2 2 | L E H I G H B U L L E T I N And he was experiencing a roller coaster of emotions. At stake was decades of people’s work—and millions of hours—spent building the complex Webb telescope, an international collaboration among NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. As vice president and programmanager of the Webb telescope at Northrop Grumman, Willoughby led a team tasked with most of its design and construction—a telescope near seven times the size of its predecessor, the Hubble, much more powerful and capable of detecting stars farther out in space, some 14 billion light years away. Too big to fit into any existing rocket, the Webb telescope had to be folded up, like origami, at launch, to eventually be unfolded and deployed in space. Eighteen gold-coated hexagons that reflect infrared light make up its main mirror, all protected by a multi-layered sunshield to block out the hot sun and keep the mirror cold for imaging. Some 25 years in the making, the Webb telescope cost $10 billion to build. For Willoughby, who has been with the project for more than 12 years, watching the Webb telescope finally head for the heavens was like experiencing one of his children leave the roost. “You see the countdown clock coming, and you feel it in your stomach,” saysWilloughby, in interviews with the Bulletin and the “Rossin Connection” podcast. “This is a hugemoment. Because when they light that rocket and it goes, that’s it, that’s a huge part of your fate, right? You’re igniting a bunch of chemicals to blow up underneath [the rocket] to propel [it] into space. And it goes ... flawlessly. You’re sitting and you’re watching. It’s a surreal feeling. “Because of this deployment sequence that still has to happen after we get on orbit—two weeks of high anxiety of deployments and months of calibration—you really don’t know where to celebrate. Everything feels good, but there’s one more thing after. You’re ready to explode with joy because the rocket launches. Oh, but we still have to separate the payload fairing. Whoof! Then the payload fairing comes out. We still need to separate from the upper stage.” An upper stage camera provided a last look at the Webb telescope as it left the launch vehicle and headed toward its final destination 1 million miles fromEarth. “All of a sudden there isWebb, and it separates from the upper stage, and for the last time humankind is going to seeWebb,”Willoughby says. “Literally these cameras are showing the backside of our telescope in its folded form drifting away. And then there’s the Earth horizon below in the cameras. … At that moment, it’s real. And the goosebumps are on you. The tears are welling. I can feel it just describing it to you now, because you’ve invested somuch.” In early January, after completion of the Webb telescope’s final major deployment, Willoughby sat down for the two separate interviews to talk about the space observatory and what it means for humankind. He also talked about his blue-collar roots, his Lehigh days and his own personal journey from a self-described smart-aleck kid growing up in East Rutherford, New Jersey, to leading the Northrop Grumman team on one of the most consequential developments for humankind. The interviews were combined and edited for space and clarity. As the James Webb Space Telescope launched into histor y on Chr istmas morning 2021 f rom a spacepor t near the equator in Kourou, French Guiana, Lehigh elect r ical eng ineer ing alum Scot t Wi l loughby ’89 was there in the cont rol center. . . GOLDEN The Webb telescope’s main mirror is made up of 18 gold-coated hexagons that reflect infrared light. Here it stands in a clean room in NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston before undergoing a cryogenic test.
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