We had a new view of space. It was amazing.
There are cliffs of glowing gas. The images of ancient history, billions of light years away, were captured by the James WEBB telescope.
More than 20,000 people worked on the project for almost two decades, including engineer Bill Ochs, who has been the project manager. The journey to this monumental snapshot in time was shared by him.
The interview has been edited to make it clear.
When he joined, the project looked a bit different.
They had just gone through an external review and it was concluded that they weren't going to make their current launch date. We didn't have a lot of money.
It was difficult for me to put together a re-plan because I was new to it. A steep learning curve is needed to plan a mission of this complexity. The complexity of the mission made us realize we need more time.
It was difficult to keep faith for such a large project.
I don't think I ever felt like it wouldn't work. Three years ago, when I hit my retirement age, I thought, "Maybe I should just retire." I have to watch this out to the end.
It was all done. I tell a lot of people. In the 11 1/2 years that I've been here, I've never heard the phrase "Give up", "failure", or anything similar. "Hey, we have an issue." There were some mistakes that were made and how do we correct them? How do we prevent this from happening again? What do we do next?
It all came together at the right time.
It arrived in steps. I was not concerned about the launch. The team did a great job. The first 2 1/2 weeks of deployment was the most anxious time for us. I'm very laid back. I've done operations before so I'm calm. The anxiety level was higher.
We had 343 single-point failures prior to launch. If one thing fails, we could lose the entire mission. Most of the single-point failures were going to be retired in the first couple of weeks of deployment. Anything in the first couple of weeks could have taken us out.
There was a sigh of relief when we deployed the final mirror wing. We are ready to align the mirrors now that we have checked out the rest of the spaceship. There were 155 motor on the back of the mirrors to make them work. They all worked. None of them died.
When the first images came in, he reacted.
I only saw a preview of the images two weeks ago. Engineering images were taken during the mirror alignment phase. If you saw that, you'll know that the first image we released was perfect. The image was a small one.
It was cool when you looked at the whole image. The star is concentrating on something. Let's take a look at those stars. One of our scientists began to count. He took a picture of 250-plus galaxies and then took a picture of every one of them. I put this stuff on my phone. The pictures were very similar to my baby pictures.
People are seeing pictures of galaxies instead of pictures of my grandson. The structure that you saw was amazing. If you think of a car as a vehicle, this is one of the ones you'll think of. We're almost there where we can go into second gear. We were barely in first gear, and we are still seeing amazing stuff.
The world's reaction was witnessed.
It's incredible. We got a lot of reactions from people all over the world when we launched. The keynote address was given by myself and one of our scientists at the National Park Service/NASA Dark Sky Festival at Death Valley National Park.
We are talking to people and they are asking questions. We had a lady come up to us and she said that she drove three hours to hear you speak. This is wonderful news in a world full of trouble. When she was talking to us, she began to cry.
One of my communications people got an email from a rancher in Idaho who was so touched by the special that he sent it to me. They can go out at night and see a lot of stars because they are in a dark sky area. It made them appreciate it a bit more. It was related to the idea that with so much trouble in the world, this is just a bright spot.
The interview was adapted for the internet.
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