Kicking a man when he's down
Much as how the Tories want to break the NHS but will never egregiously admit to it, so I have the impression that the NSF want to (and importantly have long wanted to) kill off Arecibo. It's not accidental, it's a deliberate delenda est Arecibo, albeit perhaps partly subconsciously.
It was always a long shot that calls to rebuild the telescope would fall on deaf ears because the NSF have been stuck in pig-headed ignorance for the last decade and more. But the very least you could do when a world class facility collapses is to try and facilitate a smooth transition to a new state of affairs, be that a replacement in the extreme best-case scenario, or a complete site closure in the extreme worst-case.
The problem is that closing a site like this isn't something you can just do on a whim. You can't just close the gate and call it a day. There are dozens of buildings on site, including a 12m radio telescope, LIDAR instruments, small optical telescopes, a 1 MW diesel generator, plus all of the support buildings for researchers and technicians (many of whom are still employed and working on-site) which includes all the backend electronics and data archive. The NSF plan to just stop supporting all this in six months is absurd. Okay, you want out. Fine, you short-sighted arseholes. Fine. But this current plan means dozens of job losses for people with decades of specialist experience and a clean-up operation that simply isn't going to happen.
Then the replacement scheme : a STEM outreach centre funded at the pitiful level of $1 million per year using existing local university staff (oh, and this is when the NSF are asking for a budget increase of $1.7 billion). No science or support for the researchers still there, or any of the other smaller facilities which still exist on-site. That's just plain insulting. What happens to the data archive ? It's not said. Why would anyone want to visit the site given that its in the middle of nowhere and no actual science is being done any more ? No idea. So, forget the LIDAR and 12m telescope, people, the NSF seems to think, will line up in droves to come and visit... an empty sinkhole. And this will definitely help their mission of a more inclusive STEM program, because hitherto the "people who want to look at an empty sinkhole" demographic has been sorely lacking from typical outreach programs.
Yeah, because that makes sense. Arseholes.
