Arecibo Observatory collapses

I didn't expect it to be so dramatic, that drone footage of the cables snapping one by one looks like something out of a movie.

It is sad but it did have a good run and from what I've read we have a bunch of new and upcoming radio telescopes that can do things that weren't possible a few years ago.
 
pendragon1 said:
57 years is decent. it'd still be there if that first cable didnt get cut or fail, whichever one chooses to believe.
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Probably got to the time of life where there was not much funding for general maintenance of the thing, and once something breaks the decision comes down to not worry about it until... yeah until this.
 
Dogs don’t like chocolate
Cables don’t rust
Grease doesn’t dry out
Bearings don’t fail
Pulleys don’t crack

There’s something to be said for regularly scheduled maintenance and inspections.

but all those things require regular infusions of money
 
They said they were shutting it down a couple weeks ago, before the collapse, because a couple cables even broke. Pretty sure there was even a post here about it, again before the full collapse, about the first few cables snapping and damaging the dish. Once that starts happening, it's just straining the other cables more that are likely in about the same shape as the ones that started failing.
DooKey said:
Puerto Rico in a nutshell. Nothing there lasts for long.
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Yeah *only* 57 years in the middle of a jungle. Weak!
 
DooKey said:
Puerto Rico in a nutshell. Nothing there lasts for long.
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My mother doesn’t want to go back much anymore, it’s been going downhill for at least the last two decades. Last time I was back I still remember still remember listening to the 727s go to TOGA as I swam at the beach...tells you how long it’s been since I was there.
 
Jim Kim said:
There’s something to be said for regularly scheduled maintenance and inspections.

but all those things require regular infusions of money
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This right here. We are so bad about maintaining things. I think its a testament to how well built it was that it lasted so long. When I heard the first cable broke I expected them to rush out and fix it right away. But somewhere some bean counter decided we didnt need to spend this money anymore for whatever reason.
 
kju1 said:
When I heard the first cable broke I expected them to rush out and fix it right away. But somewhere some bean counter decided we didnt need to spend this money anymore for whatever reason.
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When the first cable broke they decided that it was too dangerous to attempt to repair it. At that point, the question became one of how to demolish it safely.

Jim Kim said:
There’s something to be said for regularly scheduled maintenance and inspections.
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How many of us do that with our personal vehicles? I try to be good about mine, but I am far from perfect (mainly due to laziness in not wanting to deal with it).
 
Jonnycat99 said:
When the first cable broke they decided that it was too dangerous to attempt to repair it. At that point, the question became one of how to demolish it safely.


How many of us do that with our personal vehicles? I try to be good about mine, but I am far from perfect (mainly due to laziness in not wanting to deal with it).
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I do it.
 
DooKey said:
Puerto Rico in a nutshell. Nothing there lasts for long.
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I wonder if you realize that PR has the oldest standing fort in all the Americas. El Morro has been standing since 1539 making it 481 years old now. How many structures in the continental United States can you name that are that old without doing a Google search? Let's not even get into the fact that this is on an island that's only 35 miles wide and 100 miles across, and let's also forget that the island is habitually hit by tropical storms and hurricanes fairly often.

Yeah, you are right, nothing lasts there... /s
 
ZeroBarrier said:
I wonder if you realize that PR has the oldest standing fort in all the Americas. El Morro has been standing since 1539 making it 481 years old now. How many structures in the continental United States can you name that are that old without doing a Google search? Let's not even get into the fact that this is on an island that's only 35 miles wide and 100 miles across, and let's also forget that the island is habitually hit by tropical storms and hurricanes fairly often.

Yeah, you are right, nothing lasts there... /s
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Well forts do tend to have the heft to make that happen.

Some of the forts in the us are still standing just fine too
 
kju1 said:
This right here. We are so bad about maintaining things. I think its a testament to how well built it was that it lasted so long. When I heard the first cable broke I expected them to rush out and fix it right away. But somewhere some bean counter decided we didnt need to spend this money anymore for whatever reason.
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It was already too late to save it by the time cables started snapping. Every single cable on all three support towers was decades old by that point, so even if people had risked their lives to replace the broken cables, all of the other cables would have also had to be changed. Just replacing the broken cables was already estimated to cost several million dollars, replacing all of the cables would be tens of millions of dollars. Arecibo would have needed to have regular cable replacements every X years to continue to be safe to work on.

The maintenance cost alone would have doomed Arecibo to the scrap heap. For tens of millions of dollars, it's cheaper to just rebuild the dish. Maybe we'll get lucky and a new observatory of the type will be funded for construction.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
It was already too late to save it by the time cables started snapping. Every single cable on all three support towers was decades old by that point, so even if people had risked their lives to replace the broken cables, all of the other cables would have also had to be changed. Just replacing the broken cables was already estimated to cost several million dollars, replacing all of the cables would be tens of millions of dollars. Arecibo would have needed to have regular cable replacements every X years to continue to be safe to work on.

The maintenance cost alone would have doomed Arecibo to the scrap heap. For tens of millions of dollars, it's cheaper to just rebuild the dish. Maybe we'll get lucky and a new observatory of the type will be funded for construction.
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Hopefully if they build a new one, they will find a way to make it so that maintenance isn't so expensive.
 
1_rick said:
Hopefully if they build a new one, they will find a way to make it so that maintenance isn't so expensive.
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Unfortunately, massive steel cables are always going to be expensive. Each cable that supported the Arecibo cradle was several dozen tons of steel that had to be precisely manufactured for tensile strength and uniformity. Where they could probably save a great deal of money is designing the cradle so it can be lowered to the ground, which would make maintenance and inspections a lot cheaper and safer. It'd also protect the cradle in the event of a hurricane, which is one of the factors that contributed to the cradle collapsing.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
It was already too late to save it by the time cables started snapping. Every single cable on all three support towers was decades old by that point, so even if people had risked their lives to replace the broken cables, all of the other cables would have also had to be changed. Just replacing the broken cables was already estimated to cost several million dollars, replacing all of the cables would be tens of millions of dollars. Arecibo would have needed to have regular cable replacements every X years to continue to be safe to work on.

The maintenance cost alone would have doomed Arecibo to the scrap heap. For tens of millions of dollars, it's cheaper to just rebuild the dish. Maybe we'll get lucky and a new observatory of the type will be funded for construction.
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It cost (adjusted) 85 million. The repair cost was estimated at 12. Quite a steal considering 85 million will never happen. Personally I think 12 was a govt inflated number. But hey even 12 is better than 85...

Also thee "its dangerous" is a specious argument. At my last job we paid people to work on high voltage LIVE equipment on a regular basis. And yes someones even died once. It happens but its a risk we paid fo and a risk people are willing to take. You take every precaution you can but you dont just shrug, walk away, and say its dangerous and people would have to risk their lives.
 
kju1 said:
It cost (adjusted) 85 million. The repair cost was estimated at 12. Quite a steal considering 85 million will never happen. Personally I think 12 was a govt inflated number. But hey even 12 is better than 85...
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ALL of the cables on ALL three support towers needed to be replaced because none of them had been changed in decades, or even had proper maintenance. They could spend 12 million dollars replacing just the broken cables and the cradle would still be in imminent danger of collapsing due to the deteriorated cables on the other towers. Engineers were questioning the structural integrity of all of the cables when they started snapping at well below their rated tensioning loads.

kju1 said:
Also thee "its dangerous" is a specious argument. At my last job we paid people to work on high voltage LIVE equipment on a regular basis. And yes someones even died once. It happens but its a risk we paid fo and a risk people are willing to take. You take every precaution you can but you dont just shrug, walk away, and say its dangerous and people would have to risk their lives.
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Working on high voltage equipment is far less hazardous than being suspended hundreds of feet in the air on high tension cables that can snap at any time. If even one strand of any tensioned cable broke and so much as grazed you, you'd be a mist of fine red juice. The cradle the cables supported was over a thousand tons, it's not your typical mains tower wire where it just supports itself. Then there's the risk of the whole thing collapsing out from under you while you're working on it.

By the time it collapsed, if they had chosen to try and save it, it would not be a matter "if" people died, it would be "how many". The cradle was in such a perilous state that even a wind direction change could have made the difference between it falling or not.
 
kju1 said:
Also thee "its dangerous" is a specious argument. At my last job we paid people to work on high voltage LIVE equipment on a regular basis. And yes someones even died once. It happens but its a risk we paid fo and a risk people are willing to take. You take every precaution you can but you dont just shrug, walk away, and say its dangerous and people would have to risk their lives.
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It's always a matter of probability right? What's the chance you are going to get an injury, can we minimize it?

I imagine that with tensioned wires that are already failing that the probability of injury will not very particularly accurate. "Please helps us repair this observatory, there is anywhere between a 20% to 0.0001% chance you and your team will get very serious injuries"

And perhaps the act of the repair itself will cause the failure.
GiGaBiTe said:
Where they could probably save a great deal of money is designing the cradle so it can be lowered to the ground, which would make maintenance and inspections a lot cheaper and safer. It'd also protect the cradle in the event of a hurricane, which is one of the factors that contributed to the cradle collapsing.
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Heh, I was just thinking "if only they could carefully lower it somewhere for maintenance" right before I read your post. Ofcourse as a certified armchair hindsight engineer designing these things is always so easy !
 
pendragon1 said:
didnt click the link eh? 8M for cleanup to get rebuilding started...
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I suspect these guys are high. Cleanup and redesign for $8m? I’m not even sure you could do cleanup and removal for that price.

FTA
“Despite committing $8 million USD, the amount will only be sufficient to get the rebuilding process started, covering the removal and disposal of old debris and the design of a new telescope. Due to the state of the site, reparations to the old telescope has been deemed inappropriate, meaning a whole new installation will have to be constructed from scratch.”
 
Krazy925 said:
I suspect these guys are high. Cleanup and redesign for $8m? I’m not even sure you could do cleanup and removal for that price.

FTA
“Despite committing $8 million USD, the amount will only be sufficient to get the rebuilding process started, covering the removal and disposal of old debris and the design of a new telescope. Due to the state of the site, reparations to the old telescope has been deemed inappropriate, meaning a whole new installation will have to be constructed from scratch.”
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for local cleanup down there $8M probably goes a lot farther.
 
pendragon1 said:
for local cleanup down there $8M probably goes a lot farther.
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Maybe but I suspect a dump is awfully further away than most projects, and you’re going to deal with civilized rules because of where it is.
Also just re-engineering the whole thing is going to cost millions. It’ll be a good show either way. They’ll either cheap out and it’s a ticking time bomb or they spend an adequate amount of money and it works well.
Being that it’s an island they may make you haul the waste off the island. That would get pricey.
 
It makes more sense to do something if they're going to fully rebuild it from scratch. The main reason I saw given for not fixing it was that it wasn't worth it because it was outdated but they can fix that if they're rebuilding from scratch.

Since the government is the one pushing for something to happen I doubt they're going to make disposing of debris too difficult or expensive. Unfortunately it looks like they don't have nearly enough funding secured so who knows if this will actually go anywhere.
 
Ebernanut said:
It makes more sense to do something if they're going to fully rebuild it from scratch. The main reason I saw given for not fixing it was that it wasn't worth it because it was outdated but they can fix that if they're rebuilding from scratch.

Since the government is the one pushing for something to happen I doubt they're going to make disposing of debris too difficult or expensive. Unfortunately it looks like they don't have nearly enough funding secured so who knows if this will actually go anywhere.
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I have a feeling this will be a project that is first started and then never finished due to unrealistic financial expectations. $8 million for clean up is one thing. But if I had to take a wild guess, it’s likely $100+ million to rebuild it with modern hardware. It cost $9.3 million in 1963. With inflation alone that is $80 million today.
 
exlink said:
I have a feeling this will be a project that is first started and then never finished due to unrealistic financial expectations. $8 million for clean up is one thing. But if I had to take a wild guess, it’s likely $100+ million to rebuild it with modern hardware. It cost $9.3 million in 1963. With inflation alone that is $80 million today.
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Yeah China just spent a hundred and eighty million on their own massive scope, so I would expect a higher price (for our own more advanced sensors). I'm thinking 250 million.
 
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exlink said:
I have a feeling this will be a project that is first started and then never finished due to unrealistic financial expectations. $8 million for clean up is one thing. But if I had to take a wild guess, it’s likely $100+ million to rebuild it with modern hardware. It cost $9.3 million in 1963. With inflation alone that is $80 million today.
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That seems likely though some of the technology involved might have gotten cheaper even after inflation.
 
exlink said:
I have a feeling this will be a project that is first started and then never finished due to unrealistic financial expectations. $8 million for clean up is one thing. But if I had to take a wild guess, it’s likely $100+ million to rebuild it with modern hardware. It cost $9.3 million in 1963. With inflation alone that is $80 million today.
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It would be worth it. $200 million spent on science is a better investment imo.
 
Sounds like a good start. Stake the cash to get it cleaned up and start putting the idea out there that rebuilding is possible as it will certainly require quite abit of investment to actually make that step happen.
 
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