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Comment by cproctor | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how $1-3M per year, for five years, is going to lead to "a world-class educational institution."

Makes zero sense, and NSF's best answer is that they are soliciting ideas about how. Arecibo is somewhat remote -- it's in a karst terrain that was chosen because it was so bumpy that it formed a convenient bowl for the dish. Its easy for the roads connecting it to San Juan to get shut down or degraded by storms. Without the telescope, it's really hard to imagine which students would aspire to go there. But it's a great place for.... A telescope.

Arecibo isn't remote. From San Juan I can get there in 40 minutes and it's directly off the 22 which is definitely not an easy freeway to be shut down short of a hurricane. It's also directly in between mayaguez and san juan both of which have a ton of students.

I guess I don't see how using 1-3 million dollars to operate an educational center is nonsensical. It's a central area between major universities, fairly flat terrain, northwestern coast so it's generally not going to see the worst of the storms and also has some existing infrastructure.

With that said it's a tragedy that they aren't going to rebuild the telescope in it's original glory.

World class means it attracts people from around the world.

It's 40 minutes from San Juan, which is on a relatively small island on the ocean.

And hurricanes have a habit of hitting there.

PR deserves great local institutions, but it is less accessible than most places that have much larger nearby population.

Puerto Rico is a fairly large (top 100 largest) island with international airports. It is larger than many other islands that have observatories.

Areceibo already WAS a world class telescope and was closer to an international airport than many other observatories.

The only valid point you've made is about hurricanes and earthquakes. However I haven't seen any discussion as to how those effect contruction costs at that site vs others.

I guess San Juan sprawls a bit -- took me almost 2h when I was there in 2020 (not too long after Maria), and we did face a partial washout and downed trees slowing down the last bit of the trip. But obv I trust a local that it's usually accessible :).

$1m a year is not gonna get much. It might not be the case, but it smells a bit like a token amount to keep something going - so they don't have to deal with the drama of closing the site.

In reasearch and education terms, that's literally peanuts. For comparison, the US Department of Energy operates 17 national laboratories, with an average budget of ~$700 million per year each.

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