By Tom Nugent

When William Ochs, BS’79, MS’82 (Metro), was an undergraduate student at FDU in the late 1970s, he enjoyed the “good fortune” of taking a challenging course in digital design with an innovative electrical engineering professor named Howard Silver. That course changed his life.

Top: William Ochs, BS’79, MS’82 (Metro); center: five layers like this one will protect the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) from the sun’s heat; bottom: engineers test a scale model of the new telescope’s complex mirror conglomeration. (Photos: top, NASA; center, Northrop Grumman aerospace systems; bottom, NASA)

Dr. Silver was the first electrical engineering professor to introduce microprocessors to the FDU campus,” says Ochs. “He brought them into our digital-design class and started teaching us about computer languages and software, which were just starting to take off.”

Fascinated by the complexities of computer programming, Ochs was instantly hooked. Soon he was staying after class to hang out with Silver in a new FDU computer lab, where students could wrestle with “writing code” to their hearts’ content.

“Professor Silver was always available and supportive,” Ochs recalls. “He really nurtured my growing interest in data processing and software. For me that was the starting point in a deeply satisfying career that I had never dreamed might be possible.”

What followed Ochs’ FDU introduction to microprocessors is a remarkable odyssey. In 1979, he launched his career at Bendix Guidance Systems, where he developed software for the back-up computer for the Hubble Space Telescope. He then leap-frogged over to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in 1983, while still with Bendix. His key assignment as a systems engineer there was to assist in the development of operations for the Hubble project.

In 1990, he joined NASA and eventually served as both deputy operations manager and operations servicing mission manager for Hubble. He supervised the operations of the Hubble during its first two servicing missions.

In 1998, Ochs became a NASA project manager. For the next 13 years, he managed the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE), on the sun’s effect on the Earth and its climate, and the Landsat 8 satellite, which records images of the Earth’s surface. Both missions are still ongoing today.

In December 2010, NASA transferred the gifted engineer to the next-generation, $8-billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) program. Playing at the top of his game, Ochs has for the past five years been running a pioneering program that seems likely to change our collective understanding of how the universe was born — and which may determine whether the potential for life exists elsewhere in the cosmos.