I was first hired to help manage the fabrication of the James Webb Sunshields. After the first year it appeared to me that we had more engineering to do with our Spot Bonding Process before we could go into production. After developing confidence in the Spot Bonding Process I was moved to Materials and Process Development. This is where I found my real benefit to the program. I was free to develop materials, tooling aides and processes to manufacture the sunshields. Not only did I develop these processes I also documented and trained the technicians and Engineers to these processes and developed a training and certification process. Only those who were certified in a process were allowed to perform the process. All these processes and certifications helped us to pass our ISO certifications because of thorough documentation.
I worked on the James Webb Space Telescope for 13.5 years and won a couple of awards. We successfully built and deliver the 5 flight layers that we assembled in flight configuration at Northrop Grumman in California. The shields were integrated with the Telescope and other science instruments. Eventually the completed telescope was shipped to its launch sight near the equator, Kourou, French Guiana, and loaded onto an Ariane V rocket. It launched Dec 25, 2021.
Today we are receiving photos that are challenging the assumptions we had about the age of the universe and the “Big Bang”. They are seeing mature spiral galaxies and super massive black holes in a time between 700-900 billion years after the “Big Bang” which according to current redshift technology should not have had enough time to develop that complex of a structure. So, something needs to change; our current models or find new ways to develop a better system of determining the age of the universe. Maybe there were forces acting at the beginning that we do not understand yet or have overlooked.
