This is one of the biggest space launches of the year: on December 18, an Ariane rocket will take off from Kourou (Guyana) to place the James Webb space telescope, Hubble's successor, into orbit.
The promise of a new window on the universe, as Humanity has never seen it.
But this coming revolution is tarnished by a controversy over the name of the instrument: astronomers demand that it be renamed on the grounds that this James Webb, administrator of NASA in the 1960s, would have participated in a policy of exclusion. homosexuals.
The US Space Agency, which has launched an investigation to shed light on these allegations, explains Tuesday that it does not have proof.
"We have not found any evidence for the moment that justifies changing the name of the James Webb space telescope," said Bill Nelson, the boss of NASA, in a response sent to the Parisian.
The US Space Agency does not say if the investigation is still ongoing or if it is closed.
"Violet fear"
A petition launched in May to demand that the successor to the Hubble Telescope be renamed has collected more than 1,200 signatures from members of the scientific community. "Prior to serving as a NASA administrator, Webb served as Under Secretary of State on the government service gay purge known as
Lavender Scare,
" the petition states. This wave of persecution, "violet fear" in French, took place during the 1950s.
“The archived evidence clearly indicates that Webb was in high-level conversations regarding the creation of this policy and the actions that resulted from it.
Based on the dismissal of a NASA employee in 1963, the authors of the text claim that this policy of harassment continued when Webb was the head of the agency.
