The James Webb telescope had 344 'single point failures' before launch
This week, we got a new view of space. And it was epic. Cosmic cliffs of glowing gas, spinning galaxies, dying stars. The James Webb telescope caught those images of ancient history — billions of light years away — showing what the universe looked like when it was just forming after the Big Bang. Some 20,000 people worked on the project for almost two decades, including engineer Bill Ochs, who has been the project manager since 2011. He joined All Things Considered to share the journey to this monumental snapshot in time. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. On what the project first looked like when he joinedWhen I came on board, they had just gone through an external review and it was basically concluded that they weren't going to make their current launch date, which I think at that time was 2013. We didn't have enough money. So when I came on board, I was asked to go ahead and put together a re-plan, which was quite challenging because, you know, you're brand new onto something. To re-plan a mission of this complexity is a pretty steep learning curve. The complexity of this mission and testing it on the ground made us understand we really needed a little bit more time. On the difficulties of keeping faith for such an ambitious projectIn all honesty, I don't think I ever got to that point of really feeling like, hey, it's never going to work. I did hit my retirement age at one point [three years ago], and I thought, you know, maybe I should just retire. And then I'm like, no, I got to see this out to the end. But that was it. I mean, I tell folks all the time. The type of words I never heard on this project in the 11 1/2 years that I have been here is "give up", "failure" — never heard those words. It was always, "Hey, we got an issue." Whether it was a design complexity issue or, in this case, we did have some mistakes that were made: How do we correct this? How do we make sure this doesn't happen again? And how do we move on? On the moment it all came togetherWell, it actually came in steps. So I really wasn't worried about the launch. The launch vehicle team was outstanding. But those first 2 1/2 weeks of deployment, that's probably the highest anxiety level that we had. I'm a pretty laid-back person. I've done operations before, so I'm pretty calm throughout the whole thing. But definitely, the anxiety level was up. Prior to launch, folks talk, we had 344 single-point failures. A single-point failure means if this one thing fails, we could potentially lose the whole mission. And a majority of those single-point failures were going to be retired through that first two weeks or so of deployments. So when you think about it, anything in that first two weeks could have maybe taken us out. When we got through the first two weeks, there was a big sigh of relief when we deployed that final mirror wing. All data is taken from the source: http://npr.org Article Link: https://www.npr.org/2022/07/17/1111714756/james-webb-telescope-big-bang-galaxy-image-interview-project-manager-bill-ochs #got #newsyearsday #newsworldbbc #newstodaylocal #newsworldnow #newstodayfox #
This week, we got a new view of space. And it was epic. Cosmic cliffs of glowing gas, spinning galaxies, dying stars. The James Webb telescope caught those images of ancient history — billions of light years away — showing what the universe looked like when it was just forming after the Big Bang. Some 20,000 people worked on the project for almost two decades, including engineer Bill Ochs, who has been the project manager since 2011. He joined All Things Considered to share the journey to this monumental snapshot in time. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. On what the project first looked like when he joinedWhen I came on board, they had just gone through an external review and it was basically concluded that they weren't going to make their current launch date, which I think at that time was 2013. We didn't have enough money. So when I came on board, I was asked to go ahead and put together a re-plan, which was quite challenging because, you know, you're brand new onto something. To re-plan a mission of this complexity is a pretty steep learning curve. The complexity of this mission and testing it on the ground made us understand we really needed a little bit more time. On the difficulties of keeping faith for such an ambitious projectIn all honesty, I don't think I ever got to that point of really feeling like, hey, it's never going to work. I did hit my retirement age at one point [three years ago], and I thought, you know, maybe I should just retire. And then I'm like, no, I got to see this out to the end. But that was it. I mean, I tell folks all the time. The type of words I never heard on this project in the 11 1/2 years that I have been here is "give up", "failure" — never heard those words. It was always, "Hey, we got an issue." Whether it was a design complexity issue or, in this case, we did have some mistakes that were made: How do we correct this? How do we make sure this doesn't happen again? And how do we move on? On the moment it all came togetherWell, it actually came in steps. So I really wasn't worried about the launch. The launch vehicle team was outstanding. But those first 2 1/2 weeks of deployment, that's probably the highest anxiety level that we had. I'm a pretty laid-back person. I've done operations before, so I'm pretty calm throughout the whole thing. But definitely, the anxiety level was up. Prior to launch, folks talk, we had 344 single-point failures. A single-point failure means if this one thing fails, we could potentially lose the whole mission. And a majority of those single-point failures were going to be retired through that first two weeks or so of deployments. So when you think about it, anything in that first two weeks could have maybe taken us out. When we got through the first two weeks, there was a big sigh of relief when we deployed that final mirror wing. All data is taken from the source: http://npr.org Article Link: https://www.npr.org/2022/07/17/1111714756/james-webb-telescope-big-bang-galaxy-image-interview-project-manager-bill-ochs #got #newsyearsday #newsworldbbc #newstodaylocal #newsworldnow #newstodayfox #