Northrop Grumman on Building James Webb With Sustainability In Mind

The chief of Northrop Grumman’s sustainability efforts has shared how the company tackled the sustainability question over the 20-year development of the James Webb Space Telescope. Northrop Grumman’s Chief Sustainability Officer Mike Witt gave a keynote speech on the James Webb at the 2024 Farnborough International Airshow.

Making the James Webb a different kind of box

NASA, in partnership with the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency, awarded Northrop Grumman as the leading prime contractor on the James Webb project – tasked with creating a next-generation space telescope to replace the aged Hubble Space Telescope.

Witt shared that upon being awarded the contract, the company had to question: “How can we manufacture this differently to what we’ve done before?” in every step of the process, from conceptualisation, design, build, launch and ongoing operations.

“This is a technology that was birthed well more than 20 years ago,” he said “and you may recall it was launched on Christmas Day of 2021.”

Witt said that over that 20-year span, the company had to ponder how to manufacture something so “intricate” and “complicated”, without wasting unnecessary resources, energy, or materials – and build it to last.

To do that, the company used “digital models”, today referred to as ‘digital transformation’ – “though we didn’t call it that 15, 20 years ago”, Witt said.

“We had to think about what it is that we can do to limit our need to actually put something together in a lab or in our operations facility? Let’s test it first, and let’s employ some of these models to do that.”

“This [space telescope] was, in my humble opinion, one of the best and greatest examples of human ingenuity and innovation,” he added.

Witt added that during the James Webb development, the company “challenged” itself to develop comprehensive, repeatable tools to improve efficiency and limit waste, not only in the development and design of the asset, but also continuously through its operations.

“And these are now tools that we’re using over and over in many of our other large programs and platforms.”

As the prime contractor to develop the James Webb Space Telescope, Northrop Grumman designed and built the deployable sunshield, provided the spacecraft and integrated the total system. The observatory subsystems were developed by a Northrop Grumman-led team.

Increasing interest in sustainability

Elsewhere during his keynote, Witt pointed to the importance of commitment to sustainability, with increasing pressure both externally and internally, as investors and stakeholders grow increasingly aware of sustainability in its many forms.

Notably, he points to a third key group that is pushing the company to continuously rejuvenate its sustainable business practices.

“Our employee base, and prospective employee base, the Gen Z’s and the Millennials. They are out there looking for those companies that align to their personal values,” he said.

“And I would assert that [this] would include minimizing, if not eliminating, impact on the environment.”