But it’s 2021, and NASA has spent the past few years making a concerted effort to recognize scientists-many of them women and people of color-who have been overlooked in space history.
If JWST had launched earlier, its name might have escaped this level of scrutiny. “We have found no evidence at this time that warrants changing the name,” Nelson said in a statement. Apparently, the agency failed to find it: Last month, without releasing any additional information, NASA’s current administrator, Bill Nelson, announced that JWST would stay JWST. In response to that outcry, NASA conducted a review of historical documents, searching for evidence of Webb’s direct involvement in the discrimination against or dismissal of LGBTQ employees. Read: The shipping and handling of a gigantic space telescope Other documents show that NASA, under Webb’s watch, engaged in discriminatory firing. They point to archival, publicly accessible documents that show that, during his pre-NASA tenure at the State Department in the early ’50s, Webb attended a meeting about policies that discriminated against LGBTQ government employees. Webb, critics say, is the wrong namesake for an instrument meant to inspire future generations of scientific thinkers.
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More than 1,200 people, including professional scientists who have applied for observing time on JWST, have signed an online petition asking NASA to rename the telescope. But rather than focusing on that long-awaited triumph, they’re caught up in a controversy over the 20-year-old naming decision. Scientists around the world are ready to see JWST go the telescope has been over budget and behind schedule for years. It’s the scientific successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which completely altered our view of the universe. JWST, an enormous $9.7 billion observatory with 18 mirrors coated in gold, is scheduled to launch into space this December.
Webb, who died in 1992, was more of a behind-the-scenes manager than a space-science star he had served as NASA’s second administrator, in the 1960s, during the run-up to the Apollo moon landings. That was the prevailing reaction among scientists at the time. Knierman sipped from her suddenly out-of-date mug and wondered, Who? The mug was on Knierman’s desk in 2002 when NASA made a surprise announcement: NGST was going to become JWST, after James Webb. It bore the logo of an ambitious observatory, designed to peer at the most distant galaxies in the universe: NGST, short for Next Generation Space Telescope.
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In 1999, Karen Knierman picked up a free mug at her first big astronomy conference, just before she started grad school.
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