Who was James Webb, anyway?

In 2002, Sean O’Keefe, then the NASA administrator, introduced that the company’s subsequent telescope can be named for James Webb, who led NASA through the Sixties, when it was gearing as much as land individuals on the moon. He was a staunch champion of area science.

Some astronomers have been upset that it will not be named for an astronomer, whereas others objected on extra severe grounds, specifically that Mr. Webb bore some accountability for an occasion through the Truman administration referred to as the Lavender Scare that resulted within the purging of homosexual and lesbian staff from the State Division. On the time, Mr. Webb had been the beneath secretary of state.

That situation gained prominence a yr in the past when 4 astronomers — Lucianne Walkowicz of the JustSpace Alliance and Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein of the College of New Hampshire, Brian Nord of the Fermi Nationwide Accelerator Laboratory and the College of Chicago and Sarah Tuttle of the College of Washington — revealed an op-ed in Scientific American, “The James Webb House Telescope Must Be Renamed.”

NASA mentioned it will examine the claims and publish a report. Subsequently, final September, Invoice Nelson, the present NASA administrator and a former Florida senator, introduced that he noticed no want to vary the title. No report was ever launched, infuriating the critics.

In March after the telescope launched, Nature journal reported on the premise of FOIA requests that NASA had taken the allegations severely sufficient that Paul Hertz, then NASA’s director of astrophysics, had written outdoors astronomers asking if he ought to change the telescope’s title. The reply was no, however he didn’t speak to any L.G.B.T.Q. astronomers.

The journal additionally reported data from the case of Clifford Norton. He had been fired from NASA in 1963 — throughout Mr. Webb’s tenure — for being homosexual, and the archival supplies alluded to “a customized within the company” of firing individuals for gay exercise. Mr. Norton appealed and gained a landmark case in opposition to such discrimination in 1969.

In November of 2021, NASA’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee requested the company for fuller report.

Mr. O’Keefe, the previous administrator, defended his selection in an e mail.

“Arguably, have been it not for James Webb’s willpower to satisfy essentially the most audacious imaginative and prescient of his time, our capability to discover right now can be starkly completely different,” Mr. O’Keefe mentioned.

However that was not sufficient for the critics. “If he’s not accountable for the unhealthy stuff that occurred whereas he was in cost, why is he accountable for the good things?” Dr. Prescod-Weinstein mentioned. “It appears there’s a little bit of double-think taking place right here, the place individuals assign him accountability for the issues they like about his legacy and faux that he’s solely accountable for the issues they like.”

“Our telescopes, if they’ll be named after individuals, needs to be named after individuals who encourage us to be our higher selves,” Dr. Prescod-Weinstein added.