In 2002 then NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe announced that the upcoming Next Generation Space Telescope, the pride of the agency and a promise of astronomical revolution, would be renamed to the James Webb Space Telescope.
James E. Webb was NASA’s second administrator and an advocate for injecting more science into the overwhelmingly politically motivated Apollo missions. NASA’s usual tradition was to name observatories after scientists, not politicians, so I was a little miffed by the name at the time but not particularly bothered by it.
In 2015, however, journalist and gay rights advocate Dan Savage wrote a column about Webb’s involvement in the lavender scare, a moral panic in the 1950s and 1960s over homosexual federal employees in the U.S. Webb was then undersecretary of the Department of State, which purged 91 gay people from its staff. When this news came out, astronomers took note, and many rebelled against the choice of the observatory’s name. NASA set up an internal investigation of the naming but announced that it “found no evidence” that warranted changing the observatory’s name.
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I disagree with that conclusion. Webb’s direct involvement in the State Department purge is unclear, but it did happen under his administration, for what that’s worth, and his involvement in modernizing psychological warfare during the cold war is enough to warrant, at the least, a reconsideration of the telescope’s name. Despite queries from the American Astronomical Society—the largest professional organization of astronomers in the country—current NASA chief Bill Nelson has not changed the space agency’s stance. As far as NASA is concerned, the matter is closed.
This is troubling. For these and many other reasons, a large contingent of astronomers, including myself, prefer not to use the telescope’s official name and instead refer to it by its initials, JWST. This is hardly a solution; just a weak attempt at regaining some measure of control over how we refer to the magnificent scientific device.
The observatory is the most visible example of this naming issue when it comes to science; the fight over statues of Confederate figures and buildings and roads named after such individuals is probably the most well known among the public. In Virginia, my own home state (and locale of the former Confederacy’s capital), one county’s school board recently voted to restore the Confederate names of two high schools after they had been renamed in 2020. While this outcome is disappointing, there has been a lot of success in renaming problematic—to say the least—objects. And I’m glad we’re having this conversation; shining light on racism and other moral weaknesses is the very minimum we can do.
Some people may feel that their history, self-identity or pride is wrapped up in existing names, making it difficult for them to see the right path. It can take a lot of effort to overcome that inherent bias.
Sometimes, though, it’s far easier. For example, astronomers have a lot of nicknames we use for cosmic objects. That’s not surprising; “the Whirlpool galaxy” is a lot easier to remember than NGC 5194, its more official catalog name. But when you see an image of this lovely spiral, the nickname is descriptive as well.
Not all names are so benign. NGC 2392 is a gaseous nebula, a favorite of amateur astronomers for its brightness and location on the sky, which make it easy to find. For decades, though, it was known as the Eskimo nebula, a term that is considered offensive by many Indigenous people in Canada and Greenland.
A pair of interacting galaxies in the constellation Virgo go by the designations NGC 4567 and 4568, but are colloquially known as the Siamese Twins Galaxies, another unfortunate moniker. NASA has taken steps to stop using these nicknames in its official statements (such as press releases) due to their cultural insensitivity.
Another example is a popular piece of astronomical software used to extract sources from an image. It was given the unfortunate name SExtractor. That should be pronounced “Ess Extractor,” but I don’t think it’s too much a stretch to see where the problem lies. Astronomers have undertaken an effort to rename it, and newer version use the entire phrase Source Extractor for the package.
That’s good. It’s a relatively minor inconvenience and shows respect toward others. Inclusivity is a strength, and here NASA is doing the right thing. Extrapolating on this, most observatories are named after men (and nearly all after white men), but NASA renamed the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (to launch in 2026) to the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, after the woman who was once NASA’s chief of astronomy and widely considered the “mother of Hubble Space Telescope.” The National Science Foundation recently renamed the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope after Vera Rubin, an astronomer and pioneer in the discovery of dark matter.
Names aren’t the only things to reconsider, too. Even the terms we use should sometimes be rethought. Every now and again, when writing about people exploring space, I’ll refer to a “crewed mission.” This always brings a few comments asking why I didn’t use the word “manned,” and usually those comments are not terribly polite about it.
The answer is obvious enough; “manned” isn’t inclusive because not all astronauts are men. Some words are just holdovers from a different era, cruising on momentum, and well overdue for reconsideration. Incidentally, I always delight in pointing out to any etymological curmudgeons that a non-gender-specific term such as “crewed” over “manned” is recommended by the official NASA Style Guide—since 2006. It’s been the official term for a while now. Get with the times.
This isn’t an issue just in astronomy and space exploration, of course. The Entomological Society of America has dropped the names “gypsy moth” and “gypsy ant” from its official usage due to the pejorative adjective. In 2023 the American Ornithological Society announced it would phase out bird eponyms—names given to them after specific people. In 1982 the CDC introduced the term Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), replacing the older term Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. This isn’t hard, folks.
None of these undertakings are all that difficult. People change their names and titles all the time, and we generally take that in stride. Changing how we address other things is, really, just as simple.
After all, there’s a reason we say something is named “in honor” of someone. We honor that person by remembering their name and associating it with something we respect. The tradition of naming things is an important one; if it weren’t we wouldn’t do it. We need to do it right.
Of course there will be pushback when things are renamed, but all too often this pushback is based on bias. As the adage goes, when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
But this isn’t a zero-sum game; renaming something is not an attack on anyone. It’s a way of making space for everyone, something we should have been doing all along. If astronomy teaches us anything, it’s that we all live in a big universe, and there’s plenty of room for all.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.