At this point you have probably seen one of the five pictures taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. But you may not have known that the man behind the success is Gregory Robinson, a Pittsylvania County native and 1978 graduate of Dan River High School. 

On Tuesday, July 12th, NASA released a series of pictures taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, which has been dubbed as the largest and most powerful space telescope in the world. Now that the telescope has entered its science operations, it will allow researchers to look inside of dust clouds to see new stars that are forming and help them look for signs of life on planets outside of our solar system. 

For this week's episode of PittCo Happenings, we interviewed Robinson about his local connections, experience working with NASA, the Webb telescope program, and advice for listeners. Listen wherever you get podcasts, or below. You can also read a transcript of the interview. 

Before Pittsylvania County Schools integrated in 1970, Robinson attended three elementary schools in the County: Southside, Mount Hermon, and Glenwood. He attended Blairs Junior High School before going to Dan River High School in the ninth grade. Robinson was the ninth of eleven children born to a family of sharecroppers, and he was the only one to pursue a STEM-related field. He earned a Bachelor’s in Math from Virginia Union University and a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from Howard University. Before the pandemic, Robinson says that he would visit his family in Pittsylvania County several times a year. 

Robinson has been working for NASA since 1989 and became the Director of the James Webb Space Telescope Program in 2018. As an electrical engineer, Robinson says the space part is really the product of the application of building systems. 

"The scientists say, 'we want to go to a certain place in space and study certain things,' and of course, we flow down those requirements to something smaller, something we can build," Robinson said. 

The James Webb Telescope program first launched in 2002. Since it's launch, Robinson says that approximately 20,000 different people have worked on different elements of it. When Robinson assumed the Webb Program Director position in 2018, the program was behind schedule and over budget. The New York Times reported that within a few months Robinson brought the efficiency schedule from 55% to 95%. In his interview with Pittsylvania County, Robinson explained that there were several primary areas he focused on to get the project back on track: 

• Improving alignment between a variety of organizations, including the NASA team, the contractor workforce, the White House, and Congress. 
• Creating more detailed, and thorough plans that stretched further into the future. 
• Fostering a culture of transparency where all stakeholders had the same level of information and were kept informed of any changes or updates. 

With a successful launch, the Webb telescope, which includes both optical and infrared viewing, is already capturing images of never-before-seen areas of space. These images are also showing scenes from the early days -- or what Robinson described as the "toddler years" -- of the universe. These areas are so far away that the light has travelled millions of light years by the time it reaches the Webb telescope.  

"We are actually seeing stars and galaxies that actually started many hundreds of million, and in some cases, a few billion years ago, and that light is just reaching us. So, we're looking at something that happened a long time ago just reaching us," Robinson said.

When asked what he wanted to share with the Pittsylvania County and Danville communities, Robinson provided the following pieces of advice: 

• Invest time and energy into schooling and go to college if possible.
• Find something that you are interested in and work hard at that. 
• Maximize interactions with people and be intentional about working in teams of all sizes.

Below are some additional resources and articles about Robinson and the Webb program. 

• March Danville Register & Bee article about Robinson
• Robinson's feature from Time's 100 most influential people of 2022
• First images from the James Webb Telescope