JWST Comes to Life! by Garth Illingworth, UC Santa Cruz

Garth Illingworth was the leader of the early work on the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) that is now known as the James Webb Space Telescope. While Deputy-Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, he was one of original initiators, with Peter Stockman and Pierre Bely, of a large 8-m class passively-cooled IR space telescope. He chaired the Panel of the 1990 Decadal Survey that recommended a 6-m passively-cooled large space telescope that ultimately became the JWST. He shepherded the project through many aspects of its long development and when he finally celebrated Webb’s launch on December 25th, 2021, he was the last original architect still involved.