To Go Boldly - Naming Our New Telescope Matters
Why the Cold War Will Not Take The Stars From Us
I call our big beautiful new space station, The Next Generation Telescope.
Why?
The organically-named project, inspired by the *vision* of the science that created it — was changed at the last minute *on a whim* by one clueless bureaucrat. Sean O’Keefe. He says he “didn’t know,” and then later, didn’t care, that his hero James Webb was an architect of PSY-ops warfare & the Red/Lavender Scare. He was right at the top of it all.
The short documentary below tells quite a story. Most people today don’t know about the Cold War Red-scare and “Lavender” interrogations that tore NASA apart. It was uglier than anyone would admit at the time. Just like Alan Turing, our country was ready to destroy its finest minds for the sake of misogynist, puritanical posturing.
The 1950’s Mattachine Society — first homosexual rights organization— was started by men like Frank Kameny, a persecuted astrophysicist who was thrown out of NASA for suspected “perversion…