White Elephants: Abandoned & Unfunded Telescopes, Spacecraft, etc.

Norm Sperling, Editor

The Journal of Irreproducible Results

The limiting factors on telescope size are the ability of glassmakers to cast suitable blanks, and the ability of institutions to pay for them. Institutions almost always buy the grandest telescopes they can, and hope that they can afford operations and maintenance funding. Increasingly, that hope is not fulfilled. Quite a number of observatories have closed down working telescopes because their funding has run out.

Running out of funds is hardly new, though there seems to be a lot more of it than there used to be. The largest refractor ever made, the great Paris 49.2-inch by P. Gautier, only operated for a few months at the Paris Exposition of 1900. The observatory never obtained funds for a permanent mounting, and the optics have remained in crates in the observatory basement ever since.

Other fine, historic refractors are also out of service. The lenses of both of Pulkovo Observatory’s world’s largest refractors, the 14.9-inch Merz and Mahler of 1839 and the 30-inch Clark of 1883, both survived the WWII siege of Leningrad, in which the observatory itself was demolished. While the observatory was rebuilt, those telescopes were not; the lenses are displayed there as museum pieces.

Timeshare consortia have been more and more popular since the Armagh-Dunsink-Harvard Schmidt telescope was first set up in South Africa in 1951. They’re a good way to use equipment that is more expensive than a single institution wants to afford. But the ADH Schmidt has been out of operation for years, with the parts in crates, awaiting a new home and new sponsorship.

Corralitos Observatory was set up with a nifty all-reflecting Schmidt telescope that Lew Epstein designed ... but then underfunded, and then given to a tiny nonprofit set up to preserve it for 3 or 4 fans, including the late astronaut Karl Henize. Is it still operating?

Most large observatories have a runt-telescope that is least-used, least-respected, and least-funded. The runt of a big observatory may be far bigger than the gem of a small observatory, because runt-hood is purely relative, not absolute.

Funding dried up for several of the smaller instruments at Cerro Tololo InterAmerican Observatory. The 61-cm Curtis Schmidt camera is closed. It was originally installed by the University of Michigan at their Portage Lake Observatory in 1950, and moved to Cerro Tololo in 1966. Yale’s 1-meter f/10 Ritchey-Chrétien was used by a consortium including AURA, the University of Lisbon, and Ohio State University, but Lisbon withdrew in 2002, closing the scope. The SMARTS consortium now operates CTIO’s 4 1-meter-class telescopes. Their website says they are “... looking for one or two more partners. If you have a large project that could use observing time on these telescopes, and could support the project at a level of $50-$100K/year, then please contact Charles Bailyn.” A friend on the staff there privately wrote me “The Lowell 0.6-m is officially closed, but I was able to wangle a 10 night run with it for a multi-longitude photometry campaign on a bright variable star. The Lowell guys come out and use it about once a year. So a telescope can be officially closed, but still be operational.”

At European Southern Observatory, many telescopes have been decommissioned. The 1-meter Schmidt closed in 1998, and the 1.52-meter Cassegrain closed in 2002. As of 2006, about 12 national telescopes have closed, says S&T Sep 2006 p30.

Mount Wilson Observatory has re-invented itself on the consortium plan, after becoming the runt of the Carnegie Institution.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia closed its great 140-foot equatorial telescope in 1999 for lack of funds. 2 of the interferometer’s 3 85-foot telescopes closed in 2000 for the same reason.

Universities pull similar stunts. Ohio State pulled the plug on its “Big Ear” radio telescope, and Penn shamefully threw away a lot of heritage documentation when it closed Flower and Cook Observatory. Chicago tried to unload Yerkes Observatory for about 20 years and just succeeded.

US space missions have suffered from imposed time limits. Am I the only person who thinks those are silly and dumb? The limits have nothing to do with operating spacecraft, but only with curtailing budgets.

Voyager 1 & 2 were first officially described as only going to Jupiter and Saturn, despite trajectories that unavoidably sent them on the Grand Tour. Sure enough, in 1985-86, President Reagan threatened to cut the budget by not listening to the signals from Voyager 2 as it passed Uranus! The public shamed him into continuing funding.

We hear about the Mars rover missions being “extended”, and the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer, Compton Gamma Ray, and Mir 2 being “de-orbited”. All of those expensive spacecraft were still gathering scientific data. The decision to turn them off was budgetary and political, and the decision to de-orbit them was entirely political, with the “safety” claims a cover-story for gullible media and the public. Amateurs were never permitted to use EUVE and CGRO, and a university bid to keep operating EUVE was rejected.

The International Space Station, planned for a staff of about 8, has never been staffed beyond minimal maintenance. No wonder it doesn’t produce much real Science – it isn’t allowed to!

The Hubble Space Telescope remains gravely threatened. It’s always had opponents behind the scenes. None of the spy satellites of its type seem to have been de-orbited, the way HST enemies advocate; such big burnups would attract wide attention and should be un-hideable.

This isn’t only a US practice. The Soviet Union built an operable space shuttle, Buran, but never flew a crew in it, and left it to rust.

In the 1960s, Pennsylvania had a law that all new secondary schools had to have a space science facility, either an observatory or a planetarium. Over 100 planetaria were built in Pennsylvania schools because of this law. But the law didn’t require the schools to USE their planetaria, and within a few years planetarium directors were non-renewed, and those schools had a lot of funny-looking round study halls.

Please bring up lots of other examples!

What can be done? A few institutions now invest parts of large donations in endowments to operate and care for the stuff that the bulk of the donation pays for. A good example is the library that the late Charles Schulz, the Peanuts cartoonist, paid for at Sonoma State U. Overall, the mindset of operating multi-year and multi-decade projects must extend to the funders, who presently see a 1- or 2-year horizon. The public, the media, and administrators need to understand the full implications of such projects.