- Establish clear points of contact, authority, and responsibility on both sides
- Have a firm understanding of when the antennas will be delivered, with penalties for late delivery
- Do not take committee advice too seriously
- Have good in-house expertise
In October 1961, Joe Pawsey, from the CSIRO group in Australia, was offered the directorship of NRAO. He visited in March 1962 and started making plans for the future of NRAO, including the use of interferometers to increase angular resolution. Pawsey was diagnosed with a brain tumor in May 1962, returned to Australia, and died in November 1962. Dave Heeschen, from the NRAO staff, had been acting director and became director on October 19, 1962.
The concept of a radio telescope with angular resolution comparable to that obtained in the optical emerged in the early 1960s. While it was clear that a single dish could never achieve this, the radio interferometers certainly could, and this was already being demonstrated in Australia and in the UK. NRAO started down this path in competition with Caltech and its proposed Owens Valley Array based on John Bolton’s highly successful interferometer. In 1970, NRAO finally won this competition (described as the period of the NRAO-OVRO wars) after they had hired some of the best young radio astronomers from Caltech.
Dave Heeschen certainly learnt from his own list of lessons and under his leadership NRAO brought the VLA project to completion in 1980, on schedule and close to the planned $78M budget appropriation. The VLA exceeded almost all its design specifications and has been by far the most powerful and most successful radio telescope ever built and, arguably, the most successful ground-based astronomical telescope ever built.
“The Bar is Open” was a well-known Heeschen alternative to an after-dinner talk which is used as the title for a chapter on one of the most productive periods of radio astronomy research at NRAO. When Dave Heeschen retired, he gave a talk: “advice to future directors and managers”:
- Hire good people, then leave them alone.
- Do as little managing as possible.
- Use common sense.
- Do not take yourself too seriously
- Have fun
I also recall another item of wise advice I received from Dave as I embarked on my first serious management role as VLA Director: “It’s sometimes more important to make a clear decision than to get the decision right—but do try to get it right more than half the time!”
