Gregory L. Robinson: Early Reader Edition

Gregory L. Robinson Portrait Wikimedia Commons

Gregory L. Robinson is an American Engineer who worked for NASA. He is most known for his work on the James Webb Space Telescope. There had been lots of delays in the project, but Gregory Robinson took over and made sure the telescope was launched into space in 2021.

Gregory Robinson was born in 1960 in a countryside area in Virginia. He had ten brothers and sisters. He finished high school in 1978 and got a full football scholarship to Virginia Union University. This means he was so good at football that the university paid his tuition fees for him. He started at the university by studying math but decided that was not right for him and changed to electrical engineering instead.  

After he finished university, Robinson started working for NASA in 1989. He was soon put in charge of the Goddard Space Flight Center. After that, he became the Deputy Center Director of the John H. Glenn Research Center. Whilst working as the Deputy Center Director, he was in charge of 114 different missions! Between 2005 and 2013, he was a Deputy Chief Engineer at NASA. He has been in charge of lots of different parts of NASA!

In 2018, Robinson was asked to take charge of the James Webb Space Telescope Program. At first, he said no because he liked the job he was already doing so much. However, his boss explained to him “how important Webb was to NASA and really to the world.”[1] The people at NASA really wanted the telescope to be finished, so Robinson agreed to take the job.

NASA began creating the Webb Telescope in the 1990s, but lots of things happened which stopped the project from being finished. When Gregory Robinson took over, he was in charge of more than 20,000 people! He managed to organize them all to make the work get done quicker. Robinson’s boss, Thomas Zurbuchen, described him as, “the most effective leader of a mission [he] had ever seen at NASA.”[2]

Robinson said there were two key changes he made to make sure the Webb Telescope got finished.

1. He made sure the entire team (all 20,000) were organized so that every single one was working together to get the job done.
2. He made sure that new people came in so that they would bring new ideas.[3]

In December 2021, the telescope was sent into space. Six months later, it sent its first set of data back to Earth.[4] After working at NASA for more than 30 years, Gregory Robinson retired.

In an interview with PBS, Robinson explained that there need to be more people of color given jobs as leaders, just like he was. He said,

I shouldn’t be the first one. Hopefully — and I have had this conversation with others — in five years, Greg Robinson will just be a common name leading programs around NASA.[5]

Gregory L. Robinson is an inspiration not only because of his skills as an engineer, but because of his leadership skills. He is a science hero and an inspiration to young people.

[1] Woodruff, Judy. NASA engineer honored for work overseeing launch of James Webb Space Telescope. [Online] Available https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/nasa-engineer-honored-for-work-overseeing-launch-of-james-webb-space-telescope.2023.

[2] Cohen, Ben. The NASA Engineer Who Made the James Webb Space Telescope Work. [Online] Available https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-greg-robinson-images-11657137487.2023.

[3] Woodruff, Judy. 2023.

[4] https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/

[5] Ibid.