The $10 billion telescope was named in honor of James Webb, an American official who was NASA’s second administrator. Webb led the space agency during many of the Apollo missions in the 1960s and also served as US Under Secretary of State from 1949 to 1952. The name of the telescope has been criticized by many scientists amid claims that Webb was linked to the persecution of LGBTQ+ people in the 1950s and 1960s. The Lavender Scare witch hunt resulted in the mass firing of gay and lesbian people from the US government in in the middle of the 20th century. Researchers are calling on Nasa to rename the telescope (JWST) from early 2021. A petition has been signed by more than 1,700 people in the astronomical community. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, an assistant professor of physics at the University of New Hampshire and one of four researchers leading the renaming petition, tweeted Monday: “As one of the people who led the push to change the name, today I feel bittersweet , I am so excited about the new images and so angry at Nasa HQ. “NASA leadership has stubbornly refused to acknowledge that public information about JW’s legacy means he is not worthy of having a major observatory named after him,” he added. During Webb’s time as administrator, Nasa employee Clifford Norton was fired in 1963 for “immoral, indecent and disgraceful conduct” after being questioned on suspicion of homosexuality. Norton later successfully sued for wrongful dismissal. In September last year, Nasa announced that it would not be changing the name of the telescope. “We have found no evidence at this time to justify changing the name of the James Webb Space Telescope,” current Nasa administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement in September. In March, the journal Nature published 400 pages of internal Nasa documents obtained through a freedom of information request, including a white paper that said “Nasa had decided that removing homosexual employees would be its policy. They had the option during Webb’s tenure as administrator to set or change that policy.” “Many astronomers are very unhappy that the observatory is named after him,” wrote American astronomer Phil Plait in the Bad Astronomy newsletter. “It’s hard to want to use an instrument when you know you’re going to have to write about it using the name of someone who worked to deny your very existence.” ”The observatory will produce amazing science and wonderful images, certainly as Hubble has,” Plate tweeted. “But it was named after someone irrevocably associated with bigotry and homophobia, and on top of that Nasa failed in the way it handled the situation.”
