Dr Thomas Zurbuchen "Finding life elsewhere is critical"

The man known as Dr Z stepped down as head of NASA's Science Mission Directorate on 31 December 2022, having served in the post for six years a longer continuous term than any of his predecessors

- Mike Wall

What do you make of your time at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate?

I would talk about it in two ways. The first one is the personal side, and the second is the community side. It turns out that the second one matters more, but I’m less clear about that because I think it tends to be that history proves what is the right answer. There are other opinions, so mine kind of matters less.

I’m in awe of having the front-window view of all of science. I get to see the first picture ever taken on a mission – in the hallway, somebody’s handing it to me. I’ve just been in awe of the amazing power of space and the amazing power of science to really inspire and to excite. That’s kind of my personal view.

I think on the community side, what we have experienced in the last six years is an enormous growth in many different dimensions. If you take any six-year period, you would be hard-pressed in the history of NASA seeing one that, as an aggregate, created more success. Of course, that’s not because of me, certainly, alone. It has to do with the support that we’ve gotten from Congress, from the various White Houses and also the execution by industry-government teams.

You were steering the ship when a lot of very high-profile missions were developed and launched. Do you have any favourites?

I want to mention Webb, because what we saw in the final years [of development] and the deployment, I have not found a single person that expected it to go as well as it did. I’ve not found anybody, and I interviewed everybody. I actually kind of tended to be a little bit more pessimistic than some of the people on the team, which was perfectly fine.