To repair its damaged reputation with the LGBTQ+ community, some astronomers say, the agency should now bow to mounting pressure and strike Webb’s name from its flagship telescope. At the same meeting, the agency’s director of astrophysics Paul Hertz even offered some contrition, acknowledging that “the decision NASA made is painful to some, and it seems wrong to many of us.” “I’m looking for additional evidence that may conflict with the understanding we currently have of Webb’s role in this,” said NASA’s acting chief historian Brian Odom. Last month, for example, NASA officials scrambled to explain their abrupt cancellation of an initiative to allow employees of its Goddard Space Flight Center to more easily display personal pronouns in intra-agency communications.ĭuring a March 30 meeting of NASA’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee, officials said that the agency’s investigation into Webb’s potential involvement with LGBTQ+ persecution is still ongoing and that they expect to present a final report in the coming months. Many of them see NASA’s resistance to renaming JWST as part of a dismaying trend in which the agency’s actions speak louder than-and counter to-its stated policy of fostering diversity and inclusion throughout its workforce. “It’s almost amusing how incompetent the whole thing was,” says Scott Gaudi, an astronomer at the Ohio State University, “and how little they stopped to think of how important an issue this was to the queer astronomical community and how important NASA is for young queer kids trying to find aspirational reasons to just keep going.”Īs the successor to the renowned Hubble Space Telescope, JWST’s name is likely to one day be known by schoolchildren, suburban parents and senior citizens alike, which is why LGBTQ+ astronomers feel so strongly that the observatory’s namesake should not be someone who was allegedly involved in homophobic directives. “Reading through the exchanges, it seems that LGBTQ+ scientists and the concern we raised are not really what they care about,” says Yao-Yuan Mao of Rutgers University, who maintains the online Astronomy and Astrophysics Outlist of openly LGBTQ+ researchers. The e-mails make clear that, behind the scenes, NASA was well aware of Webb’s problematic legacy even as the agency’s leadership declined to take his name off the project. Since early last year, four researchers have been leading the charge for NASA to alter the name of the $10-billion flagship mission, launched in December 2021, which will provide unparalleled views of the universe. The new information came to light late last month when nearly 400 pages of e-mails were posted online by the journal Nature, which obtained the exchanges under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. These are some of the reactions from LGBTQ+ astronomers over the latest revelations regarding NASA’s decision not to rename the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), given that the agency long had evidence suggesting its Apollo-era administrator James Webb was involved in the persecution of gay and lesbian federal employees during the 1950s and 1960s.
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