All well-known best practices don't matter if structures cannot be maintained because the governing bodies deny the necessary funding for maintenance/repairs/operation.
In a sense Arecibo was knowingly "given up".
But it was installed on the cheap: if they'd had more money they would likely have paid for more diligent engineers. After all, they built it pretty well the first time round. So at some level, yeah, the root cause is a lack of funds.
Where? What evidence do you have for such a claim?
>The auxiliary cable was almost certainly installed incorrectly
Are you almost certain? How do you know? What stopped you from being completely certain?
>and the failure mode that occurred (cable slipped out of its socket) would not have happened if best practices were followed.
Are you a radio observatory specialist? Please share! Looking at your submission and comment history, you don't appear to have any special expertise at all. Curious where your very specific and definite pronouncements arise from.
>But it was installed on the cheap
Again: What's your evidence for this claim? And inferring this from historical under-funding isn't a satisfactory answer.
>So at some level, yeah, the root cause is a lack of funds.
Kind of strange to make all of those claims above and then come out and just plainly state this at the conclusion.
You've made lots of claims and I think you're just talking out of your ass. If that's the case, your comments are shameful and inappropriate.
The only comparison I know is the FAST which opted to actively deform the dish itself for focusing rather than suspend such a heavy receiver.
The choices were made based on funding and ability. The main platform, towers, and reflector was designed and constructed in 1960, long before our computing capabilities could have even conceived of being able to accurately deform the surface. Heck, the reason the dome is so massive is that it holds a secondary and tertiary reflector to convert the focal line (an artifact of the primary reflector being a spheroid instead of a parabola) into a focal point.
Also, the 30-ton platform in FAST is the main limitation preventing FAST from being able to perform planetary radar science. It is too small and cannot support the weight necessary for a radar system of sufficient capacity.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory#Funding_re... funding was reduced 15 years ago.
Around 5 years ago there was talk about shutting this facility down. So yah, it was knowingly given up, but it wasn't just a short term thought, this was decades of administrators all saying the same thing.