Campaign Urges NASA to Rename the John C. Stennis Space Center

For 32 years, a NASA rocket testing center in southern Mississippi has carried the name of John C. Stennis, a former United States senator who was a champion of racial segregation for most of his time in Congress.

Now, as the nation navigates a moment of reckoning over statues and other symbols of its racist past, William Pomerantz, vice president of special projects at Virgin Orbit, is leading an effort to strip the Democratic senator’s name from the John C. Stennis Space Center near Mississippi’s Gulf Coast.

“You Google him and the very first results that show up, whether it’s the Wikipedia page or however you got your search engine settings tweaked, pretty much all of them within the first paragraph are going to use the terms of ‘white supremacy’ and ‘segregation,’” Mr. Pomerantz said.

Mr. Pomerantz made his case for renaming the Stennis Space Center on Twitter on June 24, the day NASA announced that it was naming its Washington, D.C., headquarters for Mary Jackson, its first Black female engineer and a pivotal figure in helping the first American astronauts reach space. The campaign to rename the Stennis Space Center was reported by SpacePolicyOnline.com.