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Historical & Cultural Astronomy Series Editors: W. Orchiston · M. Rothenberg · C. Cunningham Kenneth I. Kellermann Ellen N. Bouton Sierra S. Brandt Open Skies The National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Its Impact on US Radio Astronomy Historical & Cultural Astronomy Series Editors: WAYNE ORCHISTON, Adjunct Professor, Astrophysics Group, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia MARC ROTHENBERG, Smithsonian Institution (retired), Rockville, MD, USA CLIFFORD CUNNINGHAM, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia Editorial Board: JAMES EVANS, University of Puget Sound, USA MILLER GOSS, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, USA DUANE HAMACHER, Monash University, Australia JAMES LEQUEUX, Observatoire de Paris, France SIMON MITTON, St. Edmund’s College Cambridge University, UK CLIVE RUGGLES, University of Leicester, UK VIRGINIA TRIMBLE, University of California Irvine, USA GUDRUN WOLFSCHMIDT, Institute for History of Science and Technology, Germany TRUDY BELL, Sky & Telescope, USA The Historical & Cultural Astronomy series includes high-level monographs and edited volumes covering a broad range of subjects in the history of astron- omy, including interdisciplinary contributions from historians, sociologists, horologists, archaeologists, and other humanities fields. The authors are distin- guished specialists in their fields of expertise. Each title is carefully supervised and aims to provide an in-depth understanding by offering detailed research. Rather than focusing on the scientific findings alone, these volumes explain the context of astronomical and space science progress from the pre-modern world to the future. The interdisciplinary Historical & Cultural Astronomy series offers a home for books addressing astronomical progress from a humanities perspective, encompassing the influence of religion, politics, social movements, and more on the growth of astronomical knowledge over the centuries. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15156 Kenneth I. Kellermann • Ellen N. Bouton • Sierra S. Brandt Open Skies The National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Its Impact on US Radio Astronomy Kenneth I. Kellermann Ellen N. Bouton National Radio Astronomy Observatory National Radio Astronomy Observatory Charlottesville, VA, USA Charlottesville, VA, USA Sierra S. Brandt Consultant to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory Archives Providence, RI, USA ISSN 2509-310X ISSN 2509-3118 (electronic) Historical & Cultural Astronomy ISBN 978-3-030-32344-8 ISBN 978-3-030-32345-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32345-5 This book is an open access publication. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, shar- ing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material con- tained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Caption: “NRAO’s Very Large Array, located on the Plains of San Agustin, 50 miles east of Socorro, New Mexico. The NRAO is a facility of the NSF operated under cooperative agreement by AUI.” Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland We dedicate the book to the memory of Dave Heeschen, whose wise and forceful leadership and commitment to Open Skies led NRAO to become the world’s premier radio astronomy observatory. An optical telescope is visual and interesting. A radio telescope is an electronic instrument and you can’t really see a lot of what makes it work. When it’s done all you get is a computer printout. Comments from an anonymous NSF referee. FOREWORD I know Ken Kellermann, well. We both did our PhDs in radio astronomy in the 1960s, supervised by the famous radio astronomer John Bolton. Ken got his lessons on how to build a telescope and do research when John was building the Owens Valley Observatory at Caltech while I started building the interfer- ometer at Parkes when John and Ken moved from Caltech to Australia. Many years later I spent a challenging but rewarding 7 years working for NRAO as the first director of the newly completed VLA radio telescope in New Mexico. This was sandwiched between my time at Westerbork and the Australia Telescope. To Ellen Bouton, we owe a great debt for the legacy of NRAO’s extensive archives of historical material which underpin the impressively detailed source material used in this book. Sierra Brandt’s background as a historian of twentieth-century science nicely complements the contributions of the other two authors. While this book is very clearly focused on the development of the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), it touches on many more broader issues, including the birth of a national facility, the open access policy for scientific research, the wider societal implications of searching for extrater- restrial intelligent life, and lessons learned from major construction projects. It is far more than just the history of NRAO. By discussing the development of NRAO in an international context the authors have also written a history of the development of radio astronomy as seen from a US perspective. They start from the well-covered ground when Karl Jansky of the Bell Telephone Laboratory discovered radio emission from the Milky Way in 1933, through the somewhat idiosyncratic but innovative experiments over the next decade by one individual, Grote Reber, to the major technology developments during World War II. Radio astronomy had started in the USA, but in the immediate postwar period, other countries, notably the UK and Australia, embarked on vigorous programs of exploration of the radio sky, taking advantage of the influx into astronomy of the high caliber scientists and engineers who had developed the vii viii FOREWORD radar technology. Quoting the authors: “Early American radio astronomy did not have the same big impact as the programs in the UK and Australia.” This external pressure was a major factor galvanizing the US scientific community into activity. In this time period, the obvious way forward was to build an even bigger dish than the British (250 foot) or the Australian (210 foot) radio tele- scopes. With the vision of building a very large antenna of perhaps 600 foot diameter this was “big science.” The establishment of a national radio astronomy facility in the USA is a fas- cinating story with many obstacles and detractors. The authors provide excel- lent context for the formation of NRAO by including detailed archival research on the steps that were involved. This is a well-informed and deep analysis of how decisions were being made. The National Science Board had already made a declaration for government support of large-scale basic scientific facilities (i.e., support for big science) and had given the construction of a major radio astronomy facility as an example. This impacted NSF policy and was the begin- ning of the national facility concept. A concept which was pioneered by the USA and later adopted in many other countries. However, establishing a national facility was not supported by all parties and throughout the book we can read lively accounts of the ongoing debate for and against the “big science” national facility concept instead of smaller groups of young innovative scientists based in the universities. This reached an extreme in the ongoing disagree- ments and confrontations between Merle Tuve (DTM) and Lloyd Berkner who was the president of AUI, the organization that ran the Brookhaven National Laboratory, a “big science” national facility for particle phys- ics research. Lloyd Berkner had a huge impact on the development of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The authors note that Berkner may not have the name recognition as some of the other American postwar science policy leaders such as Vannevar Bush, Robert Oppenheimer, or I.I. Rabi, but perhaps no one had a broader impact on mid-twentieth-century science policy. They include one extraordinary example: Berkner became the first Chair of the National Academy of Science Space Studies Board and he sent a strongly worded memo- randum to NASA Administrator James Webb stating that “Scientific explora- tion of the Moon and planets should be clearly stated as the ultimate objective of the U.S. space program. … Scientific exploration of the Moon and planets must at once be developed on the premise that man will be included. Failure to adopt and develop our national program upon this premise will inevitably pre- vent man’s inclusion, and every effort should be made to establish the feasibil- ity of manned space flight at the earliest opportunity.” Less than 2 months later, in a special address to joint session of Congress, President John F.

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