The 2,510th Meeting of the Society

February 21, 2025 at 8:00 PM

Powell Auditorium at the Cosmos Club

The James Webb Space Telescope:  Key Moments in its History

From "Napkin" to Lagrange Point

Robert Smith

Professor of History
University of Alberta - Edmonton

Sponsored by BAE Systems

About the Lecture

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) – a joint enterprise of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency – is the most complex and in some ways the most powerful telescope ever built. And since its launch in 2021, JWST has produced a string of spectacular scientific results. JWST’s history, which includes a near-death experience at the hands of a U.S. congressional committee in 2011 when there was an effort to kill the project, raises a range of critical policy issues.

This lecture will discuss several key moments in JWST’s history, and what these have to say not just about JWST and the future of space astronomy, but also about very large-scale scientific enterprises more broadly, projects of such a scale that we can reasonably refer to them as “megascience.” The lecture will discuss similarities and differences in the policy contexts for JWST, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the ill-fated Superconducting Supercollider which was cancelled just before serious planning got under way for JWST. Hubble, for example, exemplified (after serious initial problems) the successful management of increasing scale, which was central to the broader success of large-scale science in the twentieth century. Hubble demonstrated the ability of “science managers” and astronomers to operate successfully in – and to shape – the prevailing “political economy” of science. The lecture will consider how JWST may be seen in this regard, and some of the lessons its history may have for future large scale science missions.

Selected Reading & Media References
Pierre Bely, et.al., “Genesis of the James Webb Space Telescope Architecture: The Designers’ Story,” astro-ph>arXiv:2501.09072 (2025).
Alan Dressler, editor, Exploration and the Search for Origins: A Vision for Ultraviolet-Optical-Infrared Space Astronomy (AURA, 1996).
Jonathan P. Gardner, John C. Mather, et.al., “The James Webb Space Telescope Mission,” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 135(2023), 1-24.
Harley Thronson, “Britain in the early history of the James Webb Space Telescope,” Space Review, 21 October 2024.
Adam Mann, “Did the James Webb telescope ‘break the universe’? Maybe not,” Science News, 4 March 2024.

About the Speaker

Robert W. Smith is a Professor of History at the University of Alberta. For many years before that he was a staff member of the US National Air and Space Museum. In addition, he has served as an advisor to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, NASA, and the National Academy of Sciences, among others.

Robert is an author of over 50 research papers, most of them as sole author; author or coauthor of five books; and co-editor of three volumes. Publications of his have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian and Chinese.

Robert’s first book was The Expanding Universe: Astronomy’s ‘Great Debate’, 1900–1931, and he has continued to publish on early twentieth century astronomy and cosmology throughout his career. While he has also written extensively on nineteenth century astronomy, his chief research area is the history of space astronomy, and he has a particular interest in the emergence of space astronomy as “megascience.” His research on the prelaunch history of the Hubble Space Telescope is summarized in his book, The Space Telescope: A Study of NASA, Science, Technology and Politics, which also includes contributions by Paul Hanle, Robert Kargon, and Joseph N. Tatarewicz. For more than two decades he has been following the progress of the James Webb Space Telescope project, and he is working on a history of the telescope.

Among other honors and awards, Robert was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in the United States, held the Lindbergh Chair of Aerospace History at the Smithsonian Institution, and was the Sarton Lecturer for the History of Science Society at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been awarded the American Astronomical Society’s Doggett Prize for Historical Astronomy, the History of Science Society’s Watson Davis Prize for The Space Telescope, and the Bunge Prize of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker and the Deutsche Bunsen-Gesellschaft für Physiklische Chemie for seminal contributions to the study of the history of scientific instruments.

Robert earned a BSc at Queen Mary College, University of London, Part III of the Mathematics Tripos at the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science, at Cambridge University.

Social Media
LinkedIn Profile: linkedin.com/in/robert-smith-205584bb
X (Twitter) account(s) handle(s): @RobertS1795039
Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert-Smith-46?ev=hdr_xprf