Who was James Webb?

#American #DC #JamesWebbSpaceTelescope

James Webb was an American public servant and administrator of NASA
He was the NASA administrator during the Apollo programme
The 2021 James Webb Space Telescope is named after him

Written By:Sucharita

Updated: July 11 2022 01:15:53 PM ET Washington D.C., DC, USA

James Webb, full name James Edwin Webb, was an American public servant and administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during the Apollo programme. He was born on October 7, 1906, in Tally Ho, North Carolina, and died on March 27, 1992, in Washington, D.C. (1961–68).

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Webb became a marine pilot after graduating from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1928. He began his political career as a congressional staffer in Washington, D.C., in 1932, then studied law at George Washington University from 1934 to 1936.

From 1936 to 1944, he worked for Sperry Gyroscope before rejoining the Marine Corps for the remainder of WWII. Webb served as head of the Bureau of the Budget and undersecretary of state during President Harry Truman’s administration (1945-53). After leaving the government, Truman went to work for the Kerr-McGee Oil Company in Oklahoma.

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Webb took over as NASA administrator in 1961, only months before President John F. Kennedy declared the United States’ resolve to send a man to the Moon by 1970. Webb prioritised Apollo’s success and utilised his enormous political abilities to organise and retain support for the programme, even after three astronauts were killed in an accident in 1967.

Webb was also a keen student of public administration, and he used NASA as a testing ground for his ideas on how to organise large-scale public enterprises in ways that maximised the possibilities of success while also providing maximum benefits to the country.

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Webb stepped down from NASA in 1968. He stayed in Washington, working on numerous advisory boards and as a Smithsonian Institution regent. The James Webb Space Telescope is the name given by NASA to a huge space telescope that will launch in 2021. It was intended to be the Hubble Space Telescope‘s replacement.