It’s a difficult time to be a scientist. It’s an even more difficult time to be a scientist asking for money. "Economise" and "constraints" are two of the most bandied about words in science: inflation makes things more expensive, but the cookie jar of cash doesn’t swell.
This doesn’t sit that well in science, where the ideas are big — and, arguably, should remain big. If you’re going to get other countries together and lobby to build a scientific instrument, then it should be the best, biggest, shiniest instrument the world has seen.
Scientists dreaming of building a telescope, for example, don’t simply want a little TV dish — they want a Telescope with a capital T, with bells, whistles and the ability to detect a heartbeat from the dawn of time.
This is why you should never give scientists a blank cheque. If you do, you get the James Webb Space Telescope. In 2018, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the US will launch this magnificent space-based telescope, which has infrared capabilities to study the history of the universe, hunt for more exoplanets and, in general, just be scientifically awesome.
But when the idea was mooted in 1996, the price tag was about $500m. As things stand, it is $8bn. Even accounting for inflation, that’s ridiculous.
Someone somewhere should have put a stop to such an excessive overspend. I’m not saying that it won’t be cool and that we won’t be able to do really amazing science with it (if it all works as it is meant to — another hidden cost in telescope construction), but $8bn is a lot of money.
Last week, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) board decided that the first phase of the telescope, which will be the world’s largest once it is complete, is going to be scaled back to contain costs.
The SKA will be hosted in SA and Australia, and construction on the first phase is expected in mid-2019. SA’s 64-dish MeerKAT telescope, which was designed and paid for by us, is expected to be completed in 2018. For SKA 1, another 130 dishes will be added to MeerKAT.
The main cut would be to SKA 1’s computing power (260 petaflops to 50 petaflops) and the distances between the antennae will become smaller (in this sort of radio astronomy, the bigger the distances between antennae, the more detail you can see with your telescope). These shorter distances are particularly an issue for Australia’s section of SKA 1, less so for SA’s.
In the grand scheme of the SKA, these cuts are modest and many of them can be undone if more funding materialises.
Nevertheless, there has been some wailing and gnashing of teeth.
In 2013, the board gave the telescope designers a cost cap of €650m, but it has since bumped that up to €674m to account for inflation. The cuts are aimed at keeping the first phase of the telescope under that threshold. As they should.
Big science instruments cost money and that money has to come from somewhere — in this instance, the taxpayers in all the partner countries including SA. An exciting idea to do amazing science should not mean your project gets undue privilege over all the other demands on those nations’ purses.
It’s a fine line to walk. You can’t be too frugal when it comes to building large science infrastructure.
If you don’t get enough funding, your project shrinks in scope, people lose interest and the whole idea becomes a memory.
But then there is also irresponsible expenditure.
Spending an extra $7.5bn on a project that manifests more than a decade after the initial launch date is irresponsible. Someone needed to go in there with a cost cap and a big stick.
• Wild is a science journalist and author.
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