I've submitted a suggestion to the incoming Biden administration to replace Arrecibo with a National Network of Interconnected Tin Foil Hats. (NITS) The Hats would be installed on Millenials nationwide, a tracking database would be developed similar to that used for Carbon Offsets. For every 8 hours of downlinked data, the millennial will receive a student debt reduction of $100
Arecibo failed because of consensus (funding): it became a dish (actually a spheroid) trying to build funding based on scientific objectives in several disciplines, in particular high powered cm radar. This meant weight. This meant keeping stuff on the platform that should have been temporary or ROUTINELY swapped out. This meant platform weight within 'projected limits' that could have, likely, been lessened 10-20% . AO survived well within expected MTBF lifetime--true!--but that lifetime could have been extended by decades, as a singular-science facility at lower platform weight, at the cost of not bringing in enough to money operate it. The pie was a forced deep dish of apple, lemon, blackberry, and chiffon slices, because the only way to build the pie was to accommodate all the customers. Few want the salad but everyone wants the meal. Welcome to American science in 2020! FAST , in China, is not a radar facility and cannot suffer the same fate for that very reason.
Same, Stuck at Rosie Roads when one of our machinery spaces went up in flames. One of our division officers played Julie the cruise director and we went to see it. It was pretty shabby even then in 1980. Still was cool but ran distant second for most fleet sailors compared to the Black Angus.
This decision should be put on the back burner until the Biden Administration can review it. The nation is clearly going to return to valing Scientific Research.
The cost to replace the cables, rebuild the dish, and stabilize the towers was in excess of 85-90 million $$. While the NSF pushes the 'safety ' aspect in the press release, the fact is it would be about the same cost, perhaps a bit more, to return it to jungle. Pretty f'd priorities..... What they will do is dynamite/thermite the support cable anchors so the platform falls straight down and doesn't whip any cables like a slingshot. Then they will dynamite the towers later. Kinda like bringing down a casino in Vegas. Another example of US exceptionalism in destructive salvage! Sick, sick, sick. Well, at least I won't have to BUY it...my family sure didn't like that idea anyway. But--if my consortium had moved in 2017, then the planetary radar would have gone. There's some real tonnage for ya...and no new broken cables.
Actually, there is a high probability the platform will fall any minute. By signalling this now, the NSF saves face because the outcome would be the same. If they waited, and it fell by itself before the announcement, they would look like road apples.
NSF stands for "Not Sufficient Funds"...yet somehow they find the money to spend on this: The National Science Foundation’s 73-page report, Under the Microscope, exposed government boondoggles involving academics in university social science programs. The 2011 report blew the whistle on “$1.2 billion the National Science Foundation (NSF) has lost due to waste, fraud, duplication, and mismanagement.” As examples of such abuse, the report cited an “$80,000 study on why the same teams always dominate March Madness,” a “$315,000 study suggesting playing FarmVille on Facebook helps adults develop and maintain relationships,” and a $1 million expenditure to analyze “how quickly parents respond to trendy baby names.” The report also identified such other boondoggles as spending “$50,000 to produce and publicize amateur songs about science,” “$2 million to figure out that people who often post pictures on the Internet from the same location at the same time are usually friends,” "$30,000 to study the gambling habits of Ugandans", and $581,000 to determine “whether online dating site users are racist.” Each of these expenditures is approved by a team of "competent" NSF scientific review teams. Anyone who has worked for the US Government knows that at the end of the fiscal year you spend all your allocation, or it gets reduced the next year. Maybe at the 11th hour in the last month of the USGov't FY I'll ask the NSF to give me $1M to study why hams who think that a change of who sits in the Whitehouse will change the intelligence of the NSF teams that decide what the NSF wastes its money on.
We can spend trillions spilling blood in the sand...and we can't keep Arecibo from becoming a yard sale? Priorities and moralities are all wrong.
Not a 'yard sale'; a 'salvage'. Yes, we exceptional Americans can't stop Arecibo Observatory from becoming a salvage operation after the wreck. We are EX-CEPTIONAL! Surprised they didn't sell the last Saturn V for scrap.....
One of the early engineers there was a mentor, Sam Harris, W1FZJ, long SK, when we both lived in Taxachusetts. I did a lot of his antenna work, he taught me and Helen (W1HOY SK, fed me Everything has a finite life and Arecibo's time has come. I was more upset when Plymouth and Pontiac went away but I have faith a suitable Arecibo replacement will be found in the not too distant future. Carl
