Greg Robinson Fixed NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, Reluctantly

In 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope, the beleaguered project to build an instrument that could gaze back to the earliest stars in the universe, appeared to be going off the rails. Again.

The pieces of the telescope and its instruments were complete, but they needed to be assembled and tested. The launch date was slipping further into the future, and the costs, already approaching $8 billion, were again rising. Congress, which had provided several major infusions of financing over the years, was unhappy that NASA was asking for yet more money.

This is when Gregory Robinson was asked to take over as program director of Webb.

At the time, Mr. Robinson was the deputy associate administrator for programs at NASA, making him responsible for assessing the performance of more than 100 science missions.

He said no. “I was enjoying my job at the time,” Mr. Robinson recalled.

Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, asked him again.

“He had a kind of the confluence of two skills,” Dr. Zurbuchen said of Mr. Robinson. “The first one is he had seen many projects, including projects that were in trouble. And the second piece is he has that interpersonal trust-gaining activity. So he can go into a room, he can sit in a cafeteria, and by the time he leaves the cafeteria, he knows half of the people.”

Eventually, Mr. Robinson relented. In March 2018, he stepped into the task of getting the telescope back on track and into space.

“He twisted both of my arms to take over Webb,” Mr. Robinson said.

His path to that role seemed an unlikely one.

At NASA, Mr. Robinson, 62, is a rarity: a Black man among the agency’s top-level managers.

“Certainly people seeing me in this role is an inspiration,” he said, “and also it’s acknowledging they can be there, too.”

He says there are many Black engineers working at NASA now, but “certainly not as many as there should be” and most have not risen high enough to be seen by the public, for example taking part in news conferences as Mr. Robinson has following the launch of Webb.

“We have many things going on to try to improve,” Mr. Robinson said.

Born in Danville, Va., along the state’s southern edge, he was the ninth of 11 children. His parents were tobacco sharecroppers. He attended an elementary school for Black children until fifth grade, when the school district finally integrated in 1970.

He was the only one in his family who pursued science and math, with a football scholarship paying his way to Virginia Union University in Richmond. He later transferred to Howard University. He earned a bachelor’s in math from Virginia Union and a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Howard.

He started working at NASA in 1989, following some friends who had already worked there. Over the years, his jobs included deputy director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, and deputy chief engineer.

The Webb assignment came in the midst of bad publicity for the project.

The target date…