In a seismic revelation that rattled exactly zero astronomers but gave science history buffs a lively Tuesday, a group of historians and researchers have released a report suggesting that the James Webb Space Telescope, the glittering jewel of modern stargazing, may in fact carry a name less suited to cosmic exploration and more at home in Cold War bureaucracy.
Webb, formerly a top NASA administrator during the 1960s, now stands accused by the court of public opinion of being insufficiently celestial in both résumé and ideology. While he never personally hunted quasars from a grainy telescope feed or juggled galaxy redshift data at cocktail parties, he did manage to shepherd NASA through the Apollo years, all while wearing a suit that surely had less stardust on it than his more astronomically inclined successors.
The report, which took roughly two years and more patience than a Mars lander mission, concluded there was no conclusive evidence that Webb was directly involved in purging gay employees from government during the Lavender Scare. But as is customary with legacy rebranding initiatives, the absence of direct guilt has rarely proven to be a sufficient defense in our current age of telescope cancel culture.
NASA has so far chosen to stick with the name, citing traditions, naming conventions and possibly the existential dread involved in redesigning all those promotional posters. Meanwhile, astronomers who spent the better part of two decades arguing over Webb’s optics now find themselves arguing over whether the name itself was ever truly in focus.
“The report provides no evidence warranting a name change,” one NASA statement read, in language that sounded like it had been edited by both a lawyer and a telescope.
So the James Webb Space Telescope will continue to hang out a million miles from Earth, peering into the dawn of time while carrying the name of a man who probably never saw the inside of a planetarium without a fundraising banner overhead.
It turns out that sometimes, what is in a name is less about stars and more about starched collars.