” And that was the marching orders. True story! One guy’s personality. One guy. That’s all it takes in Washington. When people say, “Oh, one guy can make a difference. One gal can make a difference.” It’s true! They can! If they’re in the right position at the right time and do the right thing. So, suddenly we had a six-to-eight-meter telescope, and the rest was history.
Now, there’s another whole story to this which I’m sure you’ve heard, and that is NGST—and I’ll say this now because I’m retired—wasn’t the best contractor in the world to work with. [brief redaction, restricted during Weiler’s lifetime] Phil Sabelhaus, who was a dear friend, one of the best project managers that Goddard ever had—he launched a lot of the Earth science satellites that are up there now—was project manager. And this was 2010. I had been at Goddard for four years, and JWST, contrary to what people might tell you, was not controlled by Goddard. The budget was controlled by headquarters by a guy named Mike Griffin, who believed centers had no right to control budgets, so the budgets were controlled by headquarters from the time I was at Goddard. And I call it musical chair AAs. They had four AAs. Sean O’Keefe, my reward for landing on Mars was to be shipped to Goddard. Another story. Anyway, so I went to Goddard, and they replaced me, and then they replaced me again. They replaced me four times in three years. And then finally, the end of the story is Mike Griffin got pissed off and said, “Ed, get back here.” So, I came back, but by then JWST had been squeezed. It wasn’t getting money. The AAs were ignoring it. It was just out of control. And Phil Sabelhaus came to me and said—this was 2010, March or February—Phil came down to headquarters and said, “I hate to say this, but I’ve got to say it: we’re running out of money again. The contractor is overrunning and overrunning. And what’s worse, I did some walking around the floor of the contractor, and some of the workers I trust, who could come up to me and whisper, they say, ‘Phil, management is telling us to milk NASA for every penny you can on this project. It’s a cash cow.’” God’s honest truth, he told me that.
That’s when I made a decision: either this program had to be funded correctly, or this contractor had to be taught a lesson, or the whole damn thing has to be cancelled. One of the three. I went up to Chris Scolese who was Associate Administrator, and Charlie Bolden at the time, three of us in the room, and I said, “I want a cancellation review of JWST. It’s out of control. We either have to cancel it, put the fear of God in the contractor, or get Congress to fund it. One of the three. But something’s got to be done.” I knew in my heart—this is something I couldn’t say at the time—I knew in my heart Mikulski would never let it get cancelled. But the word cancellation review and the political fallout of that was going to put red flags all over the place. Little did I know that too many humans were going to be hurt by that. I mean, I didn’t mean that—including myself, so I was hurt too. Because this guy Casani—I won’t get into the Casani review, because it was a bunch of bull. Casani said, “This is a great contractor. They’re making great technical progress.” Yeah, they’re burning up millions of dollars an hour! Come on, give me a break! It was just a one-sided review looking for scapegoats. Phil Sabelhaus was fired, basically. John Morris resigned. It was taken away from me and put under a special program, you know… And Casani would come to my office like this and said, “Well, it was your fault. You didn’t give them more money.” I said, “John, you come from JPL. Do you live in a different country? I don’t print money. Congress gives me a budget to spend. If JWST needs more money than that, I have to go back to Congress to get it. And they told me go away! All right?”
“Well, it’s your job to get more money. You should”—this was his solution—“You should have cancelled Hubble.” I said, “John, what country do you...!? Hubble is a big—It would be like shooting Snoopy!” [laughs] Or shooting a panda! Go to the Washington Zoo and shoot the panda. This is the guy who wrote the report which led to the firing, and poor Phil died of cancer a year later. So, I will never—as long as I live—I will never forgive Casani for what he did to human beings. Now, the good thing about the Casani review was it was so gross that money just poured out. By this time I had retired. People would come up to me and do interviews and say, “It looks like JWST got $4 billion in reserve now. Are you happy with what’s happened?” I said, “I’m happy with what’s happened, but unless something changes with the contractor, they’ll burn up every penny of that and use more.” And by the way, they did. And I said that not in 2021 but 2011.
Northrop Grumman did some great work—TRW when it was TRW. AXAF was a great success. They’ve done some great stuff, but JWST was not their finest day. Now, technically it’s working great. Yeah, but for $10 billion, it ought to! [both laugh]
I would like us to go a little bit further back as well. The Next Generation Space Telescope idea was conceived from the beginning as an international project, so how did this come to be?
David Southwood, you have to understand my relationship. Again, relationships in international—and especially in your game—it’s not just science, just in things diplomatic, relationships are so important. If you get two ambassadors who really trust each other, good things can happen. If you got two ambassadors who are like this, nothing is going to happen. David Southwood was the director of science at ESA, which was equivalent to the Associate Administrator of NASA, and I met him probably back in the mid ’90s, ’97 or ’98, when I became the AA. We would have yearly meetings; NASA, ESA—we call them bilaterals. They would come here one year; we would go there one year. We had bilaterals with David in Madrid and Stockholm. He had bilaterals here at Kennedy, at Annapolis, and Chicago. He would get to pick where he wanted to go in the United States. He always loved Chicago, so he’d pick Chicago. I hadn’t been to Madrid since high school, so I wanted—plus I wanted to see our tracking station there. And Stockholm, I hadn’t been. I went to 23 countries as a high school tour, and I wanted to go back to a few of them, like Scandinavia, because I loved it.
Anyway, so we would have bilaterals where our senior staff would get together with their senior staff, and the real work would be done at the senior-staff level. David and I would go out and walk in the forest or sit by the pool or whatever, [both laugh] and that’s where the real work was done in terms of the agreements. The people at the working level would deal with the nitty-gritty. You know, “You build this nut, and you build this washer.” That kind of thing. So, when JWST started going, I said, “David, I’ll tell you what we really, really, really need from you, because we don’t have—launch vehicles are hard to get in the US. The shuttle can’t launch this thing. Your Ariane 5 is just what we need to launch this thing. It’s got the right size nose cone; it’s got the success rate; and it will take a big chunk of money off of our budget, which, these things matter. And you could build a science instrument or a half of a science instrument to keep your science community happy, because, you know, we worry about them.” And he said, “Can’t happen. I can never give you a launch vehicle. I can do science, but I can’t buy a launch vehicle and do science.”
So, the first meeting didn’t go very well. He understood my point. I understood his point. I said, “Well, why don’t you try?” Fully knowing that David really wanted in. Long story short, by the second or third bilateral, within a year David had convinced ESA to go ahead, and we wrote an MOU, a memorandum of understanding. And a lot of people in America were shocked that we were able to pull this off. David deserves all the credit for making this happen because he broke precedent. He really broke precedent. And he did again in the Mars program later on. But I stayed at his house. He’s been in my house for dinner. My wife knows him. His wife knows me. We had one of our meetings in Plymouth; that’s where he lives. It was just a great personal relationship.
After Hubble, was it natural for it to be ESA?
Oh yeah. [crosstalk]
What was the process for working out issues on a joint international project of this scale? I’ve heard a little bit about the meetings, but was there preparation in terms of before you came into the meetings? How did you think about these things?
David and I worked at the 100,000-foot level. Launch instrument. Then, once the “leaders” did their job, which was basically, “Okay, NASA and ESA are going to work together, and this is the framework.” Then it’s the Peter Jakobsens, John Mathers, and John Campbell types—the project managers over there—to work out the nitty-gritty, the interfaces, the detectors: “Oh, we don’t have this technology here, but you have this technology. Maybe this instrument should be partially American and mostly European.” All those kinds of nitty-gritty things are done at, again, the Peter Jakobsen, John Mather-type level, and at the project manager level. You don’t want David Southwood and me doing that kind of stuff. That would be like Trump or Biden—never mind, that’s not important. I’m not going to go there. [both laugh]
I’m trying to get a sense of your diplomatic approach, if you will. So, like you explained, it’s about your personal relationship with David Southwood, and then how that was the initial connection to then allow the rest of the team—
I don’t think JWST would have been international if it weren’t for the personal side. I’m not saying it was me or David; it was the personal connection. Other people can have that personal connection. I did not have that kind of connection with the previous director of ESA, and I’m sure the previous director of ESA didn’t have that with the previous AA. David Southwood... Many people who know that relationship and know us will back me up on this, because we were amazing. We were able to do things that previous people couldn’t do with the bureaucracies. Because ESA has got a bureaucracy just as bad as ours. Different, but just as bad.
How did you first meet David Southwood?
When I first was Associate Administrator, Roger Bonnet—en français—was the director of ESA, and he retired after our first meeting. Our first meeting was in Annapolis, and we had a meeting, and not much happened. Roger and I never really—I mean, we were cordial and friendly and all that kind of stuff, but just didn’t click. The next meeting, I met David Southwood—and I think it was in Europe, it may have been in Paris, I don’t know—but there was just an immediate click. We both shared the disdain for the aggressiveness and avarice of a certain subcommunity in astronomy. I won’t name that subcommunity, but that kind of brought us together. There’s infrared astronomy, X-ray astronomy, UV astronomy, gamma-ray astronomy. One particular community always seemed to want everything, and we both said at the same time almost, “Oh, you have that problem too?” [both laugh] So, it worked out real well, and just personally, I can’t speak enough of him.
So, that was during the Hubble years when you first met him?
Yeah, ’98.
I understand that Bernard Seery was the first—
Bernie Seery.
Yes. He was the first project manager from NASA to go over to ESTEC for those initial conversations about a partnership. Was that meeting under your instruction?
Well, it wasn’t under my instruction other than “make it happen.” Again, I’m the kind of leader I don’t want to get into the details. If you’ve got a problem, if ESA wants to reduce it to a three meter, then I’m going to get involved. But as long as you stay within the framework, I really let people fly. People tell me they like working for me because of that.
I’ve heard a little bit about—well, I don’t know if you were there—the Wye River resort meeting. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Oh God. Can you tell me what happened? What was that a meeting between?
From what I know, that was the meeting with some of the Hubble veterans from ESA that were there with NASA associates, and they were trying to figure out what Europe was getting for JWST. So, I think that’s when they started pitching the spectrograph for the Europeans.
Oh okay, yeah. I was there, and David might have been too, but again, if I and he were there, we didn’t really get involved in those kinds of conversations, because that’s better left to the real scientists. I’m an astronomer and all that, but I’m not an expert in any specific kind of grading, or infrared detector, or this or that. So, we would be called into a room if there was a disagreement and we had to negotiate or try to solve a problem, but we were more in a problem-solving framework than an, “Okay, you do this, you do that, you do this, and you do that.” That wasn’t David’s method, and it wasn’t mine either.
Like you said, I know it was your idea to have the Europeans provide the Ariane 5 rocket to launch JWST into L2, which I understand, from what I’ve heard, took some of them by surprise. How did you come to that decision?
Took who by surprise?
The Europeans.
That we wanted to go to L2?
No, that they were supposed to provide the Ariane 5.
Oh. I can’t speak for how the Europeans below Southwood took this, but you know, [laughs] the only person I took seriously in Europe was Southwood. Anybody else below that didn’t matter. So, if people were surprised that we were going to use an Ariane 5, that kind of shocks me, because David worked that very early. I mean, that was always, always there, and certainly it was there by the time the MOU was signed. So, I don’t quite understand.
For NASA, was there ever a concern of the political implications of using a European rocket over an American one?
Oh yeah, absolutely. The American rocket people were really upset, and, “Why aren’t we using American hardware?” And I would say, “Okay, Mikulski,” or, “Okay, Shelby from Alabama, you want to come up with $400 million for a...” [claps] It was a very simple argument. [laughs] And our argument was—and by the way, every dollar that NASA got for JWST went to contractors! NASA doesn’t—people have an idea that, “Oh, the government is getting this money and spending it.” All we are is a flow-through. You know, JWST, the money went to JWST, it went to universities. Our salaries are peanuts compared—I mean, JWST’s budget could pay the salaries of all of NASA for a year.
Like you said, a memorandum of understanding between NASA and the European Space Agency was signed in 2007. What was the process leading up to the formal agreement?
Oh God, now you’re getting into international affairs and lawyers. I don’t know how long it took to get that thing done. Again, it’s like when I was in the Army. I cannot remember basic training because it was such a terrible experience being in Columbia, South Carolina, sweating like you know what, that I’ve erased it. Much of the whole MOU process I erased because it was so frustrating, because I don’t like dealing with lawyers and people. [sighs] It was a long process, and it was a lot of back and forth, back and forth, dotting i’s and crossing t’s. It’s not a simple process. And again, there was still talk about, “Why are we launching it?” People would throw at the last minute, as Dan Goldin would say, “a turd in the punch bowl that we’re trying to drink from.” About, “Why are we doing this on a European launch vehicle? Why aren’t we buying American?” Oh God. Anyway, so it took a long process, but it finally came together, and it took a lot of work by a lot of people. And I’m not saying negative things about international affairs or lawyers; they’re all necessary to get it to—because this has to be approved by the State Department. So, we have our international affairs people, we have our lawyers so that it goes through the State Department without too many more turds being thrown into the punch bowl.
What would you say were some of the factors that finally made it come together?
I think the fact that these are our NATO allies. Europe is our ally. Europe has been our most successful partner. We did Hubble together and other programs together. They’re the most capable space program in the world other than NASA. Hubble is a shining example of European collaboration. And cost-sharing saves American tax dollars. So, those are the kind of things: saving money, and NATO allies, and working with people who know what they’re doing.
And then, just because we haven’t talked about it really, how were your interactions with the Canadian Space Agency?
Because the Europe thing was so tough, it’s one of these things. The Canadians, that was like working with our buddies in Michigan. Canada has always been so close to us, I don’t think of them as a different country. [both laugh] I’m sorry, I don’t want to offend anybody in Canada, but that went swimmingly. They got in early. There was never a problem with MOUs and all that, and it just went fine. I had previous experience working with the Canadians on something called the Lyman FUSE, which was an ultraviolet spectrograph. I worked closely with them and ESA on that, so I knew the people, and we worked well together. Again, it must be because I really think of Canada as just—they’re our neighbors.
They’re a lot closer.
There’s no ocean between us.
How did the cooperation between is ESA, CSA, and NASA unfold during the early years of the development, once the formal agreements had been signed?
Again, I left in 2011, so not a lot was done on the launch. Their instrument was moving along. It had some problems with the cryocoolers which turned out to be a humongous overrun, not because of them, but because of a certain contractor who shall remain nameless, and a certain center in Los Angeles that will remain nameless. But hundreds of millions of dollars of overruns. Oh my God! That cryocooler was just a nightmare. But that was long after I left, so I can’t take credit for that. But things were going. The instruments were going fairly well by the time I left in 2011. The real crap was on the spacecraft, on the telescope and the spacecraft. And then of course it got worse and worse and worse.
A lot of the scientists that I’ve interviewed have expressed feelings about ITAR and the way that it impacted information sharing/communication between international partners and the overall development of the project, so I was wondering what your thoughts were on that.
I feel like reacting a certain way, but you know, “Get over it.” [laughs] ITAR… I’m a scientist, and I started out in a university, so I kind of understand the university ivory tower atmosphere. ITAR is a fact of life. We have to deal with it. We as scientists are not going to change it. It’s there for very good reasons. If you don’t believe that the Chinese are stealing everything that they can, go look at all the products that come back that were invented here, like the CCD. By the way, the CCD that takes pictures here, it came out of the DOD and Hubble back in the ’60s and ’70s, and our industry decided there was no commercial value other than astronomy, so they basically gave up the patent. They basically decided not to develop it.
I had a person from a major company come to my office when I was a young astronomer at NASA in the 1979 time frame and basically say, “Unless you guys in astronomy want to buy a lot more of these CCDs—charge-coupled devices—we’re going to have to get out of the business, because we don’t see any commercial value in the long run.” True story! I won’t name the company, but it used to make a lot of TVs here. But those were with tubes. And of course the rest is history. Now you can’t buy a—every imaging device on Earth is a CCD. That technology was invented by Texas Instruments and RCA in the United States, and then it was given away, and the Chinese and the Japanese... Just another personal bug I have.
This is one of those things you have to live with—it comes to ITAR, you know it might make things a little bit harder, but it’s necessary?
It makes things difficult, but you’ve got to live with it. Facts of life. Countries are out there stealing technology: fact of life. There’s terrorism. There’s all kinds of laws we have, whether we like it or not. I’m not a great person for wasting time. If you ask my wife, my saying is, “Never put off. If you got something for me to do, I’ll do it right now.” Don’t tell me I don’t really need to do it until next week. I just get it done. Get on with it. Don’t keep paying the electric bill; pay it once, and get on with it. Are there things about ITAR that are pain in the ass as a bureaucrat? Of course! And does it irritate people? Of course! But, it’s what I learned on the Hubble repair mission: keep your eye on the target.
From your experience, was the collaboration with ESA different in JWST compared to Hubble?
I don’t think so. It had many unique factors to it, but overall it went pretty well. I don’t know what the ESA people say about it. They’re rightfully pissed that they had to waste a lot of money waiting for Webb. I don’t blame them, I’d be pissed off too that our contractors took so long to get it right and were dropping hammers. My blood boils. [sighs] God, they grossly underbid that program. ESA has got a lot to complain about, a lot more than we have to complain about. But they’re good partners. That’s what ESA is, a good partner. They have always been a good partner.
What was the impact of the decadal survey’s support for JWST in 2000?
Without the decadals—you’re looking at a person who pushed decadal surveys from 30 years ago. When I first came to NASA, only astronomy had decadal surveys. During my reign as Associate Admistrator for Science, we forced decadal surveys on Heliophysics, Planetary, Earth Science. That was all yours truly. I’ll take credit for that, because I really saw the political advantage of it. Do we really want individuals at NASA or individuals in Congress telling us what missions we should do next? Or do we want the most respected scientific body on Earth, the National Academy of Sciences? I mean, duh! To me, it was a Homer Simpson moment. Why aren’t we doing this? Because people in Earth Science or Planetary would say, “This damned congresswoman or congressman is pushing this mission for her state or his state, and da-da-da.” Duh! Is Congress going to say, “We’re not going to listen to the National Academy of Sciences”? [laughs]
Of course now they probably—I’m talking about the way Congress used to be, when science was important and the country was important, not what party you’re in. You live in a different world. I don’t envy you and your future compared to—I mean, when I talk about Mikulski and Shelby, these Republicans and Democrats, they worked together; they made things happen. That just isn’t there anymore. “Abortion is more important than this,” and, “Where do you stand on this issue or that issue?” Come on, guys! Look at the bigger picture! I’m pontificating, but I have a right to. I lived in a different world.
In 2002, the Next Generation Space Telescope was renamed the James Webb Space Telescope after former NASA Administrator, James Webb.
Yeah, Sean O’Keefe.
Yeah, what was your perspective on that?
I thought that was the biggest single mistake NASA made. Naming a major scientific program, which takes a great deal of treasure out of the scientific pockets of Earth, naming it after a nonscientist was anathema, and most astronomers would agree with me. [Written addition by Weiler: It should have been named Lyman Spitzer or Nancy Grace Roman! Eventually, major scientific missions were named after those two!]
Oh, I didn’t know that.
Yeah. The American Astronomical Society will never give me any awards, because every chance I get, I like to point out that Nancy Roman was the mother of the Hubble Space Telescope. She made that happen. It may have been Lyman Spitzer going to Congress, and John Bahcall, but it was Nancy Roman holding the leash on their collar, telling them what to do, how to do it, and all that. I saw it from the inside. Thousands and thousands of astronomers, young ones and old ones, have made their careers, have been supported. Young graduate students have been supported because of that telescope. She deserves all the credit for making that happen. And our damned professional society never once gave her one award. [claps] Every chance I get in an interview, I point that out. I think that’s just… And I think it’s because they don’t like admitting that civil servants can be good scientists. Because Nancy Roman was a civil servant. Yeah, she didn’t publish after she became a civil servant—she devoted her life to serving her community.
She’s still a scientist.
So, she didn’t publish. Well, excuse me! What’s more important? And people would ask me about my career, “Why did you give up a research career at Princeton?” I said, “Because I worked for a guy named Lyman Spitzer, and at age 28 I recognized I was never going to be the kind of scientist he is. I could never be at the top of my field like he is. I might be a good scientist, I might publish a lot, but I’d never make a mark like he did, so I decided to go to NASA and try to help other people make a mark.” And I maintain that was a better path.
Like you said, the naming of Webb, was that consulted with the Europeans? Or was that a NASA decision?
No. I mean, knowing Sean O’Keefe, the way he was. My up-front honesty: he wasn’t my favorite Administrator. Again, he had no technical background whatsoever. He was a politician. He was Secretary of the Navy, whatever that got him. Anyway, knowing him, he probably didn’t consult with ESA. He might have called them up and said it’s going to happen, but it was his call because we were paying most of the money. But it was not a popular decision. It was not a popular decision.
Now moving on a little bit further, what was your perspective on the growing schedule and budget concerns around 2010–2011 that led to multiple hearings with Congress?
Oh, the thing I caused by asking for a cancellation review? I thought it worked out very well except that too many people got blamed. They were looking for scapegoats. That was a big mistake. I think the problem there was, again, business controls money. Northrop [Grumman] has a lot of political clout. They are a huge company. They build large systems for the government, and they make lots of money. They have a lot of friends on Capitol Hill. They have a lot of lobbyists. And this stupid Casani report played right into their hands. “Oh they’re a good contractor! NASA just isn’t giving them enough money!” And whether we like it or not, history has proven someone was right: There wasn’t enough money to give them! And they overran by billions, not millions. So, as it turned out, Congress wound up giving a lot of money, and it turned out it wasn’t enough. Homer says, “D’oh!” [laughs] Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, come on guys!
I wish somebody would write a book. Go into the deep archives and get every single cost proposal from NGST from day one: their initial proposal and every change. It wasn’t that NASA was frequently changing the specs! Six meters, a certain number of instruments, certain interfaces, Ariane 5 launch. They can’t blame us for changing. A contractor can—if you got a stupid project manager who every five minutes says, “No, I don’t want five-inch bolts, I want six-inch bolts. Eh, no, let’s go with four-inch bolts.” NASA wasn’t doing that! These were pure overruns. These were underbid overruns, and I wish somebody would tell the story someday, because there’s a PhD thesis there. [laughs] But it’s much easier to fire Phil Sabelhaus, etc.
It’s been interesting for me trying to trace from the different interviews, where exactly was this coming from? Like you said, was NASA not giving them enough money? Was Congress not giving NASA enough money? Were the contractors not writing the proper proposals?
This is very, very simple. Contractors would write a cost proposal. The project manager would ask for that money. That money might be X or Y. NASA would then propose that money to Congress. Congress would say, “Well, you may need Y, but we’re going to give you a little less, X.” Congress makes the decision, not NASA. But it all starts with the contractor. If they really needed $4 billion and not $1 billion, they should have told NASA that right away. And what would have happened? They would have been cancelled. So, use your own knowledge of psychology and figure out where the blame is.
Where the disconnect is, yeah.
This is not rocket science. I’m sorry, it’s not rocket science. [laughs] It’s not. People think it’s very complex. It’s not. It’s a game that’s been played from day one. Ultimately, NASA cannot create dollars. Like, John Casani said, “Cancel Hubble and just give the money”—even if I wanted to do that, even if that were the smart thing to do, I’d have to go to Congress and say, “Next year I want to cancel Hubble. Put the money in JWST.” Even if they let me do that, it would be a year or two down the road before the money appeared. Come on guys, that’s the way the government works!
Like you said, you retired from NASA in September 2011—
September 30, 2011. And I’m proud to say that I kept that secret until the Monday before the Friday I retired, except for my boss, Charlie Bolden and—they knew about it. Because I didn’t want all the damned blogs to start with, “He was fired!” Or, “He did this!” I retired. Geez, give me a break. I was tired. Really, it was the Mars program that I had worked so hard—this is a true story, now. I told this to some reporters, like Bill Harwood, who did my first interview like 45 years ago at Cape Canaveral. He’s still writing for CBS News.
The reason for your—
Oh, retirement! Right. I had worked so hard with David Southwood; had this Mars program collaboration in place; about to start working on MOUs; Charlie Bolden was very supportive. But someone below Charlie Bolden, who shall remain nameless, had connections in Congress and OMB and bad things happened. Anyway, Charlie Bolden, I admire him because he spent a lot of time trying to run an agency with people below him trying to undercut him, but that’s another story for another day. So anyway, the Mars program fell apart because people below Charlie got to the right people in OMB and decided that, “Ah, we don’t want to do this. We want to just forget it.” So, two years of work went down the drain in December. And the people I was dealing with at OMB were not technical people. And they were very inexperienced people, and they were making decisions that were affecting something that I would consider a major thing in the United States: our Mars exploration program. A lot of people are interested in Mars. A lot of people treat Spirit and Opportunity like pet pandas. If you’re sitting next to a person on a plane and you talk about Mars and the rovers, people will know Spirit and Opportunity. If you ask them who’s flying on the space station, they say, “Do we have a space station?” [laughs] True story! Name recognition. Hubble and Mars, everybody knows, but a space station?
Anyway, so December 2010 , OMB told me Christmas time that they’re killing it. And I told my wife. I said, “Barbara, I can’t take it anymore. This has gotten too political. It’s no longer about science. It’s about petty personal crap, and things going on, and power struggles between various people at the top of NASA, and stuff like that.” I said, “I gotta get the hell out of here.” So, long story short, we planned on moving. We came down. I took her on a vacation to KSC and I said, “Let’s drive down A1A. I’ve been to KSC—Kennedy Space Center—100 times, but I’ve never driven south, so let’s just drive south on A1A.” And an hour and a half later, we come to this place called Vero Beach. We looked around and said, “This is where we’re going to retire.” Honest to God. [laughs]
That’s lovely.
So, by September of that year we had bought a house and sold our house, and we moved down here in December of 2011.
How involved have you remained with both telescopes since then?
Actually, ironically, they run so well by themselves that I’ve not—I’ve been consulting with NASA ever since I left. I mean Goddard, JPL. I was on the JPL advisory group for four or five years, with David Southwood, I might add. So, he kept in touch once a year when he was at JPL. So, primarily the things I’ve been involved with are the planetary program: new Discovery missions, new Venus missions, some Mars missions, but more the future stuff. The stuff that’s up and operating that kind of run themselves—so what can I do when they’re doing pretty well on their own?
I keep track of stuff that’s going on, some of the science. There’s a major review paper that just came out, and I’m glad to see that the only thing that I was taught in graduate school about the early universe was a bunch of bull. [laughs] Because even when we launched Hubble, we thought the universe took two billion years to get things going, and all these hydrogen atoms slowly coming together and forming stars and galaxies, that had to take two billion years. Of course HST said, “Hey, it looks like it might have only been 200 or 300 million.” Now JWST is saying it might have been 100 million. So, nothing definitive yet, so I’m not going to make any grand conclusions, because it’ll take JWST at least a year or two or three to get all the data that’s needed to see what really was going on. But it looks like a great success, so I’m very happy about that.
The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on Christmas Day of 2021. After everything, how do you remember that day, the launch day?
Pride and fear. Because, again, this thing has such a disastrous story of contractors messing up, and things failing, and retesting, and—oh God, and overruns. The Europeans, I had full faith that the Europeans would get there. The Ariane 5 is like a Ford truck; it just goes forever. It was going to be pins and needles, because remember, I lived through the spherical aberration, so you don’t celebrate the launch. [laughs] You learn that lesson. Don’t count your chickens until you’re in the oven. So, I knew it was going to take months before the thing got out to L2. My biggest fear was not really the optical system opening up; there was enough previous work with other systems that they know how to do that pretty well. What previous systems didn’t have was that huge sunshade deployment. That’s what scared the hell out of me. And until that thing came out and was proven to be okay, I was pretty nervous. But then it all came together, and I said, “Well, I guess for $10 billion you can really make this happen.” [laughs]
Did you watch the launch here?
Yeah. That was during COVID, so I’m sure if I called up Southwood and said, “Hey, can you get me a seat on the plane?” The European plane, but then I’d have to fly to Paris and then back to—[laughs] You know, so...
Not the best time.
Not during COVID. I was not going to. I’m too old to mess with COVID.
I know you mentioned a little bit about your expectations, but what was your reaction when you saw the first data come in?
Mixed emotions, because, again, if you have enough money you can do great things. I wasn’t sure. They didn’t give us a lot of confidence over the years, so could they pull this off? And to their credit, just like Perkin-Elmer on Hubble, they built the world’s smoothest, most accurate mirror ever! One itsy-bitsy problem: it was the wrong prescription. [laughs] So, when you lived through that, you’re from Missouri, so you want to really be sure of those first pictures and all that. But when I first saw the first images, especially the first deep field images, I said, “Yeah, this thing really is going to meet spec and is going to do more than we ever promised, just like Hubble.”
When we launched Hubble, even before spherical aberration, many reporters said, “This is way overhyped. They’re never going to do all this stuff. They’re not going to prove the black holes exist or look at early galaxies. They’re not going to do any of this stuff.” It was called the triple crown of Hubble. It think it was proving black holes exist, seeing the earliest galaxies beyond a billion years, and I forgot the third one. Anyway, we made all these promises before launch. I was one of them giving all these talks around the country. And even when we launched, they said, “Ah, it was all hype. It will never be that good.” And then after spherical aberration, it was, “We told you so. Not only is it not that good, it’s not better than ground-based telescopes.” And of course by year three or four or five, not only had we done all the triple crown, not only did we prove a black hole existed in M87, we’ve proven that they exist in almost every galaxy we look at in the sky. We saw galaxies back to 300 million years. And things that we never expected to do: finding all these protoplanetary disks, saying that all stars probably have solar systems. We never promised that. But that changes your—that’s not just a scientific thing that’s a philosophical thing—
Existential.
—For humans. It’s existential. There used to be this Drake Equation, you know, if a one-in-a-million chance of this, one-in-a-million chance. And you go through the Drake Equation, and life was probably not very common. But it assumed planets were rare! When I was in college, you couldn’t talk about extra-solar planets. I mean, that was like, “Oh God, you’re crazy! You’re science fiction.” And life? Forget it! It was called the Goldilocks theory when I was in college. That is, why is there life on Earth? Because it’s perfect. Mars is too cold, Venus is too hot, Earth is just right. 72 degrees and water. And here we go, just in my lifetime, with Hubble and Kepler and a few other telescopes, and now JWST, not only are we not the only solar system, but it looks like almost every star has a solar system. Many stars have planets the size of Earth. And we’ve also discovered in biology—my wife’s a Harvard PhD biologist, so she knows this stuff—we discovered that life is not the Goldilocks theory, that things have to be perfect. We’re finding life in boiling sulfur pools in Yellowstone, at the bottom of Antarctic lakes, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The unifying theme is that if there’s water, energy—heat or sunlight—and carbon—organic material—there’s life! It’s all over the place. “Well, there’s none of that stuff in the universe, right?” The universe is full of water molecules! Carbon is all over the friggin’ place! And energy? Give me a break.
I gave this talk when I moved to Vero because they found out I was Hubble and all that, so I gave a talk called “A Walk Through the Universe with Hubble and NASA’s Search for Life.” And the way I would end it, after talking about biology and Hubble and all that, is saying, what Hubble has shown us from the Hubble Deep Field is that there are about 10 to the 33 stars in the universe because the Hubble Deep Field: 5,000 galaxies, 1/200,000,000 of the sky. You can do the math. Every galaxy has 200 billion stars. So, 1 followed by 33 zeros, that’s how many stars. But stars aren’t planets. Hubble and Kepler have shown us most stars have planets. Hmm. Well, let’s say only a 1 in a 1,000 of those stars has an Earth. Oh my God, 1 in 1,000? That’s nothing. All it means is it’s 1 followed by 30 zeros Earths. Oh, but what if was the Earth is too far from the Sun or too close? Well, let’s say 1 in a 1,000 of those Earths are just at the right Goldilocks point. Oh, drop another 3 zeros, so 1 followed by 27 zeros. Hmm, okay. Well, let’s say that intelligent life takes more than just biological, or the plant life or whatever, so let’s only say 1 in 1,000 of those Goldilocks Earths develops intelligent life. Drop another 3 zeros: 1 followed by 24 zeros. Hmm.
Now, how arrogant do you have to be to think that humans are the only intelligent life in the universe, when the math I just did, which is extremely conservative, shows that there must be 1 followed by 26 zeros Earths? [laughs] People just are like, “Wow!” If I do say so myself. Really, you could drop a pin in the room. Because you can’t use scientific—you can’t say “10 to the 33rd” and all that, but if you say the words “one followed by zeros,” that can... So anyway, that was fun. I did that about 12 or 13 times, from the Indian Harbor Bar Association, to the old people’s home, to my own community here.
That’s nice. How do you feel about providing open access data to the scientific community early in the mission?
We do that. I mean, that’s a complicated question. You have to give the PIs who spend their lives—like when Hubble hits in 30, 25 years—you have to give them the first crack at the data they get. So, on Hubble, about 20 or 30 percent of the early data went to the so-called guaranteed-time observers, and they had one year to assimilate the data and publish and then become open access to everybody. JWST is something similar. I don’t know exactly what they landed on because most of those agreements were agreed to after I had left.
So, I’m kind of in the middle on this. Satellites which have PI-class—PI, principal investigator—instruments that are built by—should have some data that’s theirs to get out first and get credit for, but the rest of the data should be open to guest observers. And I, yours truly, basically was a huge fan of guest observers. I created guest observer programs on all the missions, and also limited proprietary time, and more importantly made sure that all science was funded on these missions.
A little known fact: on ST, Hubble, their guest-observer budget was nothing almost. At the same time I was writing that M&R, the maintenance and refurbishment white paper in 1983, I also wrote a white paper on science funding and did an analysis of how much it cost to analyze these CCD images with millions of pixels. And I came up with an analytic way to figure out how much a graduate student would cost, or how many hours, and how much a summer salary for a professor is, publication, da-da-da. And I came up with a number like $30,000 or $40,000 per year grant, and 300 users, and came up with a budget of $10 or $20 million. Somehow I sold that and got it into the budget, and then more importantly fenced it off for Marshall Space Flight Center and Goddard and kept it in the budget protected. And that kind of thing is now done on every mission. The science budget is protected, because again, the old NASA project managers would use science as their bank because, “That comes later. We don’t worry about the science budget. We’ll take the money now and use it.” [laughs] But why launch if you don’t have any science? It all sounds so easy, but it’s not.
From what I’ve understood throughout this time, there’s a feeling that diplomacy is somehow different when it comes to science, that it transcends borders and language because ultimately science is science.
Yeah. I mean, it’s not religion. I guess it is for some people. [laughs] But it’s not what religion you are, or what’s your stand on, I don’t know, pick your issue. Science, nobody owns it. Especially astronomy. It’s so good to be an astronomer because everybody can understand what it’s about. It’s not microparticles, or nuclear bosons, or whatever. People can go out and look at the stars; they see it.
I always found diplomacy, except for the bureaucracy, to be fairly easy. It was fairly easy to come to agreements. Some people may see it differently, but again, I should stop. I had the advantage of working with somebody who was simpatico, and that may be the key. That may be the key.
Given your experience throughout your career and with multiple projects, what can you say about the impact of having those international partnerships on the success of extremely complex scientific missions?
For the grossest reason, many projects could never get started without the financial benefit of having a partner. In many cases, having an international partner, for budgetary reasons, helps sell it with Congress. Having an international partner who is a strategic partner, like Europe and the US is, helps for the American people, for the State Department, for the White House, and things like that. On the science side, having different viewpoints on the science… Stools need three legs, right? It’s a three-legged stool. It’s the funding for Congress, it’s the politics for the White House, and the scientific diversity of thought. Because everybody has a different view. Even in astronomy, there are different ways of thinking, different ways of approaching things, on building instruments. They build instruments differently than we do. So, diversity is a good thing despite what some politicians might say.
What do you think is the value of continuing to pursue these joint projects with other space agencies and international partners? Not just for unmanned operations, but now that the human spaceflight program is starting to revamp again?
In the future, what’s the value?
Yeah, what do you think is the value of continuing to do that? Is that something NASA should keep doing?
Oh, absolutely. Especially—and some people in Congress don’t understand this—we’ve done the easy stuff in astronomy and planetary. In planetary, we’ve flown by Mars; that was easy. We’ve orbited Mars; that was a little tougher. We’ve landed on Mars; that was really tough. Ask the Russians; they’ve never done that successfully. [laughs] To bring back soil samples from Mars is really going to be tough, and it’s going to be more costly. How much money is the country willing to spend on the more costly science?
Because whether we like it or not—I mean, some of these people out there are saying, “Oh, we can do great science by flying on these suborbital tourist missions where we’re weightless for four minutes.” Yeah, you can do great science. You can throw M&Ms weightlessly into each other’s mouths and count them, but you’re not going to do any world-class New York Times science. Come on, give me a break. That actually was a big issue. There were certain people within NASA who shall remain nameless, who thought that this space tourism thing was a great boon to science. Just think of all the great science you can do on these little space planes that go up and come down like Alan Shepard did when you weren’t even born. [laughs] [exasperated noises] Yeah, maybe high-school science, seventh-grade science, but come on. We got Hubbles and we got Mars rovers.
You mean space tourism with civilians?
Yeah, but you’d fly astronomers out there, or space scientists. And I used to say, “What’s the difference? Are the space scientists going to throw the M&Ms across?” [laughs] It’s all about dollars. These people were interested in funding people like Elon Musk, and it was one of the many reasons I left NASA and got the hell out of there, because things were going... I used to do this all the time. What are you talking about? Science on a space-tourism four-minute flight? Alan Shepard flew in 1961! So yes, it is really important to continue these collaborations, even more so because of the money side of it, and maybe even the politics side, especially with Russia and China going on. Apparently some presidential candidates don’t believe it’s important to be friends with Europe, but I believe it is, because I remember the Cold War, and Russia is not good.
For one of my last questions, now that you’ve been retired and a little bit separated from the politics of it, what is your perspective on the current status of astronomy? We’re seeing a potential cancellation for Chandra. There’s different perspectives on where the different programs should go. Now we have Artemis—
My personal view is, first of all, I was a great supporter of human space flight, especially the space shuttle, but for a selfish reason: Hubble would have been space junk if it weren’t for humans in space and the space shuttle. The space shuttle rescued Hubble. Astronauts like John Grunsfeld—my good buddy—who went out there three or four times to fix Hubble, they saved Hubble’s rear end. They saved astronomy. Astronomy would have been in serious trouble today if Hubble… If Hubble had died, I don’t think we would have had an astronomy mission for 20 years. So, the space shuttle and fixing telescopes in space was a great use of humans in space. And that’s where I’ll stop.
I don’t see a great value in spending billions and billions and billions and billions and billions on going to the Moon. Been there done that. Believe it or not—I don’t care what some of the people on Twitter say—we were on the Moon. We landed on the Moon. We brought back 500 pounds of rocks. We could prove we were on the Moon. We left laser reflectors up there. If we didn’t do that, how the hell are our lasers beams reflected back to us? And on and on. I won’t go on. But the Moon is a lifeless, dead body. Yes, it may have some ice at the north pole. So what? That ice is sitting at minus 400 degrees. What machine are we going to make that’s going to go into the shadows and work at 400 degrees and mine ice? The little details like that. And then what do we do with it? Oh, we’ll use it for rocket fuel. To do what? “Oh, we’ll build things on the Moon.” I’m a scientist. I ask, “Is there a scientific reason to go to the Moon?” I hear silence. It’s a dead body. It’s lifeless.
This transcends science. It also goes into philosophy, existentialism, and human nature. From the very first time that Fred Flintstone looked up at the sky and looked at that star, and Wilma said, “What do you think that is, Fred? You think there are other people up there?” people have wondered, “What’s out there? Are we alone?” When I became AA—I’ll get back to this—when I became Associate Administrator, they gave me all this material, all these viewgraphs, all these strategic plans, 25 pages, how we sell our program, how we convince America that this is a good science program. And I was driving home on US-50—which goes to Annapolis—one night. And I was half eye-on-the-road and half eye-on-a-three-by-five card, and I wrote down three or four questions: How did the universe begin? How did we get here—humans, the Earth? Where are we going? What’s going to happen in the future? Are we alone? I went into work the next day, and we had a staff meeting, and I said, “Guys, no more strategic plans. I want you to make up some viewgraphs on each one of these questions. These are what we’re going to sell. This is why we do astronomy.” That’s how we sold NGST. That’s how we sold the Mars program, the search for life. That’s the ultimate reason NASA exists, because humans do care. No matter if they’re arguing about abortion today, or Russia tomorrow, or China; ultimately everybody, if they’ve got half a brain, is interested in the idea, “Are we alone? How did we get here? What’s this all about?” And that’s what it’s—where was I going with that? I’m sorry.
Oh, Artemis. The reason I didn’t come back to that is because Artemis has nothing to do with those fundamental questions! There’s nothing on the Moon that’s going to go after those four things. We know the Moon was part of the Earth. That’s been proven many times; it was part of the Pacific Ocean. We know it’s four billion years old. We know it’s got a molten—Yeah, it’s an interesting geological body, but excuse me, does it compare at all with spending that money on building a telescope, for instance, that can look at planets around other stars and just answer the questions? Do the lights go off at night, or do the lights come on at night? You watch a planet around their star. This is something very simple. As the night side of the planet comes around, do you start seeing lights? Do you start seeing lines across continents like interstate highways? Do you ever see a picture of the Earth at night? Unless there are a lot of fireflies, there’s life on that planet. But think about that. We have the technology to do that with the right amount of money, certainly with the amount of money we’re spending on the Moon.
Another thing, even a simpler thing, is the reason we have oxygen in the atmosphere; there was never oxygen on the Earth until the plants started growing. They took carbon dioxide and turned it into oxygen. We have methane in our atmosphere, a little bit of methane. Not because methane’s natural. It’s because we have cows and termites! And you can imagine why they produce methane, a lot of it! We look at these planets and look for carbon dioxide, water vapor, and ozone, which will cause more oxygen, and methane. If you find those three things—there are only four things—there’s only one reason those four things exist on Earth: life. You’ve proven that. And how many times in the history of humankind will we prove that we’re not alone? Once. So, do we do Artemis, or do we do that?
That was my next question. What do you think is the future of astronomy as recommended by the decadal survey of 2020? The new Great Observatories.
One of the core values of the decadal survey is searching for planets and searching for life, and I think that’s the most important thing NASA can do. I think that’s the one thing they can do that will get funding, but I think it’ll never be done if you’ve got a Moon program, just like a lot of things didn’t happen because of Apollo. Apollo was good; we should have done it once. But again, been there done that. And just think, we did it without iPhones. I wish a lot of people your age would think about that. [laughs] How did we do it without iPhones? We did it because we didn’t have iPhones! We weren’t doing social media; we were concentrating! [laughs]
Yeah, there are so many more factors now.
So many distractions.
And it gets so much more complicated.
I pity. I don’t know how people can focus anymore. You’re looking at a person who’s never done Facebook, Instagram, anything; and primarily because when I was early as Associate Administrator and got my security clearances, we were encouraged not to get involved with that stuff, with the kind of security clearances we had. And I’ve always lived by that, and I’ve never fallen back. You’re looking at a person who doesn’t have an iPhone. I have a flip phone. I have a burner, literally a burner, because I discovered something when I retired. Because I was addicted. I admit I was addicted. We had Blackberries and original iPhones, but Blackberries were essentially an iPhone; you could do Internet and social media and all that crap. And on September 30, 2011, I had to take my—turn it in. And this is the thing, I would be laying in bed at night doing email and [motions typing on the phone]. The next day, which is Saturday, I turned on this device on my desk in my den, and it was with a big screen and keyboard, and I discovered something: Wow! You can do email and type really fast and actually read the stuff without glasses! Who knew? You could download an image from the Internet and have it 25 inches across! Who knew? I never looked back. [laughs] I never looked back. I went out and got a flip phone, and that was it. I don’t text, I don’t do anything. I know I sound like a dinosaur. I’m addicted to email. You send me an email, it’ll be answered 20 minutes.
I appreciate that.
But I just worry about your generation and their ability. This is interesting: the fact that really it directly affects your thesis. I really worry that your generation and generations even older than yours... I grew up in a world where you had to communicate verbally. You had to face people like this at meetings. You had to talk. When I talked to David Southwood, it wasn’t with text. It was very seldom with email. It was usually face to face or by phone. When I testified to Congress, it was face to face. When I go in to talk to congresspeople, face to face. International negotiations are really delicate. A lot of community and a lot of the nuances you learn in those kind of interactions are incredibly important. The so-called “tell.” People have poker, and they have tells. They have tells when they’re negotiating, whether they’re really being sincere or not sincere.
That’s diplomacy.
Yeah. How does your generation develop those skills if they do all their communication with text? It’s an interesting thought. I even threatened to write a book about this, about the destruction of the Americans’ ability to communicate. Blame it on the iPhone. It’s worrisome, because in a more and more complex world where you’ve got Russia and China and the US and all that, we need good diplomats. We need delicate negotiations. I hope the way they’re solving the Israeli-Arab war is not by text, because they’re not going to work. You don’t communicate with 32 letters or whatever. Anyway, I’m pontificating again.
Is there anything else that you’d like to discuss or that you’d like to add?
No, I think what you’re doing is a real interesting topic. If you get a chance at all, even on the phone, to talk to David Southwood to get his perspective, it would be really, really, really worthwhile. Because he was central in JWST. And we didn’t talk much about the Mars collaboration, but he was central in making things happen there, so he has a different perspective, and a whole different bureaucracy perspective.
Yeah, if you could give me his contact information, I would love to reach out to him. Thank you so much for your time and for doing this interview, I really appreciate it.
It was fun. I enjoyed it.
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