responsibilities included providing equipment and aid for visiting scientists, anticipating the need for future developments in radio astronomy, and playing a leading role in developing new instrumentation. As Director of one of NRAO’s facilities (VLA) in the 1980s, I came to appreciate the value of Heeschen’s vision, and I later implemented similar policies when establishing the CSIRO radio telescopes in Australia as a National Facility.
The book is most appropriately titled Open Skies, a concept which values open access to research facilities as the most effective way to make scientific progress. The NRAO has been the leading advocate for this concept in astronomy and has set the path which has been followed by almost the entire radio astronomy community worldwide. One of the authors, Ken Kellermann, has been a visionary advocate for Open Skies so it is no surprise that it features both in the title and throughout this book.
At the inception of the National Facility concept, Berkner and his deputy Richard Emberson proposed the open access model: “all qualified scientists without regard to institutional affiliation would have access to the facility,” thus “insuring maximum scientific progress.” This was the policy adopted by NRAO and is referred to as “open skies,” following the nomenclature adopted by the international airlines governing reciprocal landing rights. In October 1959, Heeschen famously wrote to the editors of the three main astronomy journals in the USA requesting that they publish the following statement: “The facilities of the Observatory are open to any competent individual with a program in radio astronomy, regardless of institutional affiliation.” NRAO then took this a step further by not requiring previous radio experience and by including international as well as national institutes.
For over 50 years almost all radio observatories in the world have obtained mutual advantage from this policy but, sadly, as discussed in the last chapter, the SKA participating countries are now questioning whether to continue this tradition.
When reading the account of the construction of the first big dish in Chap. 4, I was struck by the various comments about the need to finish construction before the telescope was obsolete. Similar comments had been made during the construction of the Parkes 210 foot telescope, and there seemed to be a feeling that there were only a few projects that the single dish would do well, so after a short burst of activity the big dishes would have no lasting impact. At the time, there seemed to be almost no realization that in reality it was these flexible instruments that would go on to study many of the new unanticipated discoveries.
Many of us in the broader radio astronomy community had heard about the problems encountered in the construction of the NRAO 140 Foot Telescope in the USA and the practical limitations that were imposed by some poor design decisions, such as the use of an equatorial mount rather than an alt-az mount. However, this is the first time we can read a frank and detailed account of how it overran its budget by a factor of 3, was 5 years late on a 2-year construction timescale, and still did not reach the specifications of the larger and
