‘Happy little accidents’ lead to career in space technology for Kimball graduate
5 min read
When Vince Heeg graduated from Kimball High School, he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. Once a small-town Nebraska boy, Heeg played a role in launching NASA’s James Webb telescope and is currently vice president of operations at Northrup Grumman — a highly respected company that designs, builds and sustains value-driven solutions in space. Heeg’s path there was a series of happy accidents.
“I went to college mainly because my dad forced me to,” he said.
Heeg started out at Chadron State College, then a stint at Wyoming, “(University of) Nebraska: both Kearney and Lincoln,” before settling into his life as a Husker.
Vince Heeg (wearing blue mask) and colleagues from NASA and Northrop Grumman at mission control on the day the James Webb Space Telescope fully deployed to its final configuration.
He originally declared a major in psychiatry, but quickly found that wasn’t for him.
“I switched into business. I went into education. Then I was in engineering, then I went into math,” Heeg said. “And then once I got into math, that’s when I started to like college.”
Being a math major seemed to be the right choice for Heeg, and it was there that he felt accepted.
“And then I wanted to stay longer because I realized how much fun it was,” he said.
“But (advisers) told me I had to graduate at semester because I had all my credits,” he said. “So I went in the next day and picked up a physics major so I could stay in college longer.”
Soon to graduate with a physics degree, Heeg said he was nearing the end of his college time and wasn’t sure what to do next, until he attended a job fair.
“There was a company called TRW that came out during spring break for a interview,” Heeg said. “They offered me a job, That’s how it started: just by accident, really.”
What happened next was another coincidence.
“I actually went (to California) for a job doing calculations — it was a math job — but you needed a clearance to do that,” he said.
Without the security clearance, he ended up taking a position in software, which didn’t need the clearance.
“I took it,” Heeg said. “But since I didn’t know software, I wasn’t very good at it, but I stumbled through a career, and eventually got pulled onto the James Webb Space Telescope program.”
Heeg supported Webb in various roles for about eight years, toward the end as the deputy program manager.
“We had a phenomenal team,” he said. “I was executing and getting the thing put together, because it was incredibly complicated. (But) it was super cool to be a part of.”
The machine itself
While the overall size of the telescope isn’t much different, the mirror or optic of Webb is much larger than Hubble. Webb’s mirror is around almost 22 feet in diameter, whereas Hubble’s is almost 8 feet in diameter.
“The optic is huge. It’s 100 times more powerful than Hubble,” Heeg said. “(Webb’s) area of the mirror is seven times greater — it’s just an unbelievable hop in complexity.”
However, when you build an optic that big, you can’t put it in a payload fairing, put it on a rocket and launch it into space, he added.
The sunshield for the Webb Telescope is worked on before deployment on Dec. 25, 2021.
Webb scientists had to get creative.
“It was crazy: the engineering that went into being able to successfully fold (the sunshield) so that it could fit in a fairing,” Heeg said, “but then unfold in space correctly.”
To be able to get the sunshield to open in space, engineers installed non-explosive devices. There were 107 in the sunshield alone.
“If any one of those fail, and the whole sunshield’s not going to deploy like it’s supposed to,” he said. “So it would be a big problem.”
It wasn’t a happy little accident that all 107 of the sunshield deployments locked into place when the Webb Telescope was launched on Christmas Day in 2021.
“They always talk about 344 different single-point failures that could happen that as Webb launched and left and then went to where it finally ended up, in space,” Heeg said. “All of those had to go right for this thing to work. And obviously they all did, so that’s pretty cool.”
The machine’s location was no accident, either. It’s positioned a million miles away from Earth — unlike Hubble’s roughly 355 miles — at a place called a Lagrange Point.
Vince Heeg, pictured center right, along with the Northrop Grumman team win the prestigious Robert J. Collier Trophy, for revolutionizing the field of astrophysics with the team’s pioneering design and exceptional performance of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The Collier Trophy is the highest achievement in aerospace and astronautics in the United States.
According to NASA, Lagrange Points are positions in space where objects sent there tend to stay put: the gravitational pull of two large masses precisely equals the centripetal force required for a small object to move with them.
“The cool thing and why we pick that is because you’re like in a gravity well,” Heeg said, “so it doesn’t take as much energy to stay put. You don’t have to steer near as much if you’re not at a place like that.”
Also unlike Hubble, Webb sports a Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) that covers the infrared wavelength range 0.6 to 5 microns. Hubble’s camera shows visible light.
More images, videos and information from and about Webb can be found at webb.nasa.gov.
“The whole thing (it’s) like a piece of art,” Heeg said. “It’s beautiful.”
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