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Comment by shadowofneptune | Hacker News Reader

There is no money for this. The National Science Foundation, the primary source of funding for Arecibo, has been trying to shut it down or offset its cost for years. NSF is a part of the US government, so it has been a victim of the cuts to public science that have affected universities and institutions across the US since the end of the Cold War and the Great Recession. You are right that it would be simple, but there was nobody willing to fund it until it was too late.

That is the real tragedy here, Arecibo was killed over the course of years.

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>NSF victim of cuts to public science

Why is this completely erroneous fact believed by so many people? Other than a 1 time injection due to the 2008 crisis, NSF funding increases nearly every year and is currently at its second highest budget ever: https://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/NSFRqstAppropHist/NSFRequestsand...

Counterpoint: https://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2019/pdf/40b_fy2019.pdf

In FY2019 NSF reduced its budget for Arecibo from $8M to $6.08M a 24% reduction in support for this instrument.

It's both true that the NSF a whole is getting an increased budget and that the NSF reduced its budget for this particular instrument.

Yes, but the GP comment was saying the NSF's budget was growing (which is also true) but the GGP's comment that NSF was reducing support for Arecibo is also correct. So for context I thought it might add a bit more depth to the question of "whether or not NSF was funding Arecibo or trying to get rid of it / defund it" idea.

And personally I was surprised that for $8M a year you could fund the program (presumably that was with a bunch of clearly needed maintenance being deferred). It really is too bad that some billionaire didn't just fund it. I'm wondering if Paul Allen helped out when he was alive.

Thank you for the correction. I had been following the news about Arecibo mostly and had not investigated NSF's total funding.

The NSF budget increased dramatically between 1951-2008 -- but when accounting for inflation in the figures you linked, has declined by about 10% in real terms since then.

(That is, the 2010 NSF budget of $7.045 B in 2010 is in real terms equivalent to about $8.413 B today, about a billion dollars more than the real 2020 budget of $7.066 B, using the inflation calculator at [1].)

[1] https://www.in2013dollars.com

The linked budget summary says it is in "Millions of Current Dollars". I interpret that to mean it is already inflation adjusted.

That is what I would have interpreted that to mean as well, but the numbers in the far right column don't really appear to be inflation-adjusted relative to the actual primary sources.

Here, for instance, is the actual appropriations bill for 1998 [1]. As you can see,

> "There are authorized to be appropriated to the Foundation $3,505,630,000 for fiscal year 1998."

For comparison, the value in the aforementioned table for FY1998 is $3,430.63 M. This is a bit off, presumably because in contrast to the bill the values in the table are " after supplemental appropriations, transfers, and reprogrammings".

I had missed, though, that the appropriations for the last two years were actually higher than the request, so some signs of recent growth.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/house-bill/1273...

There is a footnote that specifically mentions some additional funding to repair Hurricane damage to what sounds like Arecibo.

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