Wapsi Square Forum

A massive radio telescope in Puerto Rico that was until recently the largest in the world has totally collapsed, according to the Associated Press. The Arecibo Observatory’s 900-ton receiver platform reportedly crashed down on to its reflector dish more than 400 feet below.

The telescope was already badly damaged—a cable snapped in August, creating a huge gash on the reflector dish, and a main cable broke in early November. It was built in the 1960s with Defense Department money.

The telescope was made famous by Carl Sagan in Contact and the 1995 Bond film GoldenEye—and featured in the climactic final level of the Nintendo 64 game based on the film.

[More at the Associated Press}

Newton wins again . . . .

A preventable tragedy. Where was the maintenance budget for the last twenty years? I will write to my congresscritters and plead for budget to not only replace the telescope that fell but to maintain all the remaining infrastructure.

It's probably better to remove the wreckage and start over.

Forget starting over somewhere else . . . there's no way you're going to get the EIS through.

--FreeFlier

As is all too common in industry and especially politics, the focus is on what will get another year's operation, and not sustaining equipment for the next 10 years.

I've seen an industrial company drop 1 Million on a used machine tool, then bitch about poor production and high costs when they didn't clean/upgrade/revise the electrics/hydralics and control system. I've also seen a company drop 1 Million to upgrade and basically re-manufacture a 70 year old multi-thousand ton hot metal press with all new hydraulic seals and computerized control system, with a replacement feed furnace. Uptime went from 85% ish to 97% the first year.

At $400/minute gross sales from operations, that extra 12% led to a 3rd shift and a bunch of new customers.

Shame Arecibo wasn't treated as an investment instead of an ongoing cost center.

Management who thinks that long-term planning means what they're going to do after lunch . . . but only if it's past first break.

At one plant they had two screw conveyors that would each shut down half of the plant if it broke down . . . upper management raised the roof when a first-level manager ordered all four bearings changed for bearings with grease reservoirs after a breakdown that shut the plant down for second shift. (The bearing that had failed was the newest, and at least one of the other bearings was loose, indicating incipient failure . . . none of them had been greased when they were supposed to be.)

OTOH, I did get a lot of cleanup done . . . emptied either about 210 or about 230 pallets of mixed stock.


In another, they wouldn't allow the machine operators to change cutters when they got dull . . . "You can get a few more out of it!" This meant that all cutters were run until they failed catastrophically, taking out the workpiece and frequently the following cutter into the bargain . . . plus the cutter, having burst, couldn't be sharpened. For some reason, that shop failed a few years later . . .

--FreeFlier

In this case, there's something that most people just don't want to acknowledge.

It was built over 50 years ago, using _Department of Defense_ money.

That means that they initially though there was some benefit to the structure to do with warfare. Either attacking or defending.

It might have been very useful for scientists, but I'd bet the property is still owned by the DoD. (no, I haven't checked. It's not that valuable for my time) If so, they'd have been responsible for the upkeep - and most of their budgets that were straight purchasing R&D (such as for military vehicles) have been allocated to maintaining active facilities, such as Colorado Springs and all the bases in the middle east.

It's sad that the thing collapsed, especially when casual maintenance would probably have kept it standing for another 50 years, but probably inevitable.

*goes back to dismantling laptop batteries, while being used as a bed by a cat*