Four years ago, Gregory Robinson wanted nothing to do with what might be the greatest spacecraft ever built. It didn’t, at the time, seem like it would ever actually become what it was promised to be: a machine that would take images from space, return them to Earth, and gobsmack the public with their clarity and depth and sheer celestial beauty—the kind of beauty that could, even briefly, stop a fraught and fractious species like ours from the daily messes we make of our world and leave us thinking, just once, You know what? When we try, we can do something truly grand.
What the spacecraft did seem like at the time was a massive white elephant, one that a man in Robinson’s position would not want to go near. For one thing, it was grossly over budget—with a sticker price that had risen from an initial estimate in 1995 of just $500 million to $8.8 billion. For another thing, it was years behind schedule. Its launch was originally set for 2007, and here it was the spring of 2018 and still nobody could say exactly when it would leave the ground. And finally,
