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The Hubble Space Telescope honors American astronomer Edwin Hubble. Space telescopes typically get named after famous scientists. "And so this is particularly hard for me, to feel like I'm being gaslit by the agency that I have spent my career looking up to, and that I have committed parts of my career to." How Webb ended up on a telescope "I'm basically a NASA fan girl," says Prescod-Weinstein, who adds that she is a member of multiple NASA collaborations and was in a NASA postdoctoral program. "I have to tell you that I'm concerned that they have chosen not to be public about this," she says.Īs a Black, queer person, she says, she wishes the agency would explain its reasoning, especially given the facts that have already been openly discussed. The lack of transparency is all the more troubling to Prescod-Weinstein. "Those efforts have not uncovered evidence warranting a name change." "We've done as much as we can do at this point and have exhausted our research efforts," senior science communications officer Karen Fox told NPR in an email on Wednesday. In response to the controversy, NASA opened an investigation "to examine Webb's role in government," but the agency has offered no other details about how that review was conducted or who evaluated its findings - other than mentioning that historians were involved. "But I think we have two options here: Either he was a wildly incompetent administrator and didn't know that his head of security was interrogating employees in NASA facilities, or he knew exactly what was going on and he was in some sense party to overseeing the interrogation of someone for being gay."
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"I haven't seen evidence that Webb knew about this incident," she says. She notes that Norton was arrested for gay activity, interrogated by the police, and then picked up by NASA's head of security and questioned at the agency. "And at worst, we're basically just sending this incredible instrument into the sky with the name of a homophobe on it, in my opinion." "At best, Webb's record is complicated," says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire who co-authored an article calling for the telescope to be renamed. "The historical record is already clear: under Webb's leadership, queer people were persecuted," the letter says. They cite evidence such as the interrogation of NASA employee Clifford Norton, who was fired in 1963 while Webb was directing the agency. It Could Find Hints Of Life On Far-Flung Planets Controversy eruptsĮarlier this year, over 1,200 people, mostly astronomers or astronomy enthusiasts - including scholars who want to use the new telescope for their own research - signed a petition urging NASA to rename the telescope, saying that Webb seems to have been complicit in the purge of homosexual people from government jobs during his time in public service, including when he served in a high-level position in the U.S. The powerful telescope, often viewed as the successor to Hubble, will be able to see light from the earliest galaxies in the universe and analyze the atmospheres of planets orbiting distant stars, searching for gases in the air that might indicate the presence of life.īut some people, while thrilled about the scientific promise of this telescope, have taken issue with naming it after Webb, who ran the agency during the key years when it was working to put astronauts on the moon. "We have found no evidence at this time that warrants changing the name of the James Webb Space Telescope," says NASA administrator Bill Nelson. The space agency tells NPR it has investigated the matter and decided to keep the telescope's name as is, ahead of the long-awaited launch in December. NASA does not plan to rename its new $10 billion technological marvel, the James Webb Space Telescope, despite concerns about it being named after former NASA administrator James Webb, who went along with government discrimination against gay and lesbian employees in the 1950s and 1960s. But some astronomers say discrimination against gay and lesbian government employees during his tenure should preclude him from having a telescope named in his honor. Kennedy to lead the space agency during the '60s. NASA's new telescope bears the name of James Webb (center), an influential figure who was appointed by President John F.