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LAST Christmas, I woke early in the morning, which is unusual for me. Not only am I a practising Jew, but it has been a few decades since I was a kid in the household of my non-Jewish parent, waking up eager for gifts. But Christmas 2021 was different. NASA 鈥� in partnership with the European Space Agency and other organisations 鈥� was launching the next in its series of Great Observatories. I was up early because I wanted to watch and because I was nervous as hell: what if it blew up during launch?

The final price tag for the instrument NASA calls the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was $10 billion. This sounds like a literally astronomical sum of money, but to situate it in context: Disney鈥檚 Marvel Cinematic Universe films have grossed almost three times this amount in less than the decades invested in JWST. Even so, $10 billion might be relatively small compared with the annual US Department of Defense budget (which is 194 times bigger), but to us in the astronomy community, it is a big number that has drawn bad press over the years.

Importantly, one reason why this was such an expensive facility is because it was hard to build. I will spend my life telling anyone who will listen that JWST is an extraordinary feat of human ingenuity. A telescope designed to look deep into space using infrared 鈥� wavelengths just beyond those the human eye can see 鈥� via the biggest mirror ever launched into space faced a number of technical challenges. The most obvious one: how to get the mirror up there?

The incredible solution was to make a segmented mirror that could be folded for the journey to space and that would unfold, unassisted, once it arrived at its destination. So, an explosion at launch wasn鈥檛 the only incident we had to fear. JWST had 344 single-point failures: items and systems that had to work in order for the instrument to succeed in its endeavour. Developing and testing an instrument that was robust against these risks wasn鈥檛 cheap, nor was it easy. I don鈥檛 envy the scientists who faced intense pressure, knowing that if this didn鈥檛 work out, the US Congress might never allow the astronomy community another facility like it.

That morning, I was full of another set of complicated feelings too: JWST was going up with the name James Webb attached to it, despite an effort to remove it that I had led with other astronomers. Webb not only played a major role in as a cold war tactic during his time at the US Department of State, but , an anti-LGBTQ+ moral panic. He went on to serve as NASA administrator during the storied Apollo era. Webb presided over an increase in non-openly LGBTQ+ Black staff at NASA. At the same time, a was extrajudicially interrogated by NASA鈥檚 head of security, on suspicion that he was gay, and then fired for it.

As administrator, Webb was, at the very least, complicit in a status quo where queer Black people like me could never have a home in the NASA community. JWST is the greatest telescope humanity has ever built. As I argued with comrades in last year, why not name it for someone truly worthy of admiration, like Harriet Tubman, an anti-slavery war hero who probably used the stars to navigate herself to freedom?

It is hard to talk about the telescope when using its name means treating it as a monument to a man who stood in the way of freedom for people like me. I have navigated this by coining the phrase 鈥淛ust Wonderful Space Telescope鈥�, which, since my September 2021 tweet about it was published in , has made its way into the world as an alternative name. There were other complications: JWST was built by defence contractors, which stand for everything I am against.

The telescope has, in some ways, come to represent the contradictions of my profession. But rather than take a stand against doing this kind of science, JWST motivates me to keep pushing for a scientific community organised around the value of investing in and caring for people, including nurturing our sense of wonder.

In July, the first image from JWST was unveiled: the initial deep field, which used a long exposure time to capture even the faintest objects in a small patch of sky. This one image contained thousands of galaxies, some of which are probably 13 billion years old 鈥� almost as old as the universe itself. Many of the galaxies鈥� images were quite visibly distorted by gravitational lensing, suggesting the presence of dark matter. I don鈥檛 know if I have ever seen a more beautiful snapshot of the cosmos in my life.

The cosmic lesson for me: the fight to gather this information in an ethical way is worth it.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, and a core faculty member in women鈥檚 studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her research in theoretical physics focuses on cosmology, neutron stars and particles beyond the standard model.