When the Arecibo Telescope Is Demolished, It Will Take an Era of Space Exploration With It

Arecibo is the last gasp of ambitious, publicly funded efforts to understand the universe

Photo: Corbis/Getty Images

When news broke that Puerto Rico’s famed Arecibo radio telescope was going to be demolished, it sent the scientific community into the kind of mourning typically reserved for its most beloved human heroes and pioneers. For many, Arecibo was more than the world’s second-largest radio telescope and a key instrument in our efforts to probe the cosmos and canvas the universe for extraterrestrial life — it was an iconic monument to the last 50 years of astronomy, to science, even human achievement.

Now, it is a death knell.

Arecibo Observatory, a Great Eye on the Cosmos, Is Going Dark

Arecibo’s decommissioning marks yet another sign that we’re well into a twilight era for a certain mode of undertaking ambitious scientific investigation and space exploration, the sort carried out by public organizations like the National Science Foundation, who, with shrinking budgets and clipped wings, owned the…