Denise Oliver Velez, our diva of many issues but I’ve known her best for her tireless work keeping us informed about Puerto Rico in the aftermath of hurricanes and the efforts of Republican sabotage to the island’s infrastructure, alerted the DKos community this morning about the latest news out of Puerto Rico about the Arecibo radio telescope’s upcoming demise. www.dailykos.com/…
There have been some articles on it — www.theguardian.com/…, www.space.com/…, www.nature.com/…, www.nsf.gov/… and many more. In short, in August a cable that held one of the towers seen in the above photo snapped, putting the stability of the towers and central platform at risk, while at the same time a 30 meter hole was gouged out of the dish. Today came word that a second cable snapped, and the decision has been made that the risks to try and repair this are more likely to bring the whole thing crashing down, destroying the delicate instruments instead of successfully repairing the telescope so it can continue on with its missions of studying space for radio signals. Arecibo will be dismantled and discontinued.
IMO, this is another example of how the human race, and in particular, Congress, NASA and the US technological programs, have starved science programs that don’t have immediate payoff to corporate sponsors. There’s no way today we could launch a mission to the moon the way NASA managed to in the 60’s (because it is too hard, to paraphrase JFK) and that was nearly 60 years ago. I doubt we could even replicate the space station that currently orbits the earth because it would cost too much and Congress would complain about the uncertain monetary returns while at the same time shoveling money to billionaires and the military to achieve no practical return on all that money, other than collecting campaign donations either above board or through PACS that hide all the dark money contributions. Instead, we and other countries take occasional pot shots every few years to try and send unmanned missions to asteroids, moons and other planets to search for valuable minerals and water that would likely only benefit a few wealthy industrialists and not the whole of mankind. I hope the Biden administration can make some progress on funding research and scientific programs at universities where the US will own the patents and discoveries will be public domain, available to all to learn from and not owned by private corporations that will have the choice of capitalizing upon the profits from government-funded research or choosing to kill programs that could benefit the public but will possibly conflict with other profit making enterprises of the corporation.
Well, I just am going to end this rant. I’m a believer that the US should be engaged in science for humanity’s sake and when there are threats to science, especially when huge, expensive pieces of infrastructure are at risk, we invest “a stitch in time to save nine”. I understand from reading some of the articles (which often seem to be varying takes on the same source material) that maintenance from ten years ago was never performed, (so it isn’t able to be tied directly to Trump and his dislike of Puerto Rico) which led to the damage this year and the decision that it’s less risky to do a methodical dismantling and repurposing of the components that can be salvaged and put to use in other locations. I hate those kinds of decisions, however, and in a similar vein, I applauded the Hubble telescope continuing to receive updated components that greatly extended its lifespan beyond the original projection. I do realize sometimes it’s just better to do a wholesale replacement rather than continuing to upgrade old parts, and I’m actually doing just that with my computer system that’s now approaching about eight years old but still has pretty good parts — anybody need a desktop computer? but my computer isn’t a one-of-a-kind system that still could have been saved had some government invested millions to avoid losing billions.
Ah, but who am I kidding — is it infrastructure week yet?
