MEET: PAUL H. GEITHNER, JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE OBSERVATORY MANAGER

Paul Geithner is the Observatory Manager for the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb telescope) program at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Geithner’s involvement with the Webb telescope began in 1997 when he became the program’s Mission Systems Engineer. He later served as the Webb telescope Instrument Systems Manager (1999-2000) and went to NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C., as the mission’s Program Executive (2002-2006) before returning to Goddard in November of 2006 as the Observatory Manager.

Geithner’s career at NASA started in 1991 when he was hired into the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Flight Systems and Servicing project at Goddard. He was executive secretary of the HST gyroscope failure review board and the responsible engineer for the HST’s replacement gyroscopes, and he was the Instrument Manager for the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) optical correction instrument and the Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) scientific instrument.

Geithner also conceived or managed development of special optical ground support equipment (e.g., the Grism Aberrated Validator, or GRAVAL, the Calibrated Infrared Source, or CIRCE, and the Refractive Aberrated Simulator/Calibrator, or RAS/Cal). Paul left HST to join the James Webb Space Telescope project after the second Hubble servicing mission. While working as the Program Executive for the Webb telescope at NASA Headquarters, Geithner was also the Program Executive for the Beyond Einstein program and the Lead Program Executive for Origin, Structure, Evolution and Destiny of the Universe.

Geithner’s other professional work experience includes military service and private sector employment. After graduating from Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va. he served nearly five years active duty as U.S. Air Force officer guiding development of new spacecraft survivability technologies and serving as principal investigator for the STARMATE sounding rocket experiments under the Strategic Defense Initiative. Geithner was also a vice president at credit card bank FirstUSA working on improving credit card issuance processes, and a project manager at a start-up company developing and demonstrating advanced undersea fiber optic cable communications equipment and systems.

Paul Geithner received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech in 1984 and a M.B.A. from the University of Virginia’s Darden School in 1991.

For more information about the Hubble Space Telescope, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/hubble