NASA investigates renaming James Webb telescope after anti-LGBT+ claims | Hacker News Reader

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

nature.com

32 pointsperihelions127 comments

'Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.' - George Orwell

We need to have a serious think about the value of erasing historical figures based on their actions in a very different past.

I know people who were bigots in the past but have substantially changed their perspective, and I also know people who have become more rigid and bigoted in their views over time. One of those people is gay fwiw.

Why is it that perceived character flaws based on current social mores result in historical people being cancelled in our current climate? Rinsing out perceived offensive behaviors from history will surely lead to a future featuring a bland lack of knowledge and no real world behavioral social frameworks

There is a big difference between erasing someone from history and not naming something in someone's honor. It isn't like nasa is now going to scrub all the history books of the name James Webb or outlaw mentioning his name. I would think there are enough people worth naming a telescope after after.

The suggestion mentioned in the article, Harriet Tubman, might not be the most appropriate name for a space telescope, and if that's really what's being suggested it sounds a little pandering, almost to the point of being constructed.

Aye, it would be better to name it after an astronomer, even if you would want a women there are enough names to choose from.

for example: https://youtu.be/damkjiFNn5E

Caroline Herschel Telescope would be cool, she mapped the skies so it feels appropriate

I wonder, if one dig through her private journals or songs, could a person find an view or opinion that in modern standards would not be acceptable to have? If so, should we then erase her name from the telescope and try again with a new candidate?

Sure, if you want to spend your time/effort on that and are able to mobilize and convince enough people to get it changed then you can do that. Im convinced there are enough good candidates that ~didn't actively participate in rooting out queer people from NASA~ [not accurate, read thread], which is kind of a low bar. Nobody (I think) is saying that everyone that gets something named after them must have been perfectly 'woke' by todays standards, but when you are naming something and you have the entirety of history to choose from, maybe don't pick James Webb.

Interesting. You say he "rooting out queer people from NASA", but that is not what is found in the article. The question is not about James Webb time in the NASA, but rather during his time in the State Department as an undersecretary. He became an undersecretary in 1949, and started to work in NASA in 1961. The Lavender scare occurred between 1947 and "ended" around 1973. In particular it was the 1953 law signed by Eisenhower which barred homosexuals from working in the federal government.

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.

I'm very tired and I misread it, I recently watched For All Mankind (a solid series if you like space stuff), where the looking for gay people in NASA (by the state department I think?) is a big plotpoint, I think that is the origin of the mental image I had while reading it.

will edit it, thanks for the correction

what will happen when someone finds something they don't like? because they will

The problem is not the lack of spotless characters. There is no such thing. The problem is the permanently outraged.

olivermarks is talking about an Orwellian kind of erasing, where a person's existence is forgotten or minimized. Putting a bigot's name on a big project and then asking people not to think about their bigotry would be editing history.

> We need to have a serious think about the value of erasing historical figures based on their actions in a very different past.

It’s like we assume that whatever they died believing they’d still believe today. I’m highly skeptical of that. Culture changes over time and people along with it. Except these people don’t have that opportunity to clarify or revisit their views because they’re dead.

Exactly. I wrote the parent comment and recall a pretty senior Australian medical specialist friend of my wife visiting us in San Francisco at the height of the aids crisis. He was embarrassingly, virulently anti homosexual. Today the same guy has totally different views as society has evolved and probably doesn't even remember his former perspective.

He's alive and when he dies will have his reputation intact. Had he died while being negative about gay people by current social mores he would have his views frozen for all time.

Separately, also never underestimate people's life experiences shaping their views. We can all learn from events in other people's lives that shaped their perspective. Not healthy to rinse that away.

Given the extremely short supply of telescopes deserving naming, it’s absurd to think that anyone who doesn’t have a telescope named after themselves has been erased from history.

What you’re defending is James Webb’s immaculate memory. Please think long and hard about whether it’s worth defending the immaculate memory of anyone.

I think there is one group of people who are assuming that because it's a diversity thing it's justified, and another group that thinks that because it's a diversity thing it's unjustified, whereas it may be that NASA is right and that it depends on some old documents that they have to get out of the files, none of which we have seen.

You're probably right on that mark, but on the other hand it is weird that it's not named after an astronomer. Of course, Harriet Tubman isn't much better on that score.

There is a difference between not celebrating and erasing. I agree with some of what you say here but I think asserting that not naming a telescope after somebody is erasing them from history is an unsupported leap - most people don't get their names on space telescopes and we don't think of them as having been erased.

>most people don't get their names on space telescopes and we don't think of them as having been erased.

Erasing is when there's something written somewhere, and then it's erased. So if you started with your name on something and ended without your name on something, that'd be an example of erasing your name.

No. The incorrect statement was about erasing people from history books, not from a telescope.

> Why is it that perceived character flaws based on current social mores result in historical people being cancelled in our current climate?

Additionally, think of some currently-benign things you regularly do today, that will be taboo in 30 years (hint: There's no way to know). All a future canceler has to do is trawl through your history and find all the things that you did or said today that are considered offensive in 2041.

While I agree with your comment, the decision to rename the telescope would make sense, since it was not named after an actual scientist like Hubble but after a former NASA manager.

Refraining from honoring someone is not the same as erasing them.

When you're quite literally erasing James Webb from the name, that seems like erasing and supports olivermark's point entirely.

Asking people to forget his bigotry would be erasing everything but his name. Removing his name from the project is a potential result of a more complete knowledge of history, pending this investigation.

History isn't about who has their names on objects, that's just window dressing. Taking his name off an object when it was put there to honor him is clearly not that same as erasing his history.

> the value of erasing historical figures based on their actions in a very different past

You are trying to conflate not glorifying someone with erasing them from history.

They two completely different things.

If anything, glorification of individuals blurs the lines between objective historical memory and moral judgement.

Maybe we should stop using people names altogether and forget them when they die? It's not like they're relevant anymore. A Soylent Green fate for everyone -- into the memory hole!

I'm LGBT and I'm not impacted by whether or not James Webb had straight Christian biases. Everyone of that era did.

Galileo and Newton would have been pretty trash by today's standards. I'd even bet Einstein might've harbored prejudices despite going through what he did. It was the zeitgeist.

Apollo and the old gods were pretty devious. Orion, who we're still naming things after, was a rapist in some stories. Where's the outrage for these cartoon characters?

If we keep doing this, we need to rename America itself. Because Amerigo Vespucci isn't clean. And then where does it stop?

History is fucked up. 20,000 years ago we all ate one another, and I'm not going to cry about it. Looking at the animal kingdom, we've come a long way. I'd hate to be game for a lion on the savannah. Or a Neanderthal snack. Past mistakes and evolution made us stronger, and there are too many problems on the horizon to fixate on trying to clean up and play pretend. Forgetting our past also weakens the muscles we had to develop in the first place.

Are we going to strip George Washington from all the monuments, too? I think the better idea is to teach the history so that we're kinder and more mindful. This project has been known as James Webb since its inception, and it's busywork and posturing to change it.

I'm LGBT, and frankly, I'm mad at this. I overwhelmingly get the sense that a group of people that I don't relate to very well are looking for targets to blame that conflict with their identity. I increasingly find myself less and less tied to a shared identity with these people and compelled to strong sense of individualism.

James Webb doesn't exist anymore. The language token embeddings of his name call back history and the role he had in early NASA. I'm not going to blame him for anything. In fact, now I want to know more about him to enrich my understanding.

I'm usually pretty liberal. I know my opinion on this issue isn't popular, but this is something that directly touches me. I'm an individual and I'm interested more in history than empty placating.

I'm sure whatever LGBT person we rename the telescope after will be culturally significant. Maybe my problem is just that _I_ want to be the LGBT person that people in the future look up to for my hopefully future merits and accomplishments. I don't need to be told to look up to some dug up idol. I'm too busy looking forward instead of behind.

I'll preface this by saying that I obviously don't support anti-LGBT+ rhethoric, no matter when it happened.

But without digging into the claims themselves, I'd invite people to look at this article critically, and pay careful attention to the weasel words. Specifically:

- "Some astronomers argue…"

- "NASA is investigating…"

- "Many people have…"

- "Many are keen…"

I'm not familiar with the field of astronomy, but to me this article is just full of red flags that it's trying to make a big explosive story out of what amounts to a few people annoyed about Webb's past, four of which think he shouldn't have a telescope named after him and circulating a petition; and NASA doing its due-diligence and launching an investigation rather than ignoring the petition outright.

Or, to put it another way, clickbait. A non-story until something concrete actually comes up. Something to keep people busy, and yelling out "just don't name anything after anyone because chances are they are not flawless".

It claims 1250 signatures, which is more than “a few”.

I'd wager it isn't. Depends a lot on who the names are (the article does claim there's some relevant ones in there). I'd probably sign such a petition if the evidence called for it. With an easy enough CTA, you could gather 1250 signatures just off that HN post alone.

But 1250 signatures is very little. This one (https://www.change.org/p/eight-years-later-it-s-still-too-da...) has 6500 signatures on change.org calling for some air conditioning in Denver public schools. The JWST is on a completely different scale than those schools.

> Former NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe named the JWST after Webb in 2002, when the telescope was in the early stages of development. It was a unilateral decision that took many by surprise, because NASA’s telescopes are typically named after scientists. Webb, who died in 1992, was a bureaucrat who held several administrative roles in the US government.

I actually had no idea who Webb was, I always assumed he was an astronomer or something. Maybe it’s not a bad idea to change it and honor an actual scientist regardless?

If this article had been written about the "controversy over naming a space telescope over a bureaucrat rather than a scientist", every comment here would be advocating for the name change. The framing is everything, which is why people click on stuff like this.

We're going to quickly run out of names if every person we ever memorialize has to be without sin.

I bet Isaac Newton was pretty racist, let's rename physics to "pride math".

> “We don’t call them Newton’s laws anymore,” an upperclassman at the school informs me. “We call them the three fundamental laws of physics. They say we need to ‘decenter whiteness,’ and we need to acknowledge that there’s more than just Newton in physics.”

https://www.city-journal.org/the-miseducation-of-americas-el...

But Newton is at least a scientist. Webb is a bureaucrat whose name was memorialized as a surprise unilateral move.

I think that's a bit hyperbolic.

I think most backlash about memorialization of historic figures is related to modern social issues.

Discrimination towards LGBT people is still a problem that society is coming to grips with. Webb was alive and working recently enough that it's almost certain there are still people alive who were directly harmed by his actions.

This is not to say I necessarily agree with renaming the telescope, but that I do think you're drawing a false equivalence.

Memorializing someone is not the same as endorsing all of their opinions and actions. Naming a space telescope after James Webb doesn't glorify homophobia any more than building a statue of Martin Luther King Jr glorifies adultery and academic plagiarism.

When did I claim it was?

How about just physics? "Newtonian physics" is a fake and outdated attribution anyway.

Or 'Classical Mechanics' as most university courses refer to it. Newtonian mechanics is an outdated name for simplified mechanics that approximate accurately for "normal" physics situations, at least normal for a human's daily life at this point in time.

The opposite end of this spectrum is Relativistic Mechanics, which takes over when the approximations fall away at realms deviating far from normal, such as high mass systems, those at speeds approaching C, or Quantum Mechanics for small scale like atomic interactions.

Classical mechanics wraps up general relativity, Newtonian mechanics, and analytic mechanics (which itself wraps up Hamiltonian mechanics and Lagrangian mechanics) into one name. It can also include fluid mechanics and other forms of continuum mechanics. Newtonian mechanics specifically refers to the formulation of finite-particle mechanics as a second order differential equation set in an inertial reference frame. Typical introductory physics classes teach Newtonian mechanics specifically.

Newtonian physics is a specific kind of physics distinct from other kinds which is why it has a sub-name.

Newton only contributed the three laws of motion to the model. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Newtonian_mechani... The model includes additions from Leibnitz, Euler, Lagrange, and others from around the same time. The name "classical mechanics" doesn't pretend that Newton came up with all that stuff.

Classical mechanics includes everything that's not quantum, including general relativity and the Navier-Stokes equation. It is not a suitable term for Newtonian mechanics because it already refers to a much larger category.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_mechanics#History, that's a recent change. It didn't used to include special or general relativity.

Well obviously it couldn't include general relativity before it was discovered. :-)

Newtonian refers to a particular model of physics. There's also Ptolematic model, the GR model and many others. But Newtonian is the most popular.

I really hate this modern idea that we need to cancel every historical figure because they don't live up to our modern standards.

When you cancel someone you basically are saying they're evil. Do we really want to treat the entirety of human history as evil? Because, spoiler alert every human in history has done something we consider wrong today.

Seems like a big leap. I don't think anyone is saying James Webb was evil, but that maybe Nasa should be careful of honoring a man who didn't reflect their current values.

That said I'm not sure it's worth it to change the name because very few people even know who James Webb was.

Strong actions call for strong words. Observing living people who are cancelled, it's like a scarlett letter. It's beyond getting a slap on the wrist. Getting cancelled is getting branded as a bad person.

But James Webb isn't a living person so...how does this relate?

You said "Seems like a big leap. I don't think anyone is saying James Webb was evil"

It's not "historical". LGBT+ people are still discriminated against, fired, attacked and killed. Sometimes by bigots and sometimes by well-meaning people in a system designed to discriminate. Naming a current project after a historical figure with a position still shared by a current set of powerful bigots gives them legitimacy in the present.

I don't think you understand what historical figure means.

You're trying to draw a line between modern views and historical views.

LGBT have been getting shit on for pretty much all of history. I don't get the point in making the distinction you're trying to make.

Ok so we're judging a near-contemporary character (he died in 1992) for actions that he took in living memory. It's completely relevant to use modern standards to judge him.

When I was a kid in the 90s it was common for people to say "that's gay" instead of "that sucks". I don't think you realize how much things have changed.

I heard somebody say that last night and nobody in their group objected, so I'm afraid we've not moved as far forward as we often think

But playing devils advocate here, would you be ok with naming things after Stalin? Hitler? Ivan the terrible? Or keeping things named after them?

I’m guessing there’s a spectrum here, so the question is where’s the line?

As time passes, history becomes legend, legend becomes myth, and actual people turn into symbols of something else:

http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff2000/fv01950.htm

Yes, we name things after Satan and Hell. So why not, doesn't mean it has to be a "good" thing

So there are a few things here. Not wanting historical figures to be evil is a poor basis of morality. Backwards compatibility isn't some thing that matters very much to me in this department, especially considering all the slavery and murder and illegality of my sexual preferences that went on. That being said, sure. We can gauge people by the standards of their day, should that be helpful, as long as we don't confuse their standards for acceptable ones.

However, that's all beside the point. There is a world of difference between 'canceling' someone by firing them now, 'canceling' someone by renaming things already named after them, and 'canceling' someone by...failing to name something new after them? I don't get a cool new satellite named after me, have I been canceled? Am I evil? How many people do you think even had an opinion on a NASA bureaucrat from the 60s?

The fact is, the satellite isn't even in the air (or out of it, I suppose). James Webb isn't hurt or helped one bit no matter how this goes. He isn't a scientist, or particularly noted in popular culture. The naming of the satellite happened in the 2000s, not in the distant past when there was an excuse. Was James Webb evil? Who cares!? There are plenty of people to name a satellite after.

If we used your standards to name the satellite then there would be almost nobody to name it after. If you dig deep enough almost everyone alive and dead is cancellable.

just don't name anything after anyone because chances are they are not flawless

Or accept that people have flaws and celebrate them in spite of that.

> Or accept that people have flaws and celebrate them in spite of that

You don't even have to celebrate them. Just acknowledge the contributions they made.

Why do we have to name things after people to celebrate them?

We can acknowledge and celebrate Einstein's contributions without calling his theory "Einsteinian Mechanics" or whatever, but instead the more descriptive and accessible "General Relativity".

> Why do we have to name things after people to celebrate them?

This is a time-honored tradition going back centuries, if not milennia.

Perhaps it's time to reassess this tradition.

Why do people have names instead of just being assigned IDs?

Perhaps it's time to reassess this tradition. "Hi, I'm US Citizen AXJ80182!"

That makes about as much sense as current scientific naming.

The way we name people makes sense - with a family name, and an individual name.

Conversely it makes no sense for scientific objects. As an example, 'Higgs boson' does not make sense. 'Higgs' gives no clue what the particle is. Is Peter Higgs a worthy person? Etc. Since it is the mass-carrying particle, it should clearly be called the 'masson', 'massion' or similar.

Why?

Because, when it comes to scientific and mathematical objects, it adds an unnecessary political dimension and a layer of obscurity.

I find this relatively recent trend of naming spacecrafts after people very unfortunate. Would be much easier to have names like in the 60's or 70's like Mariner, Pioneer, Voyager followed by a number.

Even abbreviation like OSIRIS-REx seems to far-fetched and hard to place in context, while when you see a name like Mariner-9 you know that it is a one of the small-scale planetary spacecrafts of the broader Mariner program.

Or name after people mainstream media would approve and never dare to question.

I'm not sure why you're downvoted. MLK was a rampant cheater and emotionally abused his spouse, and yet I've never seen anyone dare to say the many things named after him should be renamed despite the glorification of infidelity this clearly promotes. I wonder why?

Yet another delay to the deployment of this telescope. Hard for me to shake the cynical idea that this is just a smoke screen to mask the latest round of delays and overruns.[1] Or at least allow everyone involved to put a new less tainted project name on their resume. In my perception I associate ‘James Webb’ with colossal engineering mismanagement more than I do with a dead astronomer.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasas-james-webb-...

Engineers tuning the most complicated spaceborne deployment system ever built are not being retasked to investigate a petition about the namesake of the vehicle.

We have managed to come to this point in our history with all of the various changes in values over time without renaming everything from the last generation. Until now. I come from Georgia, which is named for King George of England, our enemy in the Revolutionary war. And they didn't even rename that! I can't stand these new authoritarians.

Why is it named after a bureaucrat anyway?

In fact, why do we name scientific and mathematical tools and discoveries after people at all? It adds a political dimension and an unnecessary layer of obscurity.

Relevant: https://mobile.twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/8480137859817...

What will be the reason hn_user cannot be the name of 2120s newest spaceship? Did they eat meat of real animals? Did they own more than they needed? Didn‘t they help others as much as they could?

Looking at what occurred during 1950 Truman's presidency, James webb as part of the state department was likely involved in many of the decisions around the Korean war. However the outrage is not over his war activity, but rather the Lavender and Red scare. How come? Is a war that killed millions of citizens much more morally acceptable than discrimination?

Currently, yes, because the war is over and international relations have changed since than. But LGBT+ people are still being discriminated against, so his actions there are more relevant to people now.

The notion that we can only recognize perfect people in history seems misguided since there are precious few perfect people.

Audubon owned slaves. Muir was racist. Webb was discriminatory. These are all teachable moments: the evils in our past were not solely the fault of the worst people in society; even the best people were responsible.

Sure, but I also think people like to paint with a broad brush when talking about how "nobody's perfect"

Just because very few people are totally devoid of moral failures doesn't mean some people aren't better than others. And it shouldn't mean that we can't judge those before us for their failures as well as their successes.

There's a passage in Alan Turing's autobiography that suggests he performed a non-consensual sexual act on a male friend.*

I would certainly not use this as cause for renaming the many things we have named after Turing.

*Alan Turing: The Enigma, page 132:

"They were ordinary people, who made Alan feel more at home than did the grand Princeton figures. In their old-fashioned country way, they put Alan and Maurice in the same double bed. The compartments of life were fractured. Maurice was amazed - he had not had the slightest suspicion. Alan apologised and withdrew at once. Then he blazed out"

No, the "best people" weren't responsible for slavery. Any rich guy can write a book or do math especially if they live off slave labor.

There were plenty of people who opposed slavery. Those were the best people, even if they're not remembered in a culture that worships slavemasters.

You're right that the abolitionists were better people who lived at the same time. My point is really that people can be good in many honorable ways and yet also be complicit in the common evil of their time. Likely many abolitionists were against LGBT; it's good to remember both their greatness and their failings.

You can bet that even the “best people” held some unpopular view. I’m sure they used words that would be considered terrible by today’s standards.

It’s the same as going all the way back to the beginning of someone’s Twitter account to find a rap lyric quote to get them fired.

Even the most cautious careful views today may look terrible 100 years from now.

I think at this point we shouldn't name anything after anyone ever again, its the only way to be safe

Or, we could reject insanity and recognize that all people are imperfect, and that societies' values change over time.

NASA's 2.4m space telescope

NASA's 6.5m infrared space telescope

etc

It makes much more sense, why do we need people's names?

This is an interesting read. https://hmoluseyi.medium.com/was-nasas-historic-leader-james...

Not a single person of note who has died above age 30 has had opinions entirely in line with the cutting edge of American progressive thought.

95% of Americans aren’t entirely in line with cutting edge of American progressive thought

I don't think you need to be "progressive" to be against NASA firing someone just because they are gay.

You did in 1960 or whenever this ancient news happened.

This is the perfect bike shed to delay the JWST for another year. Great job social justice!

"He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone."

As an atheist I must say there are some useful lines in the Bible, like this one

Webb was born in 1906. Why beclown themselves like this? JWST already has a name, they can't undo that association, even if they change the name.

It's also a bit like: 'Man born over a century ago hasn't the same values that we do today. More news at eleven.'

Do you really think that Hubble didn't have such views, or any other person you name stuff after?

Plenty of people have the same values today. here is the 2016/2020 Republican platform [PDF] https://prod-static-ngop-pbl.s3.amazonaws.com/media/document... It includes an endorsement to "bar government discrimination against individuals and businesses for acting on the belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman". So you can't argue that we should forget his bigotry just because it's old and not relevant anymore.

I don't agree with their beliefs either but do you really feel comfortable having one side of the political spectrum be the arbiter of what is "right"? We may disagree with them, but we (assuming you are as well) are in america where you are allowed to hold beliefs (as long as exercising those beliefs don't infringe on the rights of others).

> So you can't argue that we should forget his bigotry just because it's old and not relevant anymore.

If some people still hold some of those beliefs (again, I am not one of them), doesn't it seem even less good to penalize someone from the distant past for holding that belief?

We can individually decide what is right. We can try to convince each other of our positions too, as individuals. The people who each put their name on the petition are trying to get the people in charge of the project at NASA to change their decision. No need to drag spectrums or politics into it.

I know I'm the one who put the Republican document into this conversation but it was just an example of how widespread it is. When it comes to legislation, it makes sense to me to use it for certain large-scale kinds of systematic discrimination. Since the US government passed laws against gay people having certain positions, it's probably good to legislate against discrimination for a while. If it were just a matter of individual people's opinions, it would be less widespread issue.

> we can individually decide what is right.

You really feel comfortable that you are infallible and that it's within your rights to dictate what is "right" everywhere across society? Shouldn't others get a say in what is right?

I'm all for legislation that determines our laws, but I'm a lot less ok with social media mobs exerting pressure to force others to fall in line with their beliefs.

I don't think I'm infallible. I said in the next sentence we can try to change each other's minds. I mentioned an exception, but in most cases I'm much more comfortable with individuals making their own decisions than enforcing a uniform standard of behavior. Online mobs are just people, but legislation has legalized violence available to back it up and that seems much more powerful to me. And if you let others have a say in what's right, how could you take a stand for anything? https://twitter.com/dril/status/841892608788041732

That really shouldn't be a controversial statement. Having a government that imposes the values of one group on everyone sounds great when you happen to be a part of that group, but what happens when they decide to impose values that you don't agree with?

> So you can't argue that we should forget his bigotry just because it's old and not relevant anymore.

I never said any of that though.

James Webb has values that people still do today. Your summary of the issue says the opposite.

Yea agreed, he held a belief that most people in society held at the time. We probably hold beliefs that will be shameful to those in the future. I constantly look back at my past self and think he was an idiot. People are fallible and make mistakes as well.

>JWST already has a name, they can't undo that association, even if they change the name.

To the technical people who're already interested perhaps, but the general public won't have that association.

It seems valid not to glorify people who were involved in atrocities (perhaps overstating things in this case, I've not looked into it - but as a general point) from the past.

Personally I can't see them deciding to rename it, but I don't think it's silly for them to consider it, and if they did I wouldn't be bothered... just get the thing launched so we can do more science!

the issue is that every has skeletons in their closet. if you go by that mentality, you can never name anything after anyone. you can never celebrate people's accomplishments ever, because that person will have ALWAYS also had something bad in their life.

I understand the point you're making and I'm sympathetic to it, and the knee-jerk reaction that people who do anything seriously bad are irredeemable - but I think there's a distinct difference between the different "skeletons on their closet" that makes it not the slippery slope you're worried about.

There will be plenty of figures for whom "something bad" is just generally being rude/an asshole their whole life, for example - and that's quite different from actively furthering the systematic persecution of people based on something they can't control like who they love.

> JWST already has a name, they can't undo that association

I think this is all quite silly, but wanted to push back on this narrow point. Renaming works. Uluru was renamed in the last few decades; the new name has stuck [1]. (With more time, New York and Istanbul.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uluru#Name

I think the variables here are how tenuous the current name is, and also how cool/enduring the replacement name is.

Mt McKinely -> Denali is another great example.

I think these factors will usually be stronger than any moral dimension.

I think your example is a good illustration of my point...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denali

"McKinley" occurs 60 times on that page and is in the first sentence of the article.

Payne-Gaposchkin is actually a good choice considering what a raw deal she got.

NASA should start a committee to investigate Webb's past: set up the rules of the committee and start nominating members (at least 19) approved by a complicated 5 stage voting process by another committee. All in the name of objectivity. Drag it out for 10 years, have meetings from time to time, keep those activists busy, and let real astronomers do the real work.

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