Northrop Grumman’s Scott Willoughby ’89 took Lehigh graduates, families and guests on a cosmic journey during Sunday’s undergraduate ceremony for the Class of 2024—a journey 13.5 billion years back in time, to the birth of the universe…and how that led him to where he is today.
Delivering the keynote address at the 156th undergraduate ceremony, Willoughby, a first-generation college student, shared that his own career was not a series of “well-thought-out milestones,” but one in which learning about himself “was far more important than matching anyone else’s expectations of what I should be.”
Willoughby, senior vice president of performance excellence for Northrop Grumman, had played a pivotal role in the development of NASA’s James Webb space telescope, an engineering marvel and the world’s most powerful space telescope ever built. Northrop Grumman, a leading global aerospace and defense technology company, served as prime contractor on the telescope.
To design, build, test and launch Webb, a global endeavor was needed to make its historic mission a reality. The Northrop Grumman industry team, led by Willoughby in partnership with NASA, designed, built, completed its integration, tested its state-of-the-art scientific instruments and prepared the observatory for launch. The Webb program enlisted more than 14 countries, three space agencies (NASA, the Canadian Space Agency and the European Space Agency), 400 companies and suppliers, and 300 universities and science organizations to take the telescope from concept to reality.
“We, humanity, have built a cosmic time machine,” Willoughby said. “It was a mission NASA conceived to answer the questions, where do we come from? And are we alone?”
Willoughby described the development and construction of the telescope as being marked by several failures, all of which were closely watched by the media and the public. He said allowing the public to witness the challenging journey “only cemented how important and impressive the success was at the end of it.”
Willoughby said as the launch approached, he was frequently asked if the Webb project would be successful.
“I said, ‘We have done all we could do to ensure success on the ground and it was time to send it a million miles away and witness the outcome,’” Willoughby recalled. “It’s how your parents and professors feel today, confident you are leaving here with the best they could give you to go and make your mark on the world.”
Webb successfully launched into orbit in December 2021. Six months later, the world received the first images the telescope captured.
“Views of the universe that human eyes had never seen before,” Willoughby marveled. “In the following days, those iconic images were everywhere: they were the headlines of almost every major newspaper around the world, they were on the billboards of Times Square and Piccadilly…the Google doodle was done for Webb in our honor and, my proudest, the Empire State Building lit in gold [a nod to Webb’s gold mirrors] to celebrate Webb.”
Willoughby then fast-forwarded to the 1980s, when he was a young man from New Jersey dropped off at Dravo for his first year at Lehigh. Willoughby said he arrived on campus with only a few possessions and immediately felt out of place.
“I had never taken an AP class, I didn’t dress the same as others and I had little social grace,” Willoughby said.
Despite the sense that he didn’t belong at Lehigh, he quickly learned not to judge a book by its cover. Although some students matched Willoughby’s expectations, he found that most exhibited kindness toward him. Willoughby shared how one of his Delta Tau Delta fraternity brothers literally gave him the shirt off his back when he lent (and eventually gave) Willoughby the required collared shirt for dinner each night.
