James Edwin Webb

James Edwin Webb (1966)

James Edwin Webb (born October 7, 1906 in Tally Ho , Granville County , North Carolina , † March 27, 1992 in Washington, DC ) was an American government official and from February 14, 1961 to October 7, 1968, the second administrator of NASA .

Life

Webb was born in North Carolina and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . He studied education and obtained a bachelor's degree in 1928 . He then became a lieutenant in the US Marine Corps and served as an active pilot between 1930 and 1932. He also studied law at George Washington University from 1934 to 1936 . In 1938 Webb married Patsy Aiken Douglas, with whom he had two children: Sarah (* 1945) and James Edwin Jr. (* 1947).

Webb enjoyed a long public service career in the US capital, where he served as secretary to Edward W. Pou , a North Carolina congressman, from 1932 to 1934 . He then served for two years as a staff member in the office of Oliver Max Gardner , the former governor of North Carolina. In 1936 Webb became, among other things, head of human resources and later vice president of the Sperry Gyroscope Company in New York City before rejoining the US Marine Corps in 1944 during World War II .

Webb returned to Washington after the war and was an executive with Max Gardner before being appointed director of the Bureau of the Budget in the US President's Executive Office . In 1949 he received an offer from President Harry S. Truman to work as a United States Under Secretary of State in the State Department . With the end of Truman's reign in early 1953 left Webb Washington to a position in the oil company Kerr-McGee Oil in Oklahoma City ( Oklahoma ) to compete.

Management of NASA

James E. Webb (left) in the Oval Office speaking to US President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967

Webb returned to Washington in 1961 and took over the administration of NASA. Under his leadership, the space agency sought to achieve President Kennedy's goal of getting a person to the moon and back safely before the decade was up . For seven years, from the announcement of the moon landing on May 25, 1961 to October 1968, Webb fought in Washington to support NASA. As a Washington insider, he achieved ongoing support and funding for the Apollo program and the moon landing on Kennedy's schedule.

During his tenure, NASA evolved from a loose collection of research centers into a coordinated organization. Webb played a key role in creating the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston . Despite pressure to focus on the Apollo program, he also advocated NASA launch a planetary exploration program using the Mariner and Pioneer probes.

The Apollo 1 catastrophe of January 1967 also fell during Webb's tenure . He went to the then US President Lyndon B. Johnson and asked him that NASA could take over the investigation of the accident and the recovery of the parts. He assured him that he would uncover the causes and make this his own and the task of NASA management in an appropriate manner. The agency investigated the details of the tragedy, corrected issues and got back on schedule.

Webb presented his investigation report to several committees of Congress , almost every time subject to personal interrogation. However, he managed to keep a lot of reprisals out of his agency and the Johnson administration, which helped ensure that NASA's public image was hardly damaged by the accident.

In 1968, Webb was informed by the CIA that the Soviet Union was developing its own giant launch vehicle for manned lunar missions. He then commissioned the MSC to prepare Apollo 8 . At the time, his claims about the Soviet Union were being challenged, but subsequent revelations about the Soviet lunar program earned Webb much support because of his foresight. He left NASA in October 1968 just before the Apollo program peaked.

Next life

After leaving NASA, Webb stayed in Washington, serving as a consultant and board member of the Smithsonian Institution . He died in March 1992 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Honors

In 2002, the planned successor to the Hubble space telescope was named in his honor of James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

literature

• W. Henry Lambright: Powering Apollo. James E. Webb of NASA . Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1995, ISBN 0-8018-4902-0 .

Web links

Commons : James E. Webb  - Collection of Images, Videos, and Audio Files

• NASA biography (English)
• James Webb in the online archive of the Austrian Media Library