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James Webb led NASA within the Fifties and 60s, through the Chilly Warfare-era “Lavender Scare,” when authorities companies typically enforced insurance policies that discriminated towards homosexual and lesbian federal staff. For that purpose, astronomers and others have lengthy known as for NASA to alter the title of the James Webb Area Telescope. Earlier this yr, the house company agreed to finish a full investigation into Webb’s suspected function within the remedy and firing of LGBTQ workers.
This afternoon, NASA launched that long-awaited report by the company’s chief historian Brian Odom. In an accompanying press launch, NASA officers made clear that the company is not going to change the telescope’s title, writing: “Primarily based on the accessible proof, the company doesn’t plan to alter the title of the James Webb Area Telescope. Nonetheless, the report illuminates that this era in federal coverage—and in American historical past extra broadly—was a darkish chapter that doesn’t mirror the company’s values right this moment.”
Odom was tasked with discovering what proof, if any, hyperlinks Webb to homophobic insurance policies and choices. Monitoring down proof of contentious 60-year-old occasions made for a tough topic of research, Odom says, however he was ready to attract on loads of materials from the Nationwide Archives at School Park, Maryland and the Truman Library. “I took this investigation very significantly,” he says.
These allegations embrace these made by NASA worker Clifford Norton, who filed a lawsuit claiming that he had been fired in 1963 after he was seen in a automobile with one other man. He was taken into police custody, his lawsuit states, after which NASA safety subsequently introduced him to the company’s headquarters and interrogated him all through the night time. He was later terminated from his job.
Such horrific remedy of federal workers suspected to be homosexual or lesbian was commonplace on the time, following a 1953 govt order by President Dwight Eisenhower, which listed “sexual perversion” among the many sorts of behaviors thought of suspicious. Nonetheless, the NASA report states, “No proof has been situated exhibiting Webb knew of Norton’s firing on the time. As a result of it was accepted coverage throughout the federal government, the firing was, extremely probably—although, sadly—thought of unexceptional.”
The report and NASA’s announcement frustrate critics who for years have been making a case to alter JWST’s title. “Webb has at finest a sophisticated legacy, together with his participation within the promotion of psychological warfare. His actions didn’t earn him a $10 billion monument,” wrote Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, an astrophysicist on the College of New Hampshire, and three different astronomers and astrophysicists in a assertion on Substack right this moment. They query the interpretation {that a} lack of specific proof implies that Webb had no data of, or hand in, firings inside his personal company, writing: “In such a situation, we’ve to imagine he was comparatively incompetent as a pacesetter: the administrator of NASA ought to know if his chief of safety is extrajudicially interrogating folks.”
Prescod-Weinstein believes the timing of this launch—on the Friday afternoon earlier than the Thanksgiving vacation—isn’t a coincidence, a technique to make the report much less extensively learn. “The truth that they did it though it’s LGBT STEM Day tells you in regards to the administration’s priorities,” she wrote in an e mail to WIRED.
NASA normally names telescopes after outstanding astronomers, just like the Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra, and Compton telescopes. Webb is an exception. He led the company whereas it superior the house program towards the moon touchdown and promoted astronomy analysis, however he was a bureaucrat, not an astronomer.
Regardless that company officers made the decision to maintain Webb’s title, Odom says, “We should always nonetheless use this historical past for instance of a previous that was traumatic for lots of people. This previous, no matter Webb’s function in it was, is necessary to us going ahead.”
That NASA is selecting to not rename the telescope is “not shocking, however disappointing,” says Ralf Danner, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory astronomer and co-chair of the American Astronommical Society’s committee for sexual orientation and gender minorities in astronomy. Whether or not Webb knew of Norton’s remedy, or whether or not proof of that exists, will not be actually related, Danner argues, since as NASA administrator Webb stood for these insurance policies. “He is simply the fallacious title to point out the way forward for astronomy.”
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