Comment by buran77
3 hours ago
> Unfortunately, Arecibo received no such inspections.
With or without the inspections, the problems Arecibo faced were of a more serious nature. They are hinted in one of the findings: the non-replacement, repair or bypass of the sockets where large slips were observed.
The telescope received minimal funding for maintenance over the two decades prior to the collapse despite signs of increasing damage observed in the various inspections. A lot of factors probably contributed to this (political climate, the dropping importance of Arecibo compared to other science instruments and missions, and so on) but the result was that the structure was left with slow but sure decay.
I met a couple of people who worked with the telescope including on location and they told me that the general feeling among the people who had this on their minds (most people who ever had anything to do with Arecibo cared about the science not the instrument) was that the decay was slow but certain and catastrophic failure was bound to happen sooner or later. Like a car receiving no maintenance despite the check engine light being on for a decade.
The telescope received minimal funding because stakeholders couldn't make a good case for more. The results the facility could produce weren't seen as justifying the expense. In that light, that it was operated at all was more than one might reasonably have expected. The alternative was to just shut it down earlier. They squeezed the last drops of output before the old thing was allowed to die.
Sometimes with facilities like this you have to make the call that it's over.
Budgets are limited and there was cooler science to do in space and the newer more modern (and in ine case even larger) ground-based ones.
Yes-ish? Funding was far more plentiful when the telescope was being designed and built, and in its early decades. I know zero details about that era - but I strongly suspect it suffered from "just focus on the cool parts" syndrome. And if it'd been designed and built correctly, or the problem caught and corrected back then, it would very likely still be standing.
Which is not to say it'd still be receiving operational funding, nor that its potential scientific contributions would be particularly worthwhile.
It was built in the ‘60s and started losing its relevance and funding in the 2-3 decades before the collapse. A lot of time for issues to develop, be noticed, but not have enough money to fix.