A hard hitting new story fromScientific American offers new details about NASA's refusal to change the name of the James Webb Space Telescope after accusations of homophobia on the part of its namesake.
The whole thing is worth reading. It gives a new sense of breadth to the betrayal felt by the LGBTQ+ space community, as well as fresh details about dissent inside the agency during the evaluation of whether the name was appropriate. It also leaves open the possibility that NASA could still change its name.
During a late March meeting of NASA's Astrophysics Advisory Committee, officials said that an investigation into the actions of the man decades ago is still ongoing, leaving the door open for further developments in the saga. The decision NASA made is painful to some, and it seems wrong to many of us, according to the magazine.
The suggestion that a name change is still on the table offers a glimpse of a move that could save face for the agency, which has been seen by many as having swept concerns about the Webb legacy under the rug.
Relocating the telescope would be a simple but very impactful thing that NASA could do.
Emails obtained by Nature last month show that NASA had a deeper understanding of the discrimination against gay government employees than it stated in its brief statement last year.
During the investigation, a researcher uncovered documents that showed that President Harry Truman met with a homosexual employee at the State Department. Many gay employees were fired at the State Department and court documents show that it was also possible to fire queer employees at NASA.
The researcher wrote in the emails obtained by Nature that the leader of the Lavender Scare was a man named Webb.
Many in the space community were angry that NASA brushed off the issue despite being aware of it.
It's almost amusing how incompetent the whole thing was, and how little they thought about how important this was to the queer astronomy.
Many space experts agreed with that outlook, according to the report.
I have lost faith and a lot of people have, but I still have hope, according to University of New Hampshire cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.
The story confronted a frequent rejoinder to the debate over the telescope's name, which was that it reflected widespread beliefs at the time, that the man was living in a homophobic era.
Lucianne Walkowicz, an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium who resigned as a NASA adviser over the controversy, addressed that line of thinking in an interview.
I think monsters are a myth that we tell ourselves about prejudice and discrimination. We focus on a cartoonish idea of what discrimination looks like rather than how discrimination is a multilevel policy decision.
Internal emails show NASA employees are agonizing over James Webb's Homophobic history.
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