Latin Unmoored

White Supremacy and Trauma in NASA’s Use of Classics

EL Meszaros
EIDOLON

--

Thule on the Carte Marina (original 1539 CE)

It’s 2019, and white supremacy is everywhere. It’s in schools, at the farmer’s market, in the algorithms that run our search engines and apps, and in our very field. Until now we could console ourselves, somewhat, with the knowledge that at the very least this plague is confined to our planet.

But that’s not entirely true.

NASA has a history with Nazis — a history that ties our space program inextricably with white supremacy. Though it has since shed the practice of hiring Nazis, racism and sexism have crept into the actions of this agency in oblique and insidious ways. One of those actions is the use of Latin and classical mythology. Disconnected from context, NASA’s use of the classics propagates harmful ideologies of trauma and white supremacy and mirrors the use of classics by the alt-right, which means that even in space we can find examples of racism and sexism. Understanding how this has happened, and working to prevent it, means re-evaluating NASA’s connection to the classics, and the place that white supremacy has in both arenas.

In 1960, famous rocket scientist and literal Nazi Wernher Von Braun became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. Though fewer admitted Nazis have found their way into position at NASA since then, the agency has still found ways to associate itself with white supremacy. We can see this association in action at NASA with the recent naming of Ultima Thule, a trans-Neptunian object in the Kuiper belt. “Ultima Thule” is a temporary nickname for 2014 MU69, a fly-by target for the New Horizons spacecraft, that is drawn from classical antiquity. References to Ultima Thule can be found in Polybius, Geminus of Rhodes, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Tacitus, and others, where this phrase literally refers to a real place — perhaps Shetland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, or someplace near Ireland. It later gained a metaphorical meaning of any far-off or unattainable land. In the time since these Greek and Latin authors, however, Ultima Thule was co-opted by Nazi mystics as the name for the mythical birthplace of the Aryan race, where it gains a direct link with real and actual Nazis and a resulting association with the messages of white supremacy inherent with this group. This association is not subtle and has been further established by continued use of the name “Ultima Thule” by groups associated with the white supremacy movement, including by a Swedish viking-rock band notedly associated with “white power music” and a newspaper for incarcerated white supremacists. Despite this loaded past, NASA not only allowed its use in the regular scientific vernacular but widely publicized it.

The use of a term with ties to white supremacy comes, I think, not from any intention to associate with this crowd but rather a lack of understanding about the name, as NASA has a history of using classical languages with only a cursory understanding of their associated history and baggage. The Apollo 13 mission, made famous by Hollywood and Tom Hanks, sported the only NASA mission patch to feature a motto: Ex luna, scientia, or “from the moon, knowledge.” This motto was chosen by Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell, who claimed that he “plagiarized this somewhat” from the Naval Academy’s motto, which he incorrectly cited as Ex trident, scientia (“From the sea, knowledge”). In the case of either motto, the Latin is not particularly difficult, lending a historical feel without necessitating any study of the language. The Missions Operations Directorate at NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center has adopted the same format in their motto Ex binarii, cognito, or “from binary, understanding.” But if Apollo 13’s motto was already removed from an understanding of Latin — if it was designed to reference not the classical world but the Naval Academy’s understanding of the classical world — then the Missions Operations Directorate is even further separated from its origin. This is the kind of removed understanding of the classics that led, I’m guessing, to the naming of Ultima Thule.

That said, NASA’s careless implementation of the classics does mimic how Greco-Roman antiquity has been used by groups perpetuating white supremacy. As Donna Zuckerberg (Editor in chief of this publication) notes, the alt-right “appears to have little interest in understanding the ancient world in any way other than the most superficial one.” NASA’s use of Latin mottos and mythology displays a similar detachment from the sources and a lack of any sort of contextualized understanding of ancient material. Let me be very clear: I’m not saying that NASA is alt-right, but rather pointing to an identical pattern of exploiting classical language and references unmoored from context. At the same time, when a cursory internet search of the term “Ultima Thule” would have revealed its complications, it seems difficult to believe that at least some at NASA didn’t know about the troublesome associations between Ultima Thule and Nazis before selecting the name.

Ultima Thule is, currently, only a nickname (the official name of this trans-Neptunian object is up to the International Astronomical Union rather than NASA), but this astral body has been in the news now for more than a year, where it has been known by its white supremacist sobriquet. And with a year of continued use, no matter what name the International Astronomical Union ends up selecting for this object, there will always be some association between the trans-Neptunian object and its sordid nickname.

This is the danger in latching on to Latin without working at all to contextualize this knowledge. NASA has held on to a tradition of using Latin to historicize and legitimize the organization without any concern for the actual history of the language, in much the same way that the alt-right and other hate groups seek legitimacy by championing the preservation of the “Western Civilization” supposedly invented in classical antiquity. Similarly, the use of names that have been adopted and accepted by white nationalist groups tacitly condones the actions of these groups, even if it occurs without intention. Ultimately, one can use Latin without a contextualized understanding of classical antiquity — Latin doesn’t belong only to those with a degree in Classics! — but when the language is detached from its own history, we invite groups less savory than NASA in to co-opt materials and messages.

Ultima Thule isn’t the only instance where NASA has appropriated Latin without fully understanding its implications. In August of 2011, NASA launched the Juno spacecraft, which aimed to fall into orbit around Jupiter and join the dozens of natural satellites around this planet. Juno’s stated mission was to observe Jupiter, gathering data on its gravitational and magnetic fields, atmospheric composition, and estimate its core mass (among other goals). It didn’t take long after the craft’s July 2016 arrival at Jupiter for headlines to turn from emphasizing the scientific achievement of sending a probe through the asteroid belt to the cold outer reaches of the solar system to jokes about sending Juno to check on her adultering husband Jupiter. NASA itself aided the comparison, writing in a news release that “The god Jupiter drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief, and his wife, the goddess Juno, was able to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter’s true nature.” Headlines proclaimed the mission “the punchline on a 400-year-old joke” and “a scientific joke that took 400 years to set up,” and have credited NASA workers with “a great sense of humor.”

But invoking Juno solely in her role as wife — cheated on wife at that — ignores her countless other attributes, which include her status as protector and Queen of the gods and her role in the mythic founding of Rome. NASA, notorious for using the names of male deities even when women gods would make much more sense (I’m looking at you, Apollo missions), finally graced a craft with a goddess’ name, only to limit her role to that of a cheated-upon wife.

Worse still, NASA’s press release, by saying that the Juno spacecraft is meant to be discovering Jupiter’s “mischief,” euphemizes not only Jupiter’s infidelity but his rapes. The first four identified moons of Jupiter were named after Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, many of whom were not Jupiter’s mistresses but rather victims of sexual assault and rape. This naming convention, though not entirely NASA’s purview but certainly strengthened by their choice of mission title and press materials, suggests a mythical context in which these women are continuously confronted by their rapist. Substantive knowledge of who Juno was, of who Callisto and Europa were, of the actual connection between these women and Jupiter, changes how we view these names. And in this light, the jokes about sending Juno to check up on Jupiter seem to be in poor taste.

Why does NASA continue to make these mistakes? It’s easy to pin the surface-level understanding of the classics that led to these missteps on the lack of humanities education that many scientists have received. The need for humanities education in many STEM fields is a noted issue. STEM’s lack of even rudimentary contact with the humanities was underscored recently when The Atlantic published an article suggesting that we study the history of progress, infuriating historians everywhere who have been studying the topic for their entire career, but this is but one of many instances where familiarity with the humanities would have prevented a predicament. Undoubtedly part of the blame for NASA’s blunders can be chalked up to under-education, and I would be the first to advocate for incorporating more than a cursory study of the humanities and social sciences in general education.

But while gaining a better understanding of classical references is a necessary start, there are deeper problems with NASA’s association with the classics. From the inception of the moon program, NASA has represented — and been composed of — only white men. Recent books and biopics have highlighted the often forgotten role that women of color played in the early days of NASA, but the truth is that the majority of the players and celebrated figures of NASA were white men. This fact wasn’t lost on the rest of the country, even in the early days of the agency — Ralph Abernathy and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference showed up at the launch site of Apollo 11 to remind the world that the answers to poverty and racism weren’t to be found in the sky. The exclusionary and racist history of the organization makes its nods toward the alt-right in instances like naming Ultima Thule even more suspect.

There are issues of gender discrimination (and ignorance) associated with NASA as well, like the time they asked Sally Ride if 100 tampons would be enough for her one week trip into space. In her examination of women’s spaces in the early days of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center — the same center where Ralph Abernathy protested — Anna Reser writes that “While women’s access to spaceflight was controlled in its early days by overt discrimination — no American women flew in space until 1983 — there were subtler forces at work as well” that futher gendered spaces within NASA and worked to exclude portions of the population. It’s no wonder that an organization that failed to understand and promote how women were involved in the space program and how they accessed it would later limit Queen Juno to only her role as wife.

That NASA perpetuates issues of racism and sexism through a misunderstanding of classical language is no accident, as the field of classics itself has struggled to discard its exclusionary racist and sexist practices. Exhorting scientists to embrace the humanities might provide the necessary background to make classical references with a more complete knowledge of their associations, but simply learning more about classics won’t necessarily fix NASA’s blunders when classics has its own underlying problems with “accidental” support of white supremacy.

Even if these kinds of classical references could be made with a better understanding of context, what would these allusions signify? To many, space exploration evokes inherent imperialist and colonialist themes. “The language we use automatically frames how we envision the things we talk about,” claims astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz in her discussion of the language surrounding space exploration. The use of terms like “space colonization” automatically associate the act with moments in history like the European settlement of the Americas, which are inextricably bound with the horrors of genocide and slavery, and discussing “manned” and “unmanned” spaceflight specifically excludes groups of participants who are not men. Though the NASA style guide itself decries the use of this terminology, and has since 2006, I have personally had conversations with NASA employees as late as 2018 who think it’s silly they have to avoid the term “manned.” (Unsurprisingly, these employees were men.)

These colonialist themes are highlighted when NASA chooses to reference imperialist and colonial cultures like Rome. The use of any classical allusion therefore associates NASA, a governmental agency often associated with U.S. military assets, with so-called “Western Civilization” and the “Western Tradition” in an attempt to draw a straight line from classical antiquity to U.S. political power. As current discussions within classics seek to dismantle the idea of a “Western Civilization,” NASA seems to be drawing from this concept in an attempt to capitalize on its power, and historicize its own work. For a group like NASA that is predominantly white and male, latching on to the historically white and male field of classics perpetuates the issues of diversity inherent in both.

At the same time, I should acknowledge here that, while I’ve been talking about NASA as though it were a unified monolith “NASA” isn’t really one homogenous entity — it has dozens of centers across the United States, thousands of contractors, and many corporate and governmental partners in research. Some of these people are trained in the humanities, trained even in classics (I personally met a few while I, a classics major, worked there). But naming rights and abilities aren’t granted to the people at NASA who may understand connotations and associated baggage, and the end result propagates some problematic ideologies.

There are many reasons to address issues of diversity within STEM fields, and NASA in particular, and many reasons to advocate for an education that includes the humanities even in these fields. Ensuring that the agency correctly uses classical references seems like it should fall near the bottom of a list of these reasons. Yet the names of missions and celestial objects meet with wide publicity, made even more visible in the recent slew of memorials and tributes to the Apollo 11 missions during on their 50th anniversary celebration. NASA’s incredibly public missteps only reinforce the nationistic tendencies and the white, male, colonialist history out of which NASA has grown.

I have suggestions as to what needs to be done to address this — increase humanities education for STEM majors, work on diversity within this institution, and be careful and intentional with language — but I don’t have the solutions as to how to bring about such changes. Historicizing NASA through an association with classics is an act of power. As NASA grapples with a past that is mired in racism and sexism and a future that is fraught with the continuation of colonialism, taking small steps to change the loaded names that give identities to its missions seems a simple fix. Because if we can’t get rid of Nazis on the internet, or from our schools, or from our own field, we should at least remove them from our space program.

E.L. Meszaros is a PhD student in the History of the Exact Sciences at Brown University, focusing on the translation of scientific ideas across the borders of culture, language, and time. She is — or, perhaps after this, was — a frequent NASA intern, working on human/machine interaction (another act of scientific translation), and is an aspiring writer and circus artist.

Eidolon is a publication of Palimpsest Media LLC. Facebook | Twitter | Tumblr | Patreon | Store

--

--

Writer for

She/her. History of Science PhD student. NASA intern. Circus artist.