LGBTQ Breaking News

LGBTQ Breaking News Service

Science

Who was James Webb, anyway? – The Seattle Times

News Editor

In 2002, Sean O’Keefe, then the NASA administrator, announced that the agency’s next telescope would be named for James Webb, who led NASA during the 1960s, when it was gearing up to land people on the moon. He was a staunch champion of space science.

Some astronomers were disappointed that it would not be named for an astronomer, while others objected on more serious grounds — namely, that Webb bore some responsibility for an event during the Truman administration known as the Lavender Scare that resulted in the purging of gay and lesbian employees from the State Department. At the time, Webb had been the undersecretary of state.

That issue gained prominence a year ago when four astronomers — Lucianne Walkowicz of the JustSpace Alliance and Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein of the University of New Hampshire, Brian Nord of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Chicago, and Sarah Tuttle of the University of Washington — published an op-ed in Scientific American, “The James Webb Space Telescope Needs to Be Renamed.”

NASA said it would investigate the claims and publish a report. Subsequently, in September, Bill Nelson, the current NASA administrator and a former Florida senator, announced that he saw no need to change the name. No report was ever released, infuriating the critics.

Related

What looks much like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals previously obscured areas of star birth. Called the Cosmic Cliffs, the region is actually the edge of a gigantic, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, roughly 7,600 light-years away. The cavernous area has been carved from the nebula by the intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from extremely massive, hot, young stars located in the center of the bubble, above the area shown in this image. The high-energy radiation from these stars is sculpting the nebula’s wall by slowly eroding it away. NIRCam – with its crisp resolution and unparalleled sensitivity – unveils hundreds of previously hidden stars, and even numerous background galaxies. Several prominent features in this image are described below. • The “steam” that appears to rise from the celestial “mountains” is actually hot, ionized gas and hot dust streaming away from the nebula due to intense, ultraviolet radiation. • Dramatic pillars rise above the glowing wall of gas, resisting the blistering ultraviolet radiation from the young stars. • Bubbles and cavities are being blown by the intense radiation and stellar winds of newborn stars. • Protostellar jets and outflows, which appear in gold, shoot from dust-enshrouded, nascent stars. • A “blow-out” erupts at the top-center of the ridge, spewing gas and dust into the interstellar medium. • An unusual “arch” appears, looking like a bent-over cylinder. This period of very early star formation is difficult to capture because, for an individual star, it lasts only about 50,000 to 100,000 years – but Webb’s extreme sensitivity and exquisite spatial resolution have chronicled this rare event. Located roughly 7,600 light-years away, NGC 3324 was first cat

In March after the telescope launched, Nature magazine reported on the basis of FOIA requests that NASA had taken the allegations seriously enough that Paul Hertz, then NASA’s director of astrophysics, had written outside astronomers asking if he should change the telescope’s name. The answer was no, but he did not talk to any LGBTQ astronomers.

Advertising

The magazine also reported records from the case of Clifford Norton. He had been fired from NASA in 1963 — during Webb’s tenure — for being gay, and the archival materials alluded to “a custom in the agency” of firing people for homosexual activity. Norton appealed and won a landmark case against such discrimination in 1969.

In November 2021, NASA’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee asked the agency for a fuller report.

O’Keefe defended his choice in an email.

“Arguably, were it not for James Webb’s determination to fulfill the most audacious vision of his time, our capacity to explore today would be starkly different,” O’Keefe said.

But that was not enough for the critics. “If he’s not responsible for the bad stuff that happened while he was in charge, why is he responsible for the good stuff?” Prescod-Weinstein said. “It seems there’s a bit of double-think happening here, where people assign him responsibility for the things they like about his legacy and pretend that he’s only responsible for the things they like.

“Our telescopes, if they are going to be named after people, should be named after people who inspire us to be our better selves,” Prescod-Weinstein added.

This story was originally published at nytimes.com. Read it here.