NASA investigates renaming James Webb telescope after anti-LGBT+ claims - Nature.com

The James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch this year.Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn.

NASA is considering whether to rename its flagship astronomical observatory, given reports alleging that James Webb, after whom it is named, was involved in persecuting gay and lesbian people during his career in government.

Keeping his name on the US$8.8-billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — set to launch later this year — would glorify bigotry and anti-LGBT+ sentiment, say some astronomers.

But others say there is not yet enough evidence against Webb, who was head of NASA from 1961 to 1968, and they are withholding judgement until the agency has finished an internal investigation.

The JWST, which will peer into the distant reaches of the cosmos, is NASA’s biggest astronomical project in decades, so the stakes are high.

Former NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe named the JWST after Webb in 2002, when the telescope was in the early stages of development.

James Webb was NASA's second-ever administrator, running the agency from 1961 to 1968.Credit: NASA.

O’Keefe chose the name because Webb had advocated that NASA keep science as a key part of its portfolio in the 1960s, even as the Apollo programme of human space exploration soaked up most of the agency’s attention and budget.

“Without James Webb’s leadership, there may have been no telescope or much of anything else at NASA noteworthy of a naming controversy,” he says.

The four astronomers leading the renaming petition say that when Webb worked for the state department in the high-ranking position of undersecretary from 1949 to 1952, he passed a set of memos discussing what was described as “the problem of homosexuals and sex perverts” to a senator who was leading the persecution.

David Johnson, a historian at the University of South Florida in Tampa who wrote the 2004 book The Lavender Scare, says he knows of no evidence that Webb led or instigated persecution.

They also note the case of Clifford Norton, who was fired from his job at NASA because he was suspected to be gay in 1963, when Webb was NASA administrator.

The push to rename the telescope falls into the broader reckoning over naming buildings, facilities and other objects after questionable historical figures.

Last year, an aerospace executive began an as-yet unsuccessful effort to rename a NASA centre in Mississippi that is named after John Stennis, a senator who voted repeatedly in favour of racial segregation in the 1960s.

In the past year or so, NASA has tried to address past discrimination against Black scientists and against women by naming its Washington DC headquarters after Mary Jackson, the first Black female engineer at the agency, and announcing that the flagship space telescope after the JWST will be named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer.

The JWST debate comes near the end of a long and exhausting push to launch the observatory into space

Originally conceived in 1989 as the successor to the iconic Hubble Space Telescope, the craft is many years and billions of dollars over budget

The final decision lies with NASA administrator Bill Nelson, who has not said anything publicly on the matter

Some astronomers who plan to use the JWST are already thinking about what they will do if the telescope is not renamed

One idea is to acknowledge LGBT+ rights in the acknowledgements sections of papers published using JWST data, says Johanna Teske, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC