Global Collaboration on Science and Technology, 1993–2006

Abstract

Global collaboration from concept to SKA construction can be separated into four distinct phases. The first, the “Grass-roots” Phase from 1993 to early 2006, began with the URSI Large Telescope Working Group (LTWG) and various national design efforts working in conjunction. By 1999, interest had grown around the world to the point when a global Steering Committee was formed to take the project forward. At the end of this Phase in 2005, Funding Agencies began, collectively, to become involved in the SKA, and this heralded the start of the second phase of collaboration from 2006 to 2011, the “Transition Phase” to a legal entity for the SKA. The Transition Phase led into the Pre-Construction Phase from 2011 to 2021, and subsequently the Construction Phase.

In this chapter, we trace the evolution of the governance structures in the Grass-Roots Phase, discuss the triggers that led to the changes, and outline the main activities of, and issues faced by, the governing entities in this first phase of the SKA project.

3.1 Introduction

The long journey from concept to SKA construction can be separated into four distinct phases corresponding to an increasing level of global collaboration and sophisticated governance (Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1

The evolution of SKA governance from 1993–2021. Note that the terms “Era” and “Phase” are used interchangeably in this chapter

The first is the “Grass-roots” Phase from 1993 to early 2006 that began with the International Union of Radio Science (URSI) Large Telescope Working Group (LTWG) and various national design efforts working in conjunction. A significant effort also began in the first few years to raise the profile of the SKA by embedding it within other international entities like the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Mega-science Forum. By 1999, interest around the world had grown to the point where a global Steering Committee was formed comprising institute directors in the collaboration who oversaw the generation of a comprehensive science case, initiated the site selection process and selected a short-list, and coordinated the development of possible design concepts. This scientist-only-led governance structure ended when the national and regional (e.g. European Commission) funding agencies collectively began to be involved in 2005.

A “Transition” Phase of governance (2006–2011) followed when three governance entities operated in conjunction—(i) the International SKA Steering Committee (ISSC), (ii) the informal group of Funding Agencies which operated under a number of names, best known of which was the Agencies SKA Group (ASG), and (iii) the SKA Preparatory Phase (PrepSKA) Board. Each had their own specific responsibilities within an envelope of common interest. The PrepSKA Board was responsible for the oversight of a €5.5 million grant from the European Commission to take the project from its conceptual state to a “signature-ready” agreement to start construction in 2011.

The third phase of governance, the “Pre-construction” Phase, followed establishment of the SKA Organisation as a UK Company at the end of 2011, with governance solely vested in the company. Its first major decision, in mid-2012, was to decide where the SKA would be located. Subsequent activity focused on the refinement and review of the design to achieve construction readiness and solving the project and collaboration difficulties engendered by challenges to budget projections along the way.

This phase lasted until January 2021 when a new governance arrangement, an Inter-Governmental Organisation, came into force for the construction and operation of the SKA. In becoming an IGO, SKA joined other major science facilities like the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) .

This and the following chapter trace the evolution of the governance structures from the first to the third phase and discuss the triggers that led to the changes. Chapter 3 also outlines the main activities and issues faced by the governing entities in the first phase, while Chap. 4 covers the same topics for the Transition Phase. The long-running story of the site selection culminating in the final site decision in the first year of the Pre-construction Phase (2012) is covered in Chaps. 7 and 8. It is beyond the scope of this history to analyse the Pre-construction Phase in its entirety from 2012–2020, or the project’s transition to a Treaty Organisation and the Construction Phase in 2021.

To provide a framework for the reader in this chapter, Table 3.1 lists the key decisions and events that characterised the 1993-early 2006 period.

Table 3.1 Key decisions and events in the 1993–early 2006 period

3.2 The Global Collaboration Takes Shape, 1993–1999: The Seeds of International Collaboration Are Sown, and Major Players Begin to Emerge

The international context for the SKA created by the Large Telescope Working Group (LTWG) provided a framework within which national efforts could be accommodated. Both aspects are described in turn, with the national efforts outlined in chronological order of when the first formal steps towards a role in the SKA were taken.

3.2.1 URSI Large Telescope Working Group activities

As described in Chap. 2, Govind Swarup (Tata Institute for Fundamental Research, India) and Ron Ekers proposed the establishment of a Large Telescope Working Group in 1993 under the auspices of Commission J (Radio Astronomy) of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI). Formal URSI recognition was important as it lent the still vaguely defined project the support of the technically minded members of the radio astronomy community and raised the profile and respectability for the national funding agencies and governments. The subsequent development of the Large Telescope concept through the three phases sketched in the introduction to this chapter became a permanent item on the Commission J program at the triennial General Assemblies from 1996 onwards and has remained the case at the time of writing.

The first meeting of the LTWG was held at Jodrell Bank Observatory in March 1994. The goals set out by the WG chair, Robert Braun, were ambitious—a concrete proposal supported by a well-defined scientific case for a fully specified instrument including reasonable cost estimates within the next 2–3 years.¹ WG members described national priorities and resources potentially available, from which it was clear that large capital investments in a large radio telescope were unlikely anywhere in the world on the short term due to commitments in optical and mm-sub-mm astronomical instrumentation. The most opportune time for a Large Telescope proposal in most countries appeared to be in 1996–1997. This first meeting also went through a comprehensive review of the science drivers, instrumental options and site requirements, and so laid a solid basis for further work on concept definition in the years thereafter.

A number of the subsequent meetings were of note, in particular the third meeting in Guizhou in southern China in October 1995, and the fifth meeting in Sydney, Australia in 1997. Two other brief meetings were held at the IAU General Assembly in The Hague in 1994, and at the URSI General Assembly in Lille, France in 1996.

Fig. 3.2

Participants in the 3rd LTWG Meeting in Guiyang, China, October 1995 (Credit: National Astronomical Observatory of China)

The Guiyang conference combined an LTWG meeting and a workshop on Large Spherical Reflector Telescopes. It made the international community aware of the Chinese telescope design concept based on spherical reflectors (see later in this chapter) and its ambitions to host the Large Telescope, amply reinforced by visits to potential sites in the local region (see Fig. 7.1 left). It was the first large international meeting held in the city, and the first LTWG meeting outside Europe. Thirty Chinese astronomers and engineers and 11 international participants from seven countries (Netherlands, Canada, USA, Poland, Ukraine, France and Chinese Taipei) attended (see Fig. 3.2). Key science drivers for the SKA were again reviewed, and the technical sessions focused on design issues for the spherical reflector.

3.2.2 First Steps Towards Global Governance, 1994–1996

Following the meeting in Guizhou, Ron Ekers (Director of the CSIRO Division of Radiophysics) and Harvey Butcher (Director of the Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy, NFRA) took the initiative later in the year to set up an informal group of Directors of institutes that already had funding to work on SKA science and engineering issues to discuss strategic issues and coordinate efforts globally. The institutes involved were NFRA in The Netherlands, CSIRO Division of Radiophysics in Australia, National Astronomical Observatory in China, and the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Canada.

In parallel, efforts in Canada in 1994 and 1995 to establish priorities for future development (see Sect. 3.2.6.4) by Peter Dewdney (DRAO, Canada) and Russ Taylor (University of Calgary, Canada) led to an international meeting in February 1996 to discuss directions for the future of international radio astronomy in Penticton, British Columbia, hosted by the Radio Astronomy Committee of the Canadian Astronomical Society chaired by Taylor. It was clear that a number of institutes around the world were embarking on innovative research into antenna concepts for the large telescope, and that the development of such facilities in radio astronomy was beyond the capabilities of most individual countries. The value of sharing ideas through international collaboration was now the driving force for a global effort.

At the Penticton meeting, Butcher led a discussion² on a formal Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) to ‘Cooperate in a Technology Study Program Leading to a Future Very Large Radio Telescope’,³ using the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe governance as an example (see Sect. 2.3). This led to the establishment of a Working Group led by Butcher and Donald Morton (Director-General of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, National Research Council of Canada) to identify appropriate procedures and identify countries to be included. The MoA was signed in August 1996 in Lille at the URSI General Assembly by the Directors of six institutes in six countries (Australia, Canada, China, Netherlands, India, and the USA), and by a further two US institutes later in the year. It was a practical decision to keep the Agreement at institute level rather than involve national funding agencies. Signatories were: the Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF), Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics (HIA, Canada), Beijing Astronomical Observatory (BAO, China), National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA, India), Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy (NFRA), SETI Institute (USA), National Astronomy and Ionospheric Centre (NAIC, Arecibo, USA), and the Ohio State University Radio Observatory (OSU, USA).

The specific goals and study program set out in the MoA (see Box 3.1) remained valid for many years, however the proposed year for completing the work (2000) proved optimistic. From this point onwards, this MoA effectively superseded the remit of the LTWG as far as technical cooperation was concerned.

Box 3.1 Edited Excerpts from the 1996 Memorandum of Agreement to Cooperate on Technology Development for a Very Large Radio Telescope

Specific goals of the program

• Select a conceptual design for a new, very large telescope by 2000.

• Define an organisational framework within which a telescope project can be carried out.

Study Program

• The institutes will jointly compile an inventory of the scientific case.

• Technical studies will be undertaken of antenna design and of detection strategies

• Detailed siting criteria will be formulated jointly and potential locations will be identified.

• Preliminary cost estimates for construction and operations will be developed.

Institute programs

• NFRA and ATNF: investigate broad band phased array antennas

• BAO and HIA: investigate designs that divide the total collecting area into several tens of large diameter element telescopes

• NCRA and SETI Institute: investigate designs that divide the total collecting area up into many (1000) small, fully steerable, parabolic dish telescopes operating at low and mid-frequencies (NCRA) and high frequencies (SETI Institute).

• NAIC: consider the constraints imposed on the technical specifications by radar studies of solar system bodies

• OSU: investigate wide-band, array designs with beams covering the entire sky simultaneously, and novel interference rejection techniques made possible by this approach.

3.2.3 LTWG Meeting in Sydney, December 1997

By the time of the Sydney meeting of the LTWG at the end of 1997, the project had grown substantially with 70 participants from 10 countries (see Fig. 3.3). The format changed to include a half-day meeting of the LTWG itself, primarily on the science drivers, followed by 2 days of presentations and discussion on national progress reports and issues affecting potential engineering solutions.⁴ The latter aspect of the meeting reflected the mandate of the 1996 MoU (see Box 3.1).

On the global collaboration side of things, Ekers and Butcher presented thoughts on how to organise and manage the required international collaboration, how to raise its profile via contacts with the OECD, project timescales, and financing. It was clear the Large Telescope project had attracted worldwide interest but there was no national government or existing international organisation equivalent to the European Southern Observatory to act as SKA “project champion”.

Being aware of international decision-making processes such as the next US Decadal Survey in 2000 was crucial, as was the potential availability of finance for astronomy projects across the spectrum and where a large radio telescope project might fit into a phased funding process. In 1997, it looked like the optical telescopes under construction (e.g. VLT) would be ready in 2000 or so, the mm arrays in 2005, which left a window for the large radio telescope project in 2005/2006. Obvious concrete steps to take in the near term were to establish an international project definition team to document the science case, assess the feasibility and cost of design options, and define the site criteria and oversee site surveys.

Fig. 3.3

LTWG meeting in Sydney in 1997. (Credit: CSIRO Radio Astronomy Image Archive CRAIA-SKA001)

An overview of conclusions from the meeting by the convenor, Wim Brouw (CSIRO Division of Radiophysics), noted that worldwide cooperation was required to implement the facility in view of its likely cost ($600 million). The extensive range of its science goals demanded a general and versatile instrument operating from 20 MHz to 20 GHz, and the complexity of the technology and software that demanded the best ideas from around the planet be applied to its design and implementation. A strong scientific case was required, as well as a well-structured cooperative arrangement. The meeting also marked the first time that a system-wide analysis of design issues was presented by Arnold van Ardenne⁵ from ASTRON⁶ in the Netherlands. The meeting participants addressed a recommendation to Butcher and the other institute directors who had signed the Memorandum of Understanding on Technical Cooperation a year earlier (see above) that a more formal organisation than currently provided in the MoU was required, as well as a full-time consortium secretary/project scientist and a number of technical sub-committees.

This was the last meeting of the LTWG and set the stage for the creation of the International SKA Steering Committee just over a year later in early 1999. The LTWG mandate had effectively been superseded by the 1996 MoA, which in turn was superseded by the International SKA Steering Committee in 1999.

3.2.4 International Science and Engineering Meetings in 1998 and 1999

3.2.4.1 Calgary, Canada, July 1998: The First SKA Science Book, and SKA Gets a Name

The SKA science case was reviewed in detail in Calgary and published as a Proceedings of the meeting⁷ (see Fig. 3.4). This was the first compendium of the many research areas that SKA would enable (see Chap. 5) and was used to support proposals to include the large radio telescope in the Canadian Long Range Plan 2000–2010 and the US Decadal Survey for the same period.

Fig. 3.4

Three of the participants at the Calgary meeting during an excursion to Lake Louise near Banff in 1998. Left to right: Arnold van Ardenne, Wim Brouw, and Bernard Burke

The meeting participants agreed to adopt a single name for the project. The various prototypes under planning or construction would keep their own distinct names determined by local priorities, but it was agreed that everyone, worldwide, would use the same name in referring to the international project. A vote by those present at the meeting, and in a follow-up electronic discussion, chose the name Square Kilometre Array, SKA, over the many others that had been suggested, and used, including⁸: OSKAR, 1kT, SKAI, ITRA, KARST, SLA, VLRT, SKIRT, ARGO, NGRO, NGAT. The European spelling of “Kilometre” was adopted for the SKA.⁹ For convenience in the following sections of the book, we use “SKA” as the national and international name of the Large Telescope project in the years before the formal choice in 1998.

3.2.4.2 Amsterdam, March 1999, and Dwingeloo, April 1999

As the final two activities under the 1996 MoA on Coordination, two major international meetings focused on the SKA were held in The Netherlands: “Perspectives on Radio Astronomy: Science with Large Antenna Arrays”, in Amsterdam (van Haarlem, 1999) and “Perspectives on Radio Astronomy: Technologies for Large Antenna Arrays, in Dwingeloo (Smolders & van Haarlem, 1999). These two meetings had the effect of substantially raising awareness of the SKA in the wider astrophysics and astronomy and astronomical-engineering communities.

3.2.5 Embedding the Large Telescope Project Within Other International Entities

3.2.5.1 International Astronomical Union (IAU)

The year after establishment of the LTWG at the 1993 URSI General Assembly, discussions on Future Large-Scale Facilities (FLSF) took place at the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in The Hague in 1994. Harvey Butcher, Wim Brouw and Ron Ekers organised these discussions on policy issues and specific projects with the general aim of creating interest in forming a working group to monitor progress on potential large instruments across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and the specific aim of embedding the SKA concept in the consciousness of astronomers of all persuasions. A summary of the IAU session on Large Scale Facilities by Virginia Trimble (University of California, USA) and Ron Ekers was published in the “Sidereal Times”, a newspaper published for IAU General Assembly participants.¹⁰ Speakers included representatives of government organisations, people operating collaborative organisations, and colleagues with plans for large scale facilities that no one country could afford. Francoise Praderie described the Mega-Science Forum (MSF) of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which had already produced one report on the future of astronomy in the industrialised nations. Following the IAU session, Butcher, Ekers, Masoto Ishiguro (Nobeyama Radio Observatory, Japan), and Praderie submitted a proposal to the IAU Executive Committee to organise a working group.¹¹ This was established in 1994 with Butcher as first chair. The WG provided a forum for updating the community on the various large projects at subsequent General Assemblies. Radio astronomers kept a firm grip on the management and agenda of the WG in its early years; subsequent chairs were Ron Ekers (1997–2000) and Richard Schilizzi (2000–2003). Not surprisingly, the SKA remained one of the major topics of discussion in meetings of the WG at each of the General Assemblies up to and including the 2006 Assembly in Prague. By then, the SKA was firmly embedded in the consciousness of astronomers and was beginning to make inroads on the thinking of funding agencies, as we discuss later in this chapter and in Chap. 4.

Interesting to note is that Robert Braun (LTWG chair; ASTRON, The Netherlands) gave a 10-minute talk at the first FLSF meeting in 1994 in The Hague on the “Square Kilometre Array”.¹² This marks the first time this name was used for the large telescope concept in a talk for an international audience.¹³

3.2.5.2 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD): Mega-Science Forum/Global Science Forum

The OECD is an intergovernmental organisation that, in the 1990s, had 31 member governments from Europe, North America, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. The Mega-science Forum (MSF) was one of its committees originally formed in 1992 in the wake of the fiasco of the Superconducting Super Collider to provide a forum for funding agency officials to talk about future large projects in a timely manner, and potentially prevent projects collapsing due to, among other things, a lack of adequate internationalisation. The MSF mandate was revised significantly in 1995, with the goal to study and promote scientific collaboration and basic research in big projects, but not specific projects or specific scientific fields.

The MSF, and its successor in 1998, the Global Science Forum (GSF), played a role in SKA affairs for 15 years. The relationship began in June 1993 when Francoise Praderie, then Scientific Head of the MSF, wrote to Ron Ekers after his presentation on IMT (International Mega-Telescope) at the Frontiers of Astronomy conference a month earlier in The Netherlands,¹⁴ the same conference at which Swarup and Ekers decided to form the URSI LTWG (see above and Sect. 2.5). Her intention was to inform Ekers of the OECD ministerial mandate to foster international cooperation in big science, and to offer help by providing framework documents for global cooperation on world-class mega-projects such as Ekers had been talking about. From this point onwards, the Large Telescope/SKA concept was included in OECD discussions on mega-projects in astronomy.

It took 3 years and a re-purposing of the MSF before radio astronomy and the Large Telescope concept took advantage of this opportunity. From Butcher and Ekers’ point of view, the OECD and MSF opened the way to benefit from previous experience in global projects and, since the OECD operated at government level, there was the potential to create a political dimension for the project by bringing it to the attention of governments. And in the charismatic MSF/GSF Secretary-General, Stefan Michalowski, they found a willing and knowledgeable partner. Following a proposal by The Netherlands government in 1996 instigated by Butcher, the MSF convened a Working Group on Radio Astronomy (1997–1998) chaired by Butcher, which was followed by a Task Force on Radio Astronomy and the Radio Spectrum (1999–2004) chaired by Mike Goddard from the UK Radiocommunications Agency.

The Working Group meetings were attended by 35 delegates from 17 countries, each delegation including a representative from a government funding-agency and a government-designated scientist. The Working Group met on three occasions: in Paris (June and December 1997) and Washington DC (June 1998). It also co-sponsored a meeting of radio observatory directors and radio spectrum management experts during the August 1997 General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Kyoto. In November 1998 a report was prepared specifically for use by science policy makers which noted that “Since the signals received at [radio] telescopes are the only source of information for astronomers, terrestrial contamination of these signals is a very serious concern.” More detail is given in Sect. 5.8.2.

The initial 1997–1998 project was well received by those countries with radio astronomy programs, excepting only the USA. According to Butcher,¹⁵ this was for several reasons:

a. The US government looked to NRAO for advice, but NRAO was looking for Millimetre Array/ALMA funding and made clear SKA was not a priority at that time.

b. The post of President’s Science Advisor (Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy) was effectively vacant, so there was no one to talk to at upper government level who was willing to enter into a discussion of longer-term international collaboration. That issue was felt to be essential given the 10-year window for planning in the Decadal Survey.

c. The US Forum delegates made abundantly clear in informal discussions that the US would likely embrace SKA only if the US would take on the leading role in the international project. Their formal remarks made evident that they saw the scientific importance of the project, but its lack of status in the US made significant funding for development unlikely. Their words clearly signaled an intention to lobby to delay progress internationally until the project was granted real priority in the USA.

d. Discussions with NASA at the level of Associate Administrator Space Science found interest in the technology because of a projected serious shortfall in Deep Space Network capability at the time. The strong involvement of the SETI Institute then was a show-stopper, however, given the US government’s ban on funding for anything connected to SETI.

From 2003 onwards, the GSF began to take a pro-active role in including the SKA in meetings and discussions on future large scientific instruments. In his second month in office as SKA director in February 2003, Schilizzi gave a talk on the SKA at a workshop on Best Practices in International Scientific Cooperation in Tokyo that brought the project to the attention of a wide range of scientists and administrators. A further three Workshops were held in 2003 and 2004 (in Munich, Washington and Chicago, see Sect. 4.3.1) that included talks on the SKA, an effort that paved the way for the further substantial funding in subsequent years described in Chap. 4.

At the Washington meeting, Michalowski suggested the OECD could set up an international, generic project office to act as banker and auditing institute and use the knowledge of the OECD to aid internationalisation of new initiatives. The thought was that the SKA could be the first client, and act as an example. This idea did not go as far as a generic project office, but it did lead to the GSF providing a temporary no-cost banking service for countries contributing to the central SKA Project Office from 2005 to 2008. At the conference on the History of the SKA held in 2019, Michalowski¹⁶ recalled that since the International SKA Steering Committee did not have the legal status to accept funds from governments, the OECD stepped in. It was not straightforward to arrange this as “the OECD was going through one of its periodic funding crises, and the financial administrators said “Yes, we can probably do this, but we’ll take a bite out of the sausage. We’ll take some of that money for ourselves.” He was happy to say that did not happen, and the money was transferred as instructed by the SKA central office, and at the end of the arrangement, the unspent funds went to the SKA “without a bite being taken”.

Michalowski continued his involvement in SKA in meetings of the Funding Agency Working Group in 2007 and 2008 (see Chap. 4) and was also a member of the SKA Site Advisory Committee in 2011–2012 (see Chap. 8).

These contributions to SKA had the effect of raising the profile of the SKA at high political levels and are discussed both in the following section as far as Australia is concerned, and in Sect. 4.3.1.

3.2.6 National SKA Activities 1993–1999

3.2.6.1 The Netherlands

Following the establishment of the LTWG in August 1993 at the URSI General Assembly, The Netherlands was first out of the blocks with a national SKA program as part of LTWG activities.

Fortuitously, a National Discussion Day on future large research infrastructures had been scheduled to take place in September 1993 to provide national decision-makers with advice on priorities and strategies. Fuelling discussion were three key input documents: (i) optical instruments for the Keck, ESO Very Large Telescope and other telescopes by George Miley (Leiden University) and colleagues, (ii) (sub)-mm wave instrumentation for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, Owens Valley Radio Observatory, Large Southern Array, and others by Frank Israel (Leiden University) and colleagues, and (iii) a dish-based “Square Kilometre Array” by Ed van den Heuvel (University of Amsterdam), and Harvey Butcher and Robert Braun at ASTRON.^17,18 All three possible future directions had been under discussion for several years with the university astronomers backing the optical and (sub)mm instrumentation, and ASTRON as a national research institute and centre of radio astronomy backing the large radio telescope concept. It was a period of some internal tension in Dutch astronomy, blurred somewhat by the transfer of the optical instrumentation group at the Kapteyn Observatory, previously led by Butcher, to ASTRON Headquarters in Dwingeloo, thus expanding ASTRON’s instrumental responsibilities to the optical as well as the radio.

But it was now crunch-time. A decision needed to be made.

After intensive deliberations, the ASTRON Board in October 1993 approved a Pre-Study into the feasibility of an international very large radio telescope starting in early 1994, a study that was to look into the technical and political feasibility, budget, realistic timescales, and international partners. Initially this focused on a much larger version of the EURO-16 concept of many 100 m diameter dishes,¹⁹ but quickly moved on to phased arrays rather than dishes for their promise of a Moore’s Law-like reduction in cost per square metre of collecting area, as well as their flexibility and innovation potential. In large part, this change in direction was due to Arnold van Ardenne’s return to ASTRON from industry in September 1994 as Head of Research and Development. He had worked on phased arrays for military radar before joining ASTRON for the first time in 1975, and for sub-mm multi-beam arrays for astronomy in a joint ASTRON-Dutch Space Research Institute project in the 3 years before he left for Ericsson in 1989. But it should also be noted that Jan Noordam and Lodie Voute had also explored a “tile” concept for a large telescope as a thought experiment in an unpublished note in 1994 which led van Ardenne to adopt the “tile” nomenclature for the aggregation of aperture array elements.

A year later in 1995, the Dutch Government made the first substantial grant anywhere in the world (4.5 million guilders, USD 2.75M) for innovative technology research leading to a square kilometre array. This led to a sequence of prototype phased arrays starting with AAD (Aperture Array Demonstrator) and followed by OSMA (One Square Metre Array) and THEA (Thousand Element Array).²⁰

An international meeting on Antennas and Architectures in September 1996 in Delft kicked off the Aperture Array project.²¹ Topics covered engineering design and project definition issues. The engineering topics included beam forming and architectures, antennas and calibration, and interference rejection.

Another major Dutch initiative with substantial impact on the development of the SKA, the low-frequency array LOFAR, had its origins in this period. In 1997, George Miley, then Chair of the Leiden Observatory, observed that interest in radio astronomy in a number of Dutch universities including Leiden was beginning to wane as new opportunities in sub-millimetre and optical/infra-red astronomy were emerging, something he contended was also the case world-wide. In his view, the timescale to SKA operation was more like 2020 than the then current estimates of 2010 (Miley, 2010).

With this in mind, Miley took advantage of the opportunity afforded by a workshop at the Leiden Observatory in 1997 with the aim of brainstorming ideas for a next generation radio telescope covering a broad range of options. This had been initiated by Ron Ekers as Oort Visiting Professor at the Observatory. It was in this context that Miley advocated a low frequency array on an intermediate timescale in which the Netherlands would play a leading role.²² This would be a way of bridging the gap to the SKA and using phased array technology already under development at ASTRON at the time (van Haarlem, 2013). This led to a proposal for a feasibility study led by ASTRON in 1998 and the creation in the following year of an international consortium involving ASTRON, the Naval Research Laboratory and Haystack Observatory in the USA, which CSIRO in Australia joined in 2002.

All three countries involved were contenders for hosting the LOFAR site. A formal site selection process completed in August 2003 ranked the sites in the following order—Australia, US, Netherlands—with all three sites regarded as viable but Australia as the best site based on its scientific and technical merits. However, later in 2003, €52M funding for LOFAR was granted in The Netherlands from a Knowledge Infrastructure Fund, ICES/KIS-3. This came with organisational boundary conditions including the expectation that part, if not all, of the resulting telescope infrastructure would be sited locally. These boundary conditions were a surprise to the international partners and led to the disintegration of the collaboration. The whole experience served as a cautionary tale for the SKA site selection process described in Chaps. 7 and 8, in particular the need for transparency among partners. It was also a lesson in the priorities of national funding agencies.

3.2.6.2 China

In the early 1990s, the Chinese radio astronomy community was not large and the radio astronomy facilities comprised the Miyun array near Beijing, the 25 m VLBI dish near Shanghai, a 10 m dish in Yunnan, and a 14 m mm-wave telescope at Delingxa. A further 25 m dish was under construction near Urumqi. However, within 5 years of the formation of the LTWG in 1993 China had become a major player in SKA.²³ This was the result of the vision and leadership of Rendong Nan (then Large Telescope Group Leader, and later Deputy Director of the Beijing Astronomical Observatory) and Bo Peng (then Deputy Large Telescope Group Leader, later Group Leader and at the time of writing, FAST Telescope Director).

With the blessing of the “Father” of Radio Astronomy in China, Shouguan Wang, and the encouragement of Richard Strom, visiting scholar at the Beijing Astronomical Observatory (BAO) from ASTRON, Nan, Peng, Yuhai Qiu, and Shengyin Wu formed a research group at BAO in 1994 to initiate and promote the Chinese Large Telescope concept KARST (Kilometre Area Radio Synthesis Telescope)—an array of large aperture spherical antennas in Guizhou Province in southern China. An early task for Nan and Wu was to enlist the support of the Provincial Governor for a prestigious involvement in a high-profile international project. This was secured during a fine dinner.

In addition to the site investigations noted in Sect. 7.2.1, the group organised the third meeting of the LTWG and the associated Workshop on Spherical Radio Telescopes in October 1995 in Guiyang, the nearest city to the karst geological region (see Sect. 3.2.1). This was the first LTWG meeting outside Europe and helped put China firmly on the SKA map.

In 1997–1998, the FAST (Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical radio Telescope) concept was initiated as the KARST forerunner. Nan played the key role in directing the Chinese efforts for the SKA and then the R&D for the FAST project as Chief Scientist and Chief Engineer. At this point, Nan and Peng went public with their plans and visited the UK for a Royal Astronomical Society meeting followed by visits to Cambridge and Jodrell Bank and ASTRON in The Netherlands to establish collaborations. SKA-KARST continued to be developed as one of the options until the site short-listing process in 2006 decided in favour of Australia and South Africa (see Sects. 3.3.3.3 and 7.4).

3.2.6.3 Australia

Australia had maintained a very strong national radio astronomy infrastructure since the pioneering days after World War II, so that in the early 1990s it could boast the Australia Telescope National Facility, the Parkes Dish and the Molonglo Cross Radio Telescope (Sim, 2021). The SKA was seen as the next big step for Australia. Optical astronomers were also highly motivated to keep their facilities at the state of the art. The desire to present a unified front to government funding agencies led Ron Ekers and Lawrence Cram (Australian National University) to make use of the National Committee for Astronomy (NCA), the Australian Academy of Science’s highest level body for astronomy, to establish an astronomy decadal review process in Australia. Both Cram and Ekers had come back to Australia from the USA and based the Australian decadal review on the very successful US model with the aim of setting priorities for future funding for both major branches of astronomy. This was carried out by the NCA chaired by Harry Hyland, which, before this, had only functioned as the corresponding body for Australian membership of the International Astronomical Union. The first report,²⁴ “Australian astronomy: Beyond 2000—Astronomy decadal plan, 1996-2005” issued in 1995, was submitted to the Australian Government by the Australian Research Council. It gave top priority to Australia joining the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and also endorsed a “one kilometre aperture cm-wave radio telescope (1kT)” as a future project with the “highest priority for the second half of the decade”, subject to selection of a viable design. The other major recommendation for radio astronomy was the upgrade of the Australia Telescope Compact Array to mm wavelengths and participation in design studies for the 1kT. Interesting to note is that Australia did not join ESO as a full member despite negotiations that continued for quite some time but did enter into a partnership with ESO two decades later.

It did not take long for radio astronomy and the SKA to reach the highest levels in the Australian government. The trigger was a request from the OECD in 1996 for Australian government involvement in a newly created Mega-science Forum WG on Radio Astronomy proposed by Harvey Butcher via the Netherlands delegation. Martin Gallagher,²⁵ as Australian Science Attaché in Paris and delegate to the OECD Mega-science Forum, brought the WG to the attention of his government.

This led to CSIRO approval for site studies to commence (see Sect. 7.2.2), and for CSIRO to sign the MoA on SKA technology coordinated by Butcher in 1996 (see Sect. 3.2.2). An Australian technical workshop was held early in 1997 and research projects were identified in antenna design, radio frequency interference, signal processing, MMIC development, site investigation, and the science case. $2.4M capital investment was available for the MMIC work and Major National Research Facility (MNRF) funding of $200 k/year was obtained for strategic research. This grant was obtained jointly by the optical astronomy community for instrumental developments on large optical telescopes and the radio astronomy community for SKA related developments. In Australia the two groups adopted this joint strategy instead of being in competition in order to enhance their prospects of success against competition from other areas of science. This close cooperation did not last and returned to normal competition in future funding rounds. Also in December 1997, the 5th LTWG and 1kT (the Australian name for the SKA) technology meeting was held in Sydney (see Sect. 3.2.3).

Ekers was invited to address the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council (PMSEIC) in December 1998 about radio astronomy and the Large Telescope project. He emphasised the historical development of a world-class radio astronomy infrastructure in Australia, its location in the southern hemisphere making it able to observe the Galactic Centre region for many hours a day, and good potential sites for the telescope. In his summary, the Prime Minister, John Howard, who had chaired the PMSEIC meeting, noted that “even the public seem to like astronomy”.

The SKA’s high political profile in Australia from the start was a major factor underpinning the concerted science, technology, and site efforts carried out in the country in subsequent decades. The project also enjoyed a high political profile in South Africa from the start of activities there in 2003, as we discuss later in this chapter.

A critical role in engaging the astronomical community in Australia was played by an advisory committee, the Australian SKA Committee (ASKAC) , established by Ekers and colleagues in 2000 under the auspices of the National Committee for Astronomy in the Academy. This functioned as the initial Australian interface to the international SKA organisation until the Australian SKA Consortium was formed in 2001.

In 2001, a mid-term review of the Decadal Plan²⁶ compiled by Brian Boyle (then at the Anglo-Australian Observatory) and Louise Webster (University of New South Wales, Australia) listed the SKA as equal top priority for major new international facilities with a 20% share for Australia in what was then estimated in the Decadal Plan to be a USD 500 million project. In the report, hosting the telescope was given more prominence than the science return, presumably to keep the Government interested and involved.

3.2.6.4 Canada

In the early 1990s, Canadian national facilities for astronomy included the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory at Penticton, British Columbia, and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in collaboration with the UK and The Netherlands. In addition, Canadian astronomers were major users of the NRAO 140-foot telescope and the Very Large Array in the US. It was difficult to get purely Canadian facilities off the ground when far larger resources and facilities across the border in the US were available free of charge, which explained why Dewdney’s Radio Schmidt concept (see Sect. 2.2.2.4), and a Canadian Long Baseline Array proposed by Ernie Seaquist (University of Toronto, Canada) were not successful. This was described by Russ Taylor (University of Calgary, Canada), later Executive Secretary of the International SKA Steering Committee, and SKA Project Scientist, as the US Catch-22: “If it’s worth doing, why isn’t the US doing it? If the US is doing it, why should we?”²⁷

However, the URSI Large Telescope Working Group provided a new initiative for Canada to get behind, and Canadian astronomers, in particular Lloyd Higgs, Russ Taylor and Peter Dewdney, were involved in the LTWG from its inception in 1993. A year later in August 1994, an international meeting sponsored by the National Research Council and organised by the Radio Astronomy Committee of Canadian Astronomical Society led by Peter Dewdney and Russ Taylor (Committee Chair), was held in Penticton to explore radio astronomy science directions. A Very Large Radio Telescope and a Millimetre Array were identified as exciting directions to be working towards. This led, in early 1995, to a Planning Committee for a New National Radio Facility, chaired by Ernie Seaquist, to examine options for such a facility and make recommendations. Seaquist was a senior figure in Canadian astronomy from the University of Toronto, and later a member of the SKA Site Advisory Committee at the time of the site short-listing in 2006.

The NRC Planning Committee submitted a substantial report in December 1996 entitled “Canadian Radio Astronomy in the twenty-first Century—The Challenge” that recommended that the highest long-term priority for a “new radio astronomy facility” should be a partnership with other countries in the design, construction, and operation of the SKA. A specific recommendation was to develop a concept for a Very Large Radio Telescope first put forward by Tom Legg ((DRAO, Penticton) called the Large Adaptive Reflector (Legg, 1997). Canada’s share should be $CA 50 million, starting in 2003.

This work was the opening that allowed Canada to sign the MoU to collaborate in a Technology Development Program for a Very Large Radio Telescope in August 1996 (see Sect. 3.2.2), and to obtain NRC funds for conceptual design studies of the LAR in December 1997. At the Sydney LTWG/1kT meeting that same month, Dewdney updated the participants on Canadian plans and on the LAR design work already in progress.²⁸

The following year, in July 1998, Canada hosted the sixth LTWG meeting in Calgary, described earlier.

3.2.6.5 USA

From the 1960s onwards, the US was a major player in radio astronomy, and with the advent of the VLA in 1980, it became the major player globally. The 1990s also saw completion of the construction of the Very-Long-Baseline Array, the start of construction of the Green Bank Telescope to replace the collapsed 300-foot Telescope, and the approval of the Millimetre Array (MMA), which later became a global project, ALMA, as the next large project in US astronomy (Vanden Bout, 2004). US radio astronomers and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in particular had their hands full in the early 1990s.

Despite an October 1993 Note²⁹ on the value of exploring new technologies like fully sampled focal plane arrays for a large aperture radio telescope sent by Rick Fisher at NRAO to Robert Braun in February 1994, US participation in the LTWG was relatively low-key in the first 2 or 3 years. It was more a watching brief by LTWG member, Dick Thompson (NRAO) and others than active involvement. However, by the time of the Sydney LTWG/1kT meeting in 1997, other scientists at NRAO and US universities were contributing to discussions on the science case and telescope design constraints and specifications including a presentation by John Dreher (SETI Institute) on the cost advantage of an array comprising a large number of small diameter dishes—the LNSD concept³⁰ (see also Sect. 2.2.2.4). Jack Welch (University of California, Berkeley) gave a progress report from the USA.³¹ By mid-1998, Dreher and colleagues had developed the basic design for the one-hectare array (1 hT) later called the Allen Telescope Array.

Ken Kellermann (NRAO) and Rick Fisher convened the first US SKA Meeting at the NRAO Green Bank Observatory, West Virginia, in October 1998 not long after the Calgary LTWG meeting. Over sixty people participated, ten of whom were international. However, there was growing grassroots discontent in the US university community with the increasing centralisation of radio astronomy in the NRAO that had caused, as collateral damage, the demise of a number of university radio observatories.³² There was also the feeling that the universities were the places to be teaching the next generation of instrument builders and instrument users and they were not getting the support that they wanted. This resulted in a small meeting at University of California, Berkeley, shortly after the Green Bank meeting where it was decided to create an organisation, the US Square Kilometer Array Consortium, to coordinate US activity. Initially, the universities and the National Astronomy and Ionospheric Centre (NAIC) that operated the Arecibo Telescope were full members while NRAO was an at-large member. NRAO Director, Paul Vanden Bout, was concerned that National Science Foundation funds should not be used to pay for SKA Consortium subscription fees. However, it was soon realised that private funds from Associated Universities Incorporated (AUI), the legal entity operating NRAO, could be used instead, and NRAO became a full member. The Consortium was formally established in early 1999.

In the early years, interest in the Large Telescope concept in the US was driven primarily by the science and engineering challenges rather than by the international collaborative aspects, or impact on the domestic US economy, or any potential sociological or educational impacts that were later found to be important in obtaining funding in other countries. Some people saw the SKA in the US as a possibility for funding, either of their individual research activities, or institutional activities. As the project evolved, there was also an opportunity to exert leadership at all levels³³ as we describe later in this chapter.

3.2.6.6 UK

Following Peter Wilkinson’s seminal contribution to the creation of the SKA concept in 1990 described in Sect. 2.4.1.2, the UK’s involvement in the SKA remained at a relatively low level for much of the next decade due to other higher priority projects in the two main centres of radio astronomy at Manchester University and Cambridge University. Wilkinson became a founder member of the LTWG and hosted the first meeting of the LTWG at Jodrell Bank in 1994 (see Sect. 3.2.1). Thereafter he attended most of its meetings and played an active role as UK representative, but no funding for SKA technical development was requested in the UK.

However, as global interest and involvement in the SKA continued to grow in 1998 and 1999, it became obvious that the UK could no longer afford to remain on the sidelines. Andrew Lyne, Director of the Jodrell Bank Observatory, signed the MoA on Collaboration on SKA Technical Development in 1998,³⁴ and Phil Diamond, newly appointed Director of the Multi-Element Radio-Linked INterferometer (MERLIN) at Jodrell Bank Observatory, attended the second meeting of the International SKA Steering Committee in August 1999 representing the UK.

3.2.6.7 India

Govind Swarup kept Indian interest in the large radio telescope project visible by making presentations at LTWG and other meetings on scaled-up versions of the Giant Metre-wave Radio Telescope (GMRT) dishes as a design option. In reality, there were no additional resources available in India for any in-depth design work on the SKA while the GMRT was being brought into full operation.

3.3 Global “Grass-Roots” Collaboration, 1999–2005

The years 1999 to 2005 saw the SKA project enter a new phase, ushered in by the establishment of an International SKA Steering Committee in 1999 that aspired to coordinate the disparate national activities more actively than was possible under the 1996 MoU (see Sect. 3.2.2). The appointment of a full-time Director and Project Engineer followed, a comprehensive science case was published, and substantial funds for engineering development flowed both nationally and regionally in Europe. In 2005, the first contacts with the funding agencies, acting as a global group, took place, and the SKA started its transition to a recognised science mega-project operated by a legal entity and funded for detailed pre-construction design.

3.3.1 Governance

3.3.1.1 First Things First: A Steering Committee (1999) and a Director (2003)

With international science and technology meetings now a regular occurrence and centres of technology activity springing up around the world, it was time to take the next step in formalising the top-level governance of the SKA and lay the foundations for broadening the membership and scope of the 1996 Memorandum of Agreement on Cooperation outlined in Sect. 3.2.2.

Ekers and Butcher used the opportunity provided by the Dwingeloo conference on Perspectives on Radio Astronomy: Technologies for Large Antenna Arrays (see Sect. 3.2.6.1) in April 1999 to call a meeting of senior figures from many of the SKA countries (see Box 3.2) to discuss SKA strategic issues. This took place at ASTRON in Dwingeloo, chaired by Ekers. It is now recognised as the first meeting of the International SKA Steering Committee (ISSC) even though the ISSC was not formally established via Memorandum of Understanding until August 2000.

The rationale behind this initiative was clear: ‘It is in everyone’s interests to create and fund a Steering Committee. Since the SKA is a truly international project that does not have a single sponsoring agency, the only way to create such a committee is to “self-appoint” an ad hoc group consisting of active project scientists and engineers from each participating country.’³⁵

Box 3.2 Participants in the First SKA Steering Committee Meeting in April 1999

Australia: Wim Brouw and Ron Ekers (Australia Telescope National Facility)

Canada: Peter Dewdney (Herzberg Institute of Astronomy), Russ Taylor (U. Calgary)

Europe: Richard Schilizzi (Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe);

Netherlands: Harvey Butcher (Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy)

USA: Bernie Burke (MIT), John Dreher (SETI Institute), Bill Erickson (U. Maryland), Ken Kellermann (NRAO), Jack Welch (U. Berkeley), Alan Whitney (Haystack Observatory)

The strategic issues on the agenda were obvious for a project of SKA’s scope and ambition—international coordination, coordination of sub-projects and prototypes, technology selection process, number of telescopes, detailed specification process, science case, and marketing. These remained on the agenda, in various forms, for subsequent steering committee meetings over the following 12 years.

An important outcome of the 1999 meeting was the first step towards a Project Office. Russ Taylor one of the leaders of SKA involvement in Canada, was appointed International SKA Project Scientist with responsibilities to further develop the science case and expand the global science community involved in SKA. Initial tasks for the Steering Committee were to create a formal organisation based on a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and establish a committee to monitor and evaluate technical progress on a continuous basis.

Like many steering committees before it, the SKA committee set out its vision for the project timescale, in suitably modest terminology if not ambition. Their ‘tentative sequence of events’ foresaw construction of the full SKA beginning around 2010.

It took over a year to align all the parties to the point that a formal Memorandum of Understanding for an International SKA Steering Committee (ISSC) could be signed. At least two international conferences were used as venues for informal discussions to resolve issues—the URSI General Assembly in Toronto in August 1999, and the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) meeting in Munich in March–April 2000³⁶ (Butcher, 2000). In Europe, it was felt that a prerequisite to any signature at global level was the formation of a regional consortium to coordinate and represent European interests in the same way as the national consortia in the USA and Australia did for their respective interests. By early 2000, this came to pass as part of a broadly-based European Commission Infrastructure Cooperation Network called RadioNet, coordinated by Schilizzi, which had been funded through the 5th Framework Program for Research and Technological Development (FP-5) to support cooperation in European radio astronomy.

The IAU General Assembly in Manchester in August 2000 provided a ready-made occasion to sign the ISSC MoU. It was there that Ron Ekers (Australian SKA Consortium), Don Morton (Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, Canada), Guoxiang Ai (Beijing Astronomical Observatory, China), Rajaram Nityananda (National Centre for Radio Astronomy, India), Harvey Butcher (European SKA Consortium), and Jill Tarter (US SKA Consortium) formalised the collaboration.³⁷

The MoU preamble (Box 3.3) reiterated many of the points made in the URSI 1993 Large Telescope Working Group remit and the 1996 MoA to Cooperate on Technology and set the framework for what proved to be a lasting collaboration.

Box 3.3 Preamble to the MoU Establishing the ISSC in 2000

The undersigned, representing their respective organisations, recognising:

• their mutual interest to develop the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope as a joint international endeavour, and

• the need for a coordinating body to oversee and direct the development of a joint international Square Kilometre Array program, including a joint research and development program,

hereby agree to establish an International Square Kilometre Array Steering Committee to:

• (i) promote the SKA as an international project,

• (ii) to provide oversight and to act as a coordinating body to establish agreed goals and timelines for the project,

• (iii) to develop a joint international technical and scientific proposal for the SKA, including an implementation and cost plan, and

• (iv) to establish and oversee working groups as necessary.

Equal representation from Europe, the USA and “the Rest of the World” was a central tenet of the ISSC concept. This reflected the expected provision of funds for the design and construction of the SKA. Initial membership comprised six from the USA, six from Europe (Germany, Italy, The Netherlands (2), and UK (2)), and six from the Rest of the World (Australia (2), Canada (2), India, and China), and up to two at-large members (see Fig. 3.5).

Fig. 3.5

Initial ISSC members, 2000. Left to right: Bob Preston (USA), Douglas Bock (USA), Harvey Butcher (Netherlands), Wim Brouw (Australia), Jill Tarter (USA), Arnold van Ardenne (Netherlands), Franco Mantovani (Italy), Rick Fisher (USA), Russ Taylor (Canada), Peter Dewdney (Canada), Bernard Burke (USA, partially obscured), Ron Ekers (Australia, chair), Peter Wilkinson (UK), Govind Swarup (India), Bo Peng (China), Phil Diamond (UK). Not present for the photo: Dayton Jones (USA), Ken Kellermann (USA), Anton Zensus (Germany) and Richard Schilizzi (at-large member). (Credit: Ian Morison)

Management of the collaboration was further formalised at the Manchester meeting. An Executive Committee was appointed comprising the ISSC Chair—Ron Ekers, two Vice-Chairs—Jill Tarter and Harvey Butcher, and an Executive Secretary—Russ Taylor. A maximum contribution to the activities of the Secretariat was set at USD 2000 per member annually, a total of USD 32000.

Box 3.4 Chairs of the International SKA Steering Committee (1999–2007) and the SKA Science and Engineering Committee (2008–2011)

ISSC: Ron Ekers (1999–2002), Jill Tarter (2002–2004), Phil Diamond (2004–2006), Brian Boyle (2006–2007)

SSEC: Brian Boyle (2008), Ken Kellermann (2008–2010), Mike Garrett (2010–2011)

Vice-chairs followed Chairs at two-year intervals (see Box 3.4) apart from the July 2004 handover when Butcher indicated that he would prefer not to be elected as chair of the ISSC in view of the heavy LOFAR workload in the coming years. The difficulties surrounding the recent national decision to locate the LOFAR telescope in The Netherlands (see Sect. 3.2.6.1) may have influenced his decision to withdraw his name. The two-year term of office continued throughout the subsequent governance period from 2008 to 2011 following the replacement of the ISSC by the SKA Science and Engineering Committee (SSEC) as we describe in the next chapter.

It rapidly became clear to the ISSC that leadership of a complex global collaboration was a full-time task and in July 2001 members agreed to seek a full-time Director of International SKA Development as the next step in creating a central project office. Some 9 months later with funding in hand, the selection process was set in motion, resulting in the position being offered to Schilizzi based on his long experience in international collaboration in European VLBI. He took up the position in January 2003 on an annually renewable contract.

With the appointment of a full-time Director, Taylor decided to relinquish his part-time duties as ISSC Executive Secretary in August 2003. The duties of ISSC Secretary were taken up by Wim Brouw, one of the Australian ISSC representatives based at CSIRO, in August 2003, and then passed to the International SKA Project Office (ISPO, see next section) 3 years later, in 2006. Brouw remained an active member of the ISSC until the end of 2007. To accommodate the appointment of the Director, the maximum contribution to the activities of the SKA project was raised to USD 10,000 per member annually in 2004.

Observers at ISSC meetings were encouraged as part of the drive to expand the collaboration. In this respect, the July 2001 meeting was noteworthy for the first appearance of a representative from the fledgling radio astronomy community in South Africa. This was Justin Jonas, a pulsar astronomer based at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. He reported that SKA had ranked second to the Virtual Observatory in a list of possible future astronomy initiatives in the country. He hoped that South Africa could contribute to the technical development of the SKA and noted that South Africa had the potential to be a good site for the SKA, or SKA elements. Both of these aspirations were fulfilled in the decade to follow.

The growing presence of South Africa particularly from 2004 onwards as one of the candidate sites for the SKA, led to a decision to draw up a new Memorandum of Agreement to allow the ISSC to expand to 21 members with South Africa joining Australia, Canada, India and China in the Rest of the World group, and the number in each of the European and US groups increasing by one to maintain parity. This came into force on 1 January 2005. A representative from France, Wim van Driel, joined the European group. Amongst the other provisions the MoA recognised the ISPO and raised the ceiling for the annual contributions to the ISPO from USD 10000 to €40,000 per ISSC membership.

Representatives from Japan were regular observers from 2002 to 2006. In 2005, there was hope that Japan would join the SKA following support expressed at the annual symposium on Radio Astronomy. The question was not if, but how and when, Japan would join the SKA. In a memorable exchange,³⁸ Ekers urged Makoto Inoue (Nobeyama Observatory, Japan) to take action, pointing out that the lessons from ALMA should have taught Japan that the earlier you get into a project the better. In Ekers’ view, Japan was late to join the US and ESO as the third party in the International ALMA collaboration, but they were not treated as an equal partner. To initiate closer cooperation between Japan and the SKA, the ISSC asked Schilizzi to set up discussions on the incorporation of Japanese members into the ISPO Working Groups and Task Forces as one of the best ways forward for Japan to become a full member of the ISSC. However, these endeavours were not successful due to higher priorities for Japanese astronomy elsewhere. At the time of writing, 15 years later, Japan is still an Observer at SKAO Council meetings.

As an example of the cultural interchange that marked the SKA project, Hisashi Hirabayashi from the Japanese Institute of Space and Aeronautical Science, ISAS, presented the then ISSC Chair, Jill Tarter, with a Daruma doll in 2002 as a symbol of perseverance and good luck for the project. This entered SKA folklore and was passed on to the incoming ISSC Chair from the outgoing Chair. Figure 3.6 shows the doll with one eye coloured in, the other eye to be coloured in at the moment of achieving a long-held goal. The record does not show what goal was identified to be fulfilled, but presumably something along the lines of successful operation of the SKA. The record also does not show what happened to the doll post-2007.

Observers from Russia also attended on an occasional basis.

Fig. 3.6

“Good luck for the Project”. The Daruma doll (credit: Jill Tarter)

3.3.1.2 Beyond the Steering Committee: Project Management Structure

At the August 2000 Manchester ISSC meeting, three advisory committees were created to report to the ISSC—an Engineering Working Group (EWG) to be chaired by Rick Fisher from NRAO, a Science Working Group (SWG) to be chaired by Russ Taylor, and a Site Selection and Evaluation Committee (SESC) to be chaired by Bruce Thomas from CSIRO. Rick Fisher declined to accept the EWG Chair position and was replaced by Peter Hall from CSIRO. The EWG was renamed the International Engineering Management Team (IEMT) in 2002 but returned to being called the EWG after the establishment of the International SKA Project Office in 2004. Russ Taylor served as SWG chair for 2 years and was followed by Chris Carilli from NRAO (2002–2004), Steve Rawlings from Oxford University (2004–2006), and Bryan Gaensler from University of Sydney (2006–2008). Joe Lazio from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory was appointed SKA Project Scientist and SWG Chair from 2008 to 2011. The SWG was renamed the International Science Advisory Committee (ISAC) in 2002 but, like the IEMT, returned to being called the SWG in 2004.

The IEMT was charged with auditing SKA technical activities around the world, identifying and proposing possible collaborations, and identifying technical or system engineering needs in the international SKA effort (as discussed in Sect. 6.2.1). The ISAC’s task was to establish the primary science goals, unique to the SKA, the shared science goals complementary with other next generation instruments, and the secondary science goals (see Sect. 5.9.2). The primary tasks of the SESC were to set out the site selection principles for ISSC approval and map out the site selection process (see Chap. 7).

3.3.1.3 International SKA Project Office (2003)

Establishment of a formal project office, the International SKA Project Office, ISPO, followed the appointment of the Director, in August 2003. This was located at the Dwingeloo Observatory in the Netherlands, home of ASTRON and the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe, both former institutes for Schilizzi. Despite the ISSC intention that the Director should not be located at their home institute in order to avoid perceptions of local bias, Schilizzi remained at the Dwingeloo Observatory on the grounds that the contract was for 1 year at a time which did not provide sufficient job security for a major change in circumstances. This remained the case until the selection of the University of Manchester as the host for the SKA project office in 2008 (see Sect. 9.2).

The appointment of a Director and the establishment of the ISPO led to a revised management structure in 2004 that reconvened the ISAC, IEMT and SESC as Working Groups reporting to the Director (Science WG, Engineering WG, Site Evaluation WG), as mentioned above. This reflected the fact that project-related work at the international level was becoming increasingly important, in addition to the very valuable internal advisory roles provided by these groups. Later WGs on Outreach, Simulations, and Operations were formed that reported to the Director. In the course of time, some WGs created sub-committees or task forces on specific subjects such as the EWG Industrial Liaison Task Force (see Chap. 10). Also, in the course of time, the ISSC established international advisory committees for Engineering (IEAC, see Sect. 6.2.2.3) and Site Selection (ISSAC, see Sect. 7.3.4) to provide advice directly to the ISSC.

In 2004, Peter Hall was appointed International Project Engineer within the ISPO, an obvious choice in view of his achievements in previous years as Chair of the IEMT and EWG. His tasks for the initial 2 years were non-trivial and included developing a design requirements document based on the science requirements and coordinating studies of common elements of SKA design. This was to culminate in guidelines for proposals for the final design concept. Overseeing the site characterisation activities of RFI testing and definition of the engineering infrastructure, also fell within his remit. Hall was on secondment from CSIRO but remained based in Australia.

As Hall remarked in a retrospective talk at an SKA meeting in 2008, the ISPO in 2004 consisted of “two men and a pot-plant” supported by a substantial global WG structure! ISPO numbers grew modestly to four by 2007, but then expanded in subsequent years with SKA Preparatory Phase funding (PrepSKA, see Sect. 4.4) to over 15 staff in 2011.

3.3.2 The Coordinating Role of ISSC and ISPO, 1999–2005

At the Manchester meeting in August 2000, the first international project plan in outline form saw the light of day. An ISSC working group chaired by Bob Preston from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of the most active members of the Committee, set out an initial management structure for the SKA. The plan also included a more detailed timeline for the project, still with 2010 as the goal for start of construction. However, in August 2003, the Director presented the first detailed project plan³⁹ in which construction would start in 2012 leading to full operation in 2019. As the years passed and project realities became apparent, these dates slipped as we discuss in Sect. 4.6.1.

In addition to the planning and strategy discussions, much of the ISSC activity in this six-year period revolved around the site selection process, overseeing the development of the science case and technical developments, and ensuring the ISPO had sufficient funding to carry out its work. In 2005 preparations for the first interactions with national funding agencies, acting as a global group, took place. Dealing with the aftermath of that meeting changed the course of the project as we describe in Sect. 3.4.

The ISPO acted as the operational arm of the ISSC, with the Director expected to help shape policy, and propose initiatives and courses of action. It is fair to say that the main accomplishments of the ISSC and the ISPO in this period were to create a strong sense of common purpose in the SKA project, and to prepare the way for substantially increased funding represented by the European-led SKA Design Studies (SKADS) and PrepSKA, and the US Technical Development Program (TDP).

3.3.3 National and Regional Governance Structures, Long Range Plans, and Funding, 1999–2005

Underpinning the international coordination activities described in the previous section, national efforts in the “pioneer” SKA institutes/countries (see Sect. 3.2.6) continued and from 2000 onwards additional institutes or groups in other countries organised themselves and began to contribute to the overall project. This section sketches these national and regional in the case of Europe, developments up the start of the “Transition Era” in 2006. The cumulative total of funding for SKA-specific work approved by the end of 2005 amounted to over €70 million of which over half was to be contributed by the European-led SKADS program.⁴⁰

The US SKA community led the way on national governance structures by being the first to establish an SKA Consortium following the April 1999 meeting in Dwingeloo that established the international steering committee. By the time the MoU to formally establish the ISSC in August 2000 was signed, similar national consortia had been formed in Australia and Canada, and, regionally, in Europe.

The SKA appeared in long-range plans in The Netherlands (1993), and Australia (1996), and, in 2000, in Canada, the UK and the US. By 2005, the same was true for the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), as we discuss in Sect. 4.3.2.2.1.

Funding for SKA technical research was already in place in The Netherlands, Australia, Canada and China from the mid-1990s, and from the early 2000s in the US. But it was in Europe that the first large tranche of funding for SKA Design Studies (SKADS) was granted, in 2005, by the European Commission as part of the 6th Framework Program for Research and Technological Development (FP-6). “Matching” national funds for SKADS were also made available. FP-6 was the overall framework for the EU’s activities in the field of science, research and innovation in the 2002–2006 period. Its principal objective was to contribute to the creation of a genuine European Research Area (ERA) by fostering more integration and coordination in Europe’s previously fragmented research sector.

The technical design work carried out under the grants mentioned is described briefly in Chap. 6. Chapter 10 summarises industry engagement strategies and activities in the various countries. The individual national and regional stories from 2006 to 2012 continue in Sect. 4.3.2.

3.3.3.1 Australia

Governance

Australia formed an SKA Consortium Committee in 2001. Chief amongst its Terms of Reference were to: (i) provide a single, coherent interface between Australia and the international SKA project, (ii) report to, and consult with, the Australian astronomical community regarding all aspects of the SKA project, (iii) promote the SKA to Government and Industry, and (iv) coordinate R&D within Australia. The members of the Committee came from the national research organisations (CSIRO and the Anglo-Australian Observatory), universities (Sydney, Melbourne, Australian National University and Swinburne University of Technology), industry, and the federal government’s Department of Science and Technology.

The approach to membership taken was different to that of the US SKA Consortium a year earlier (see Sect. 3.3.3.8). In Australia, all potential stakeholders from science to industry and government were active members of the Consortium from the start to ensure coordination and collaboration was built in, and potential funding avenues explored. In the USA, the consortium membership involved astronomers and engineers only, reflecting the greater separation of the science community and government agencies in the early stages of a large project.

Funding

An additional 3 years of funding of $A1.5M in 2000 from CSIRO followed on from the original 1997 allocation and was used for “strategic development of the SKA” including engineering prototypes, exploration of possible sites if the SKA were located in Australia, and a number of postdoctoral and postgraduate positions for SKA research. It was recognised that innovative new antenna designs would be needed to make the full SKA feasible technically and financially, and CSIRO embarked on a “smart antenna” project which incorporated digital beamforming and radio frequency interference rejection into the design. At this time, attention turned to the use of Luneberg Lenses as the SKA antenna element to allow multiple concurrent observations in different directions on the sky (see hba.skao.int/SKASUP6-30). The government of the state of Western Australia was especially enthusiastic in its support of site-related activities.

A significant milestone was the formal signing of a five-year Major National Research Facility (MNRF) agreement on SKA research in 2001 between the Australian Government, CSIRO, the University of Sydney, Swinburne University of Technology, and several other collaborators. This provided $A20M funding to support work on antenna elements including focal plane arrays, SKA simulations, RFI testing of the sites near Murchison in Western Australia, the SKA Molonglo Prototype (SKAMP, University of Sydney) project, and configurations for the Australian SKA site bid.

MNRF-funded research on the use of Luneberg lenses for the SKA elements was discontinued in 2004 due to a number of substantial technical problems that were identified. The direction changed to developing focal plane array technology for parabolic reflectors to enable wide field-of-view SKA observations, and an extended New Technology Demonstrator (xNTD) project involving 20 dishes was created, supported by an additional $A 15 million from CSIRO and the Australian Government.

In 2004, the West Australian State Government allocated $AU 4 million in further support for Australian efforts on an SKA potentially located in a remote area of that State. This was to fund infrastructure such as fibre optic cabling, buildings, power supplies and local road upgrades for radio astronomy projects at Mileura, including the New Technology Demonstrator.

SKA Site

In September 2004 the Australian SKA Consortium Committee (ASKACC) was invited by the International SKA Steering Committee to submit a proposal for a site for SKA (see Chap. 7). Conditions in the Request For Proposals required ASKACC to select a single Australian candidate site from the three proposed in the Initial Australian Site Analysis Document. The West Australian site was selected.

Following a recommendation, in June 2004, from the Australian Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council Working Group on Astronomy, a Federal Government Forum on establishing an Australian radio-quiet zone was held in the Australian Parliament House in August 2004. This led eventually to the creation of a radio quiet zone following the selection of Australia on the short list in 2006 (see Sect. 7.4).

3.3.3.2 Canada

Governance

The Canadian SKA Consortium (CSKAC) was established under the auspices of the National Research Council, the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy and Canadian Astronomical Society (CASCA). Members of the Consortium were drawn from the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, and a number of universities (Queen’s, British Columbia, McGill, York and Calgary). In addition, three representatives came from industrial partners. Russ Taylor was appointed Chair of the CSKAC.

Long Range Plan

The Canadian Long-Range Plan (LRP) for Astronomy for 2000–2010 recommended participation in ALMA construction as first priority, and participation in the design phase of the SKA as second priority. The Long-Range Panel strongly recommended the Canadian Large Adaptive Reflector (LAR) concept (see hba.skao.int/SKASUP6-28) be carried forward into prototypes for further detailed studies. It also recommended Canada start positioning itself for entry into the construction of the SKA.

A mid-term review of the Long-Range Plan in 2005 strongly re-affirmed its original recommendation that Canada position itself to play a leadership role in the international SKA initiative, and that a Phase B study of the LAR be supported to ensure its successful and timely completion for the selection of the SKA design by the international SKA consortium.

Funding

The LRP recommended $CA 28 million funding⁴¹ in 2000 for SKA development ($CA 20 million for the NRC for LAR design and prototyping and $8 million for the universities). As proposed, the development of innovative solutions for the LAR (aerostat, reflector, and phased array feed) took central place throughout this period until the technology down-select in January 2006 described in Sect. 6.2.1. It failed to reach the short-list due to an ISSC decision to pursue small diameter dish arrays rather than large diameter elements. Post-2006, about $CA 20 million was made available to support SKA-related technology developments including new technology antennas (see Sect. 6.4) throughout the period to 2012.

3.3.3.3 China

Funding and Governance

Section 3.2.6.2 outlined the multiple large diameter spherical dish concept for SKA to be located in the karst region of Guizhou Province, and FAST as a pilot project. In 1999, FAST was designated a key project in the Chinese Academy of Sciences and received support from the Ministry of Science and Technology of China and funding of the equivalent of $US 1 million. The Guizhou provincial government also supported the SKA and FAST plans in part as a means of developing their radio communications industry.

The national funding allowed the creation of the Large Radio Telescope/FAST Laboratory in the newly established National Astronomical Observatories in China, with Rendong Nan as the Laboratory Director and Bo Peng as Deputy Director (see Fig. 3.7). The FAST Laboratory began R&D collaborations with about 20 domestic partners including Xidian University, Tsinghua University, Tongji University, as well as institutes of Remote Sensing Application, Radio Measurement, Systems Science, and Mechanics, and the Nanjing Astronomical Instruments Research Centre.

Fig. 3.7

Rendong Nan (right) and Bo Peng (left), the prime movers for the FAST project in China, at the ceremony celebrating the start of construction of FAST in December 2007 (Credit: National Astronomical Observatory of China)

The initial goal was to design and build scaled models for the surface element of the main reflector and the feed support system. In early 2005, the construction of a 30 m diameter demonstrator called MyFAST began at Miyun Observatory near Beijing.

SKA Siting

The main activities underpinning China’s bid for the SKA site during this period were choosing a site for FAST in the area chosen for the SKA as a whole (see Fig. 7.1), measuring the levels of Radio Frequency Interference, and preparing the submission to the SKA site competition at the end of 2005 (see Chap. 7). The Guizhou regional Bureau of Radio Management agreed to work and collaborate on designating a Radio Quiet Zone as soon as the final site for the FAST was chosen and the FAST project approved as a National Mega-science Project of China.

As we will see unfold in Chap. 7, the site short-listing process in 2006 decided in favour of Australia and South Africa. However, the national momentum behind the FAST project carried it on to funding approval by the Chinese National Development and Reform Committee in 2007. This was the culmination of a “Long March” of 13 years of research and development by Nan, Peng and their partners in about 20 domestic institutes including the Remote Sensing Institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xidian University, and Tsinghua University.⁴²

FAST was officially inaugurated as a major radio astronomy facility on the world scene in September 2016 (Fig. 3.8), having cost the equivalent of about €200 million (Renminbi 1.19 billion). The original cost estimate at start of construction in 2007 was about €100 million.⁴³

Fig. 3.8

The 500 m diameter FAST dish in Guizhou Province in China. It is an active-surface spherical dish with collecting area of 196,000 m² located in a karst depression, and operates at frequencies from 70 MHz to 3 GHz (with plans to upgrade to 8 GHz in the future) (Credit: National Astronomical Observatory of China)

The National Astronomical Observatory of China and associated academic institutions and industry continued their involvement in the SKA, in parallel with the construction of FAST. China is a member of the Inter-Governmental Organisation, the SKA Observatory (see Sect. 4.7) and, at the time of writing, a major participant in construction of the first phase of the SKA.

3.3.3.4 Europe

3.3.3.4.1 Netherlands

The Netherlands continued to lead the way in SKA in Europe throughout the 1999–2005 period, both at national and European levels. Design work on aperture array systems continued (see Sect. 6.5) with the One-Square-Metre Array (OSMA), the Thousand Element Array (THEA), and the Electronic Multi-Beam Radio Astronomy ConcEpt (EMBRACE) as part of the SKA Design Studies program (SKADS), as did design work and planning for funding and siting LOFAR (see Fig. 3.9). The European initiatives—the European SKA Consortium and the proposal for European Commission funding for SKADS are discussed below.

Fig. 3.9

The central part of the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) in the Netherlands (Credit: ASTRON)

3.3.3.4.2 UK

In late 1999, the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council established a ‘Visions Panel’ to set out the long term (10–15 years) science goals for UK astrophysics. SKA was included, in the same category as the ESO Extremely Large Telescope project in the European Southern Observatory, a competition we will revisit in Sect. 4.3.2.2.2.

At the institute level, a small ‘SKA Focus Group’ was established at Jodrell Bank Observatory (JBO) in 2000, chaired by Alan Pedlar, to oversee JBO involvement with the SKA. Transmission of broad-band signals from antennas to correlator using optical fibres formed the main technical research initiative. This technology could also be applied to the local interferometer, MERLIN, and was an early example of “dual-use” funding proposals to national funding agencies. The SKA pre-cursors became the prime examples of technology development for dual use.

The UK took centre stage in August 2000 in hosting the ISSC meeting in Manchester at which the MoA was signed (see Sect. 3.3.1.1). An engineering workshop, “Technical Pathways to the SKA”, was held in conjunction with the ISSC meeting.

3.3.3.4.3 Europe-Wide

Governance

As noted above, the impetus for grouping the European SKA efforts under one umbrella came when funding for a European Infrastructure Cooperation Network (ICN) for Radio Astronomy was made available in 2000 as part of the European Commission Fifth Framework Program. As one of the RadioNet activities, €100,000 was allocated over 4 years to help establish European collaborations and coordinate activities for the SKA project in Europe including workshops and strategy meetings. The European SKA Consortium (ESKAC) was duly formed in March 2000 and included representatives from institutes in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK. Harvey Butcher from ASTRON in the Netherlands and Phil Diamond from Jodrell Bank Observatory were appointed chair and vice-chair. This was not a new concept for Europe, the European VLBI Network had laid the groundwork for continent-wide collaboration 20 years earlier (see Sect. 2.3).

ESKAC’s mission was fourfold: (i) foster European and global technical and scientific activities related to the SKA, (ii) encourage, support, and stimulate individual national, joint international and European funding applications for scientific and technical development and operation of the SKA, (iii) foster coordinated European technical and scientific input to the SKA project, and (iv) serve as a conduit for exchange of scientific and technical information between its members, their communities, and the SKA organisation. It proved an effective voice for European views on SKA issues in the ISSC and SSEC until its dissolution when the SKA Organisation was established at the end of 2011.

A new ESKAC Memorandum of Understanding was agreed in 2005. On ISSC membership, four members were to come from The Netherlands, UK, France, and Italy as the largest SKADS contributors and selected by the national SKA consortia; two ISSC members were to be selected automatically “by position” (the coordinators of RadioNet and SKADS); and one other member was to be selected ad personam by the ESKAC Board following a standard nomination and voting procedure.

Funding

In RadioNet spin-off funding from the EC in 2001, €1.5 million was allocated to the Faraday focal plane array project in which ASTRON led a group comprising Jodrell Bank Observatory (JBO) in the UK, the Institute of Radio Astronomy (IRA) in Bologna, Italy and the Torun Centre for Astrophysics (TCfR), Poland. In later EC Framework Programs, RadioNet continued to provide support for SKA-related technical development under Joint Research Activities.

In 2003, work on preparing for SKADS began in Europe, centred on aperture arrays. One of the main goals was to establish the economic viability of “aperture plane” array technology for radio astronomy by constructing one or more demonstrators with a total area up to 1000 m². The second main goal was ambitious: to develop a costed design for the entire SKA based on one or more collector concepts involving phased arrays.

Arnold van Ardenne from ASTRON and Peter Wilkinson from Jodrell Bank Observatory spearheaded efforts to generate an ultimately successful proposal for SKADS to the European Commission for €10.4 million. This was funded in 2004 and completed in 2009. Matching funding from the national sources contributed another ~€28 million. At its peak, 30 organisations (national institutes, universities and industry) drawn from EC member states and non-EC countries (Australia, South Africa, Canada and Russia) contributed to SKADS (see Sect. 6.5.5.2 and Fig. 6.29). It was unusual that the EC’s financial contribution was only a little over a quarter of the project total of ~€38M which led to a range of new administrative problems to be overcome by the Commission and the national funding agencies.

Another ambitious goal was to act as the key cohering organisation for the international scientific and technology R&D effort for the 4 years of the SKADS project. This led to some creative tension between the SKADS Board and ESKAC, and with the global project office in both its ISPO and SPDO guises.

3.3.3.5 India

Throughout the 1999–2005 period as the Giant Metre-wave Radio Telescope (GMRT) was under construction, Govind Swarup and colleagues continued to adapt the low-cost GMRT dish design for smaller and larger diameter antennas than the original 45 m, also with the goal of operating at higher frequencies than the 1.4 GHz limit of GMRT. The new concept was called a pre-loaded parabolic dish (PPD, see Sect. 6.4.4.3). This continued until the antenna technology down select at the end of 2005 when it became clear that the astronomical community was pushing for a higher frequency limit for SKA operation (8 GHz) than the PPD dish could provide.

In the meantime, the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (NCRA) in Pune began to prepare for the SKA and other radio astronomy projects in other areas than antenna design. A workshop organised by NCRA and the Radio Research Institute in Bangalore (RRI) in 2004 highlighted the opportunities for the burgeoning Indian software industry and hardware R&D companies in radio astronomy technologies required for GMRT upgrades and developments in SKA and LOFAR.

To carry this further, the Square Kilometer Array Consortium of India (SKACI) was formed in 2005, with the NCRA and the RRI as initial members. J.N. Chengalur (NCRA), K.S. Dwarakanath (RRI), A. Pramesh Rao (NCRA), and N. Udaya Shankar (RRI) represented those institutes.

3.3.3.6 New Zealand

SKA developments around the world, and especially in Australia, became a catalyst for New Zealand to start developing radio astronomy in order to join Australia in their bid for the SKA site. Its location 2000 km east of what they called New Zealand’s “West Island” would provide even higher angular resolution observations than requested in the call for SKA site proposals. In September 2004 the Centre for Radiophysics and Space Research (CRSR) was founded in Auckland University of Technology (AUT) with Sergei Gulyaev as Director. The initial goals were to establish a Very Long Baseline Interferometry capability with Australia and to search for suitable SKA remote sites in NZ. In 2005, it formally joined the SKA global community and played a role throughout the Transition and much of the Pre-Construction Eras.

3.3.3.7 South Africa

How South Africa came to be involved in the SKA project is a fascinating story in itself, one that is intertwined with a new approach to Research & Development at governmental level in the post-Apartheid era from 1994 onwards^44,45 (Adam, 2002).

Roger Jardine and Rob Adam, respectively Director-General and Deputy-Director-General of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) in the South African government, and Khotso Mokhele, President of the National Research Foundation (NRF) had spent several years in the 1990s leading the preparation of a White Paper⁴⁶ setting out the new strategy and priorities for R&D in the country following the end of Apartheid. Astronomy was one of nine priorities chosen. The Southern African Large Telescope⁴⁷ (SALT) , an international optical telescope, was the first project supported by the government in 1998. Following the ground-breaking ceremony for SALT in 2000, Mokhele convened a National Astronomy and Space Science Workshop to map out future possible projects. Patricia Whitelock (Deputy Director, South African Astronomical Observatory) and George Nicolson (Director, Hartebeesthoek Radio Observatory, and the prime mover of radio astronomy in South Africa) suggested including the SKA in the workshop since it was already enjoying considerable support in the radio astronomy community around the world. Justin Jonas (Rhodes University) presented the case at the workshop and the SKA duly emerged as one of the two top priorities. This led to the invitation, mentioned earlier, from Ron Ekers (then ISSC Chair) to Justin Jonas to participate as an observer in the ISSC meeting in Berkeley, California in July 2001.

Following the ISSC invitation in late-2001 to a number of countries to submit Letters of Interest in hosting the SKA (see Sect. 7.3.1), Mokhele, Jonas and Nicolson requested funds from the Department of Science and Technology in mid-2002 for 7 million Rand (€1 million) over 2 years for the preparation of a hosting proposal and employment of several staff to carry out Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) and other studies, and for RFI equipment for field measurements.

The first direct contact of the South African government with the SKA project came in September 2002 when Ekers, as chair of the ISSC and the IAU WG on Future Large-Scale Facilities (see Sect. 3.2.5.1) was invited by Whitelock in her capacity as President of the South African Institute of Physics, in consultation with Nicolson, to give a talk about radio astronomy and the SKA at a meeting of the Institute of Physics in Potchefstroom. This led to a meeting in Pretoria a week later in which Ekers, together with Nicolson and Jonas, enthused Adam, DST Director-General, about the SKA and made the case that South Africa and other countries in Africa should “throw their caps in the ring” for the SKA site.

This proposal was taken up by the DST in November 2002 and, as Adam describes,⁴⁸ the case was made outside science. The appeal was the prospect of a world-class scientific and engineering project on the African continent, the big data challenge, and the potential to use the SKA project to attract and retain young people in science and technology in Africa. “Having a project located in your country creates a centre of science and engineering, which stimulates technology in local industry and science and technology in universities.” This wider case allowed two other major government ministries in addition to Science and Technology to get involved in SKA planning, Foreign Affairs via the African development angle (see Fig. 3.10), and Trade and Industry via industrial standards and leading-edge technology competitiveness. Provincial and local government also became involved because of regional development.

Fig. 3.10

Group photograph of delegates at the Africa regional SKA workshop held in Pretoria in October 2004. Delegates came from South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique, Mauritius, Madagascar, Kenya, Ghana and Zambia (credit: SKA South Africa)

With this increasing involvement in SKA, it was clear that a project manager would be required and Bernie Fanaroff⁴⁹ was engaged to fill that position. A South African SKA Steering Committee was formed in January 2003, chaired by Adam, with Mokhele, Fanaroff, Jonas and Nicolson as the initial members (see Fig. 3.11). Later, other members were added to the Steering Committee from the DST and the NRF.

Fig. 3.11

The five South African “musketeers”. Left to right: Bernie Fanaroff, Rob Adam, Khotso Mokhele, George Nicolson, and Justin Jonas. Photo taken at the Conference on SKA History held at SKAO Headquarters at Jodrell Bank, UK in April 2019. (Credit Rob Adam)

Once the candidate site in the Karoo desert had been chosen, a plan for radio astronomy was developed focusing on a series of ever larger radio telescopes on the site—KAT-7⁵⁰, MeerKAT, and then Big KAT. Significant funding (Rand 30 million, about €3.3 million) was made available from the central government in 2004,⁵¹ more than expected by Fanaroff and his team, for engineering design, site bid development and human capital development. The perception that South Africa was punching above its weight, and other countries were involved in the competition for site selection, had piqued the competitive instinct in government. In addition, the SKA project was popular, particularly in the Mbeki presidency (see Box 3.5), because it was seen as an “amazing footprint of modernity” in the African continent, and the iconic high-tech project in South Africa post-apartheid.⁵² Section 4.3.3.2 carries on this story in the following period of development for the SKA and charts the outlines of the funding process leading to MeerKAT.

Box 3.5 Quote from the Executive Summary of the 2005 SKA Site Bid by Southern Africa Countries (See hba.skao.int/SKAHB-441 South African Bid to Host the Square Kilometre Array, 2005)

President Thabo Mbeki, in his address at the opening of the 10 m Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) on 10 November 2005, said that the Government is “determined to provide everything necessary to create the optimal environmental and other conditions to support and facilitate the research efforts of the world’s astronomers, including the most up-to-date information and communications technological infrastructure” in order to make Southern Africa a hub for astronomy in the Southern Hemisphere.

On the last day of 2005, the site bid was delivered to the SKA Director and, eight months later, the southern Africa site was one of the two on the short-list (see Sect. 7.4), a considerable achievement in 5 years from a standing start.

3.3.3.8 USA

Governance

As noted in Sect. 3.2.6.5, the US radio community was the first to form an SKA Consortium (USSKAC), in March 1999. It was formed for the purpose of coordinating an SKA development program in the United States, with a primary focus on a “Large-N” SKA design consisting of a large number (of order hundreds to one thousand) “stations” each consisting of some number of antenna elements. Initial members were the California Institute of Technology, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Cornell University, including National Astronomy and Ionosphere Centre; Georgia Institute of Technology; Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including Haystack Observatory; Ohio State University; the SETI Institute; the University of California Berkeley; and the University of Minnesota. For the reasons noted in Sect. 3.2.6.5, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory was initially represented by at-large members for the Consortium’s first two meetings in 1999, but became a formal member thereafter.

Funding

Also in early 1999, preparations were in full swing for the US Academy of Sciences 2000 Decadal Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASTRO2000). This provided a good opportunity to obtain funding to support the design and prototyping of the Large N-small D concept (LNSD, many relatively small dishes) for the SKA that had been under consideration for a number of years by the University of California at Berkeley and the SETI Institute as the one-hectare telescope (1 hT, later the Allen Telescope Array ATA). Additional technical components under consideration for funding were: (i) large-N configuration studies at MIT Haystack Observatory to explore the advantages of such configurations for image quality; (ii) RFI suppression techniques, full-sampling array feed design and implementation, and simulations of the sub-mJy sky at NRAO; and (iii) an array for space navigation at JPL for the Deep Space Network.

Copies of the OECD radio astronomy working group report and annexes were sent directly to the Academy of Sciences by Harvey Butcher as coordinator of the activities undertaken under the 1996 MoA to ‘Cooperate in a Technology Study Program Leading to a Future Very Large Radio Telescope’ (see Sect. 3.2.2). Presentations on SKA to the Radio-Millimetre-Sub-millimetre (RMS) Panel advising the 2000 US Decadal Survey Committee were made in February 1999 by Russ Taylor as SKA Project Scientist and Ron Ekers as Chair of the International SKA Steering Committee^53,54 emphasising the global nature of the project. These efforts were successful, and the Decadal Review process recommended $22 million for SKA technical development for the SKA in the coming decade (McKee & Taylor, 2001).⁵⁵ However, a subsequent multi-institute proposal to the National Science Foundation Advanced Technology Initiative (ATI) program in 2001 led by Jim Cordes at Cornell University for a three-year SKA Technical Development Program (TDP) generated only $2.5 million and a promise that further funding may be available later in the decade.

The funding supported ongoing efforts by the SETI Institute and UC Berkeley to build the Allen Telescope Array, development work in the US on LOFAR by the Naval Research Laboratory and MIT/Haystack Observatory, implementation of NRAO’s EVLA, and work at JPL on large-array designs for the next generation Deep Space Network. The only direct funding for new SKA design work came from a separate ATI grant to Sandy Weinreb at JPL and Per-Simon Kildahl at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden for wide-band single pixel feed development for radio astronomy (see Sect. 6.6.1.1).

By the time the main ATI grant was due to end in 2005, the NSF Astronomy Division had decided to undertake a “senior review” of all the facilities and operations supported by that division which meant a final decision on funding of the TDP was delayed pending the outcome of the senior review. This delay lasted until 2007. In view of the later departure of the US from the global SKA project in 2011, one can only speculate whether an NSF grant of the recommended $22 million early in the decade before Europe obtained its SKA funding might have changed the course of the SKA, resulting in a US-led project.

Siting

USSKAC organised a US Site and Hosting Committee in 2002 to prepare an ‘Initial Site Analysis Document’ for the ISSC, based on a Strawman Design Whitepaper⁵⁶ authored by Ken Kellermann and colleagues. The US Consortium proposed to host the SKA in the South-West of the US where the NRAO’s VLA is located with SKA antenna locations spread across the US and parts of northern Mexico. But in the end, there was insufficient support in the US Consortium for submitting a full proposal for siting the SKA in the US (see Sect. 7.3.5). The primary reasons⁵⁷ were reluctance among the university community for NRAO to take charge of US involvement in SKA matched by reluctance from the NRAO Director to get involved in SKA in a major way while ALMA was still demanding substantial resources. In addition, the person designated by the Consortium to coordinate the site bid, Neb Duric from the University of New Mexico, left radio astronomy for another research field.

3.4 The End of Grass-Roots Governance: Funding Agencies Begin to Take a Global Role in the SKA: June 2005 to February 2006

By early 2005, the international governance and management structure of the SKA project was well established, and national SKA governance structures had also evolved to be able to manage the increasingly large grants being received. What was not in place was any well-defined route towards the multi-national funding required for SKA construction, then estimated as 1 billion Euros (Schilizzi, 2004).

Although it might seem that contact on funding between the ISSC and the group of funding agencies/government departments already supporting national SKA activities, or intending to do so, would have been a good idea as early as possible, the ISSC meeting minutes show that the topic caused lively debate for a number of years in the early 2000s.

“Politics” was never very far from anyone’s mind in discussions on the big questions confronting the project as a whole—site selection, technology selection, governance, and funding. There was, however, a feeling among a number of ISSC members that the selection of site and technology was best left to the experts and run by the ISSC, and that approaching the agencies with these questions already solved would be evidence of project maturity and its readiness for serious funding on an international scale.

An ISSC meeting in early 2003 discussed the relative timing of the site and technology decisions and approaches to Funding Agencies.⁵⁸ Debate focused on two approaches without coming to a formal conclusion: (i) decide on site, technology and governance simultaneously in order that trade-offs could be made that allowed the various partners to remain engaged in the project; or (ii) first make the site decision in order to reduce the level of politics and focus on the best site for the science.

A year later in further debate on this issue,⁵⁹ ISSC member, Brian Boyle (CSIRO, Australia), and some others supported the first approach and argued that staying objective and quantitative for as long as possible on the site selection and having an independent grading process, was essential to obtain broad support. In that same discussion, Harvey Butcher pointed out that the LOFAR site selection had shown that it was most likely that a small number of sites will be almost equal in satisfying the selection criteria and that political factors will ultimately play a role. Stefan Michalowski, Executive Secretary of the OECD Global Science Forum, commented along similar lines to Schilizzi in 2004⁶⁰ that:

Site decisions are the most contentious in international projects and unless one site is clearly better than all others, the site decision must be made by the politicians.

Michalowski felt that, in general, financial inducements are hard to separate from “best science” considerations.

3.4.1 The Heathrow Meeting in June 2005

Until 2005, contacts with Funding Agencies on funding SKA activities had been at individual national level, apart from the approach to the European Commission by Arnold van Ardenne, Peter Wilkinson and colleagues in the European SKA Consortium that led to the SKADS project (see Sects. 3.3.3.4 and 6.5). The contacts with the OECD Global Science Forum, described in Sect. 3.2.5.2, did not involve funding but did have both international and national impact.

This changed in early 2005 during an ISSC discussion on a collective approach to the funding agencies.⁶¹ There remained a vocal minority in the ISSC, primarily among the US delegation, that was in favour of delaying the first contact as long as possible since that would signal that scientists were losing control of the project. Others (Butcher, Boyle, Schilizzi) voiced the need to move to a site selection procedure and a governance structure that was firmly in place in 2010 with enough detail to satisfy the governments, and so maximise the chances of major funding for the full SKA. To avoid the pitfalls that were seen as having occurred in other large international projects, the ISSC felt a strong need to ‘guide’ the process.

Box 3.6 Countries and Observers Represented at the Heathrow Meeting of Funding Agencies on SKA in June 2005

Australia (Martin Gallagher), Canada (Greg Fahlman), France (Anne-Marie Lagrange, Laurent Vigroux), Germany (Thomas Berghoefer), Italy (Paolo Vettolani), Japan (Shoken Miyama), Netherlands (Annejet Meijler, Ronald Stark), South Africa (Rob Adam), Spain (Carlos Alejaldre), UK (co-chair, Richard Wade), USA (co-chair, Wayne van Citters). Observer: ESO (Catherine Cesarsky).

Also present were two representatives from the large optical telescope community: Gerry Gilmore (UK) and Doug Simons (USA).

ISSC member, Peter Wilkinson, proposed that the ISSC make contact with Richard Wade, the Director of the Astronomy Program at PPARC, UK (Fig. 3.12 left), on how best to raise the profile of the SKA with Funding Agencies around the world in order to engage them in discussions and decisions on global governance and funding for the SKA. This was done. Wade was open to the idea since it transpired that several funding agencies and government departments (see Box 3.6) had already agreed to meet in June 2005 at Heathrow airport to discuss their views on proposed extremely large (optical) telescope (ELT) projects around the world. This was an outcome of several OECD Global Science Forum discussions on global collaboration on big science projects. Wade and his counterpart in the US National Science Foundation, Wayne van Citters (Fig. 3.12 right), were co-chairing the meeting and were charged with establishing the agenda. It was an excellent opportunity to include an initial discussion on the SKA.

Fig. 3.12

The co-chairs of the June 2005 Heathrow meeting of Funding Agencies on large optical telescopes and the SKA. Left: Richard Wade, Program Director and Deputy Chief Executive at the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (Credit: Richard Wade), Right: Wayne van Citters, Director of the Division of Astronomical Sciences at the US National Science Foundation. (Credit: Wayne van Citters)

This was a turning point for the SKA and marked the start of the transition from a grass-roots project to one in which the partnership with the Funding Agencies grew slowly as confidence was built on both sides to the point when, 6 years later, the project became a legal entity with funding agencies and government departments formally involved in the project. Funding Agency involvement was a key requisite for 2007 European Commission funding for the SKA Preparatory Phase (PrepSKA), and this led to growing co-ownership of the project.

The ISSC submitted two position papers to the “Heathrow Group” outlining the project science, technology choices (including seven antenna concepts), governance, site selection plans, and overall project plan, and inviting agency comments on a number of governance and funding issues. Curiously, no ISSC members were invited to attend the meeting while two ELT proponents, Gerry Gilmore and Doug Simons, remained in the meeting room following the morning’s discussion of large optical telescopes.

As far as ISSC members “guiding the process”, only Harvey Butcher is known to have briefed the Netherlands delegates ahead of time. He wrote a well-argued four-page note that included a set of potential positions to take concerning the main factors requiring further study before proceeding to decision-making on SKA construction. These were cost, site selection and operations and the global nature of the project, in particular, governance, procurement, and industrial participation. He suggested that The Netherlands, in view of its prominence on the global SKA stage, should propose that a funding agency working group be formed to address the issues and that a second meeting of the agencies on SKA should be hosted in The Netherlands to discuss WG outcomes.

Following the Heathrow meeting, which was not minuted, no formal statement was issued by the Funding Agencies/governments. Subsequent discussions by ISSC Executive Committee members with Wade, who chaired the SKA discussion, and several other delegates provided a summary of positions taken and conclusions reached (see Box 3.7). The SKA science case was seen to be strong, but the technological readiness was low as evidenced by the variety of antenna concepts under consideration. This cast the proposed timescales into doubt. The Extremely Large [optical] Telescopes were in a better state of technological readiness and had higher priority with the agencies. A suggestion was made by one of the ELT proponents at the meeting that ESO adopt the SKA as a project. This was not taken up at the time but re-emerged in early 2006 (see Sect. 3.4.2) and again in 2008–2009 (see Sect. 4.4.3.2).

Box 3.7 Heathrow Meeting, June 2005: Agency Comments and Reflections on the SKA Position Paper

Australia—There is commitment and momentum for SKA in Australia, but it wasn’t clear how to maintain the momentum.

Canada—Extremely Large Telescope (ELT, optical) was higher priority; SKA misses a connection to government. No funding until ALMA and ELT are settled. The ISSC and ISPO are ahead of the project as a whole. The number of technical demonstrators should be reduced.

France—First priority was ELT. Second SKA. No new money available.

Germany—Small community, Max-Planck-Institute for Radio astronomy is the only major centre.

Italy—For the next 3 years, the Sardinia Radio Telescope and VLBI are the priorities.

Japan—ELT has a much higher priority.

Netherlands—fully involved in the European SKA Design Study (SKADS), no new money available.

South Africa—the SKA appeared to be a proliferation of bottom-up projects rather than a coherent whole, and it was unclear what the Agencies were being asked to fund. The timescales were unrealistic.

UK—ELT first priority, SKA to follow as soon as possible thereafter.

USA—SKA not ready to be proposed. It would be 3–4 years before the NSF could think of providing support for SKA technical development in the US as part of the next decadal survey review.

It was also clear that the global nature of the SKA had both a positive and negative impact. Positive because global collaboration was in favour at government levels at the time as a means of funding large science projects. Negative, because within the USA there was no prospect of serious funding for the SKA until at least 2010 when the next decadal survey took place, although the NSF recognised the strength of the science case and wished US scientists to remain involved in the planning.⁶²

A key statement in the ISSC paper was the plan for the final decision on site selection to be taken in 2006.⁶³ One almost parenthetical remark by Wade to ISSC Chair, Phil Diamond, on this point had far-reaching consequences—SKA site selection in September 2006 (by the ISSC) was premature. The Funding Agencies must be involved (as forecast by Stefan Michalowski a year earlier⁶⁴) and the current ‘state of readiness’ of the project was not sufficient to enable the agencies to come to a decision on that time scale.

The final comment from the Funding Agencies was that ‘The agencies do not want to take “ownership” of the SKA yet because the project is not sufficiently mature.’ In their view, the ISSC had raised too many issues in their paper, which were too detailed and too early in the project development. However, they did accept the invitation from the Netherlands delegation to meet again in The Hague in February 2006 to review SKA progress.

This sparked a vigorous debate in the ISSC.⁶⁵ Butcher felt that the “comments about project immaturity reflected the inadequacy of the governments/agencies in their ideas of organising the SKA process. As long as there was no vehicle to run the global effort, notions of ‘immaturity’ in design will prevail as an easy way out of making a commitment.” Ekers noted that the competition between the two US ELT proposals was seen as healthy, as was the competition with the ESO ELT. The global consensus on the SKA presented by the ISSC did not fit current models. Also clear was that the ELT was perceived to be ahead of SKA, partly because ALMA was seen as a major radio astronomy facility, and hence the next project should be in the optical/infrared domain. Several ISSC members including Jill Tarter, Butcher and Bob Preston were in favour of leaving the site selection process unchanged, despite the Funding Agencies’ comment, since the competing sites were expecting a final decision in 2006. ISSC members from countries in the competition were divided in their views—Australia (Boyle) supported a ranking of suitable sites at this stage; China (Bo Peng) supported a ranking of all proposed sites while South Africa (Jonas) favoured a final selection proceeding from the original site selection process that was nearing completion.

However, the majority opinion in the ISSC was that “the genie was out of the bottle” as far as the Funding Agencies were concerned, and their advice should now be followed (see Box 3.8). The ISSC determined to reverse the “not sufficiently mature” perception of the project and took two far-reaching decisions: (1) it appointed a “Tiger Team” chaired by the Director to create a Reference Design for the SKA by the end of the year building on the work done by the Engineering Management Team and its successor, the ISPO Engineering WG (see Sect. 6.2.1). A Reference Design would allow a far better definition of the SKA’s cost and scientific capability, without precluding other technologies eventually replacing some or all parts of any reference design adopted; and (2) It agreed that the outcome of the site selection process should change from a “final decision” on the location of the SKA to a decision on the ranking of the four sites based on scientific, technical and infrastructure cost grounds. This was to form the basis of a recommendation on acceptable sites the ISSC would submit to the governments and funding agencies involved in the SKA in September 2006.⁶⁶

Box 3.8 Working with Funding Agencies

There was a cultural difference between Europe and the US in terms of how closely to work with funding agencies. In Europe, getting the funding agencies to co-own the project was felt to be a prerequisite to eventually obtaining funds, and success was measured by the level to which an agency person was prepared to argue for your project behind closed doors. For many of the younger agency and government staff, the SKA was a potential career-making project if their role in shepherding the project through the many ups and downs was successful. Similar close relationships with the US National Science Foundation staff members were not standard for international projects.

In a follow-up briefing session with Wade, Diamond and Schilizzi discussed the ISSC decisions on site ranking and a Reference Design, as well as the need for a new project plan taking these decisions into account.⁶⁷ Wade agreed that the “Heathrow Group (HG)” was the appropriate body to receive the ISSC recommendation on site shortlist, and to make proposals to higher government authorities on participants in the Roundtable Discussion that would lead to the final site decision. The HG had all the appropriate links to governments, and there was no other obvious recipient for the ISSC recommendation. In addition, despite there being no record that the HG discussed a phased construction schedule for the SKA at Heathrow, Wade noted that there was considerable support within the HG for the concept since that would allow a start on SKA construction while construction of the ELT, which had a considerably higher priority, was in full swing.

The ISSC decisions and briefing sessions notwithstanding, the ISSC Executive Committee (XC) remained cautious about the interactions with funding agencies, in particular the suitability of the Heathrow Group (HG) to receive the ISSC scientific site ranking for further decisions. Some members pointed out that the HG was, at that moment, not a formal group, it had no responsibility, it did not minute its meetings, it had no leader, and had not actually asked for a ranking of sites. This was something the ISSC had decided after the Heathrow meeting would be the outcome of the ISSC selection process rather than outright selection of one site. It would be premature for the ISSC to relinquish control of the selection process to an informal entity after all the work done on the site selection by ISPO and the site proposers. The XC agreed that it was essential to continue engaging the governments/funding agencies in SKA decisions, but the project should wait until a clearer picture existed as to which formal entity the ISSC should submit its site ranking.

In at least one agency delegation, there was also a question on the Funding Agency side about leadership of this global collaboration. Reflecting on the Heathrow meeting in a conversation with Schilizzi,⁶⁸ the Australian delegate, Martin Gallagher, noted that the SKA was clearly on a slower path than the ELTs, and a different process would need to be in place for the SKA if it was to be funded concurrently with the ELTs. He supported building the SKA in phases as proposed in the ISSC submission and noted the need for a large Member State to act as “project champion” to lead such a process. With the US unable to play a major role for several years due to the looming Decadal Survey, Europe and the UK in particular, was the obvious choice. This would signal serious international commitment. But in Gallagher’s opinion, the European actors at the meeting had not come across as well-prepared for this.

This began to change once the ISSC decisions on the Reference Design and site ranking were made known to Wade in July 2005. This led to serious preparation for the next meeting in The Hague on both sides and together, with the UK and The Netherlands as meeting host, in the leading role for the agencies. A sense of working together began to emerge. By the time of the Hague meeting in February 2006, it was possible for the ISSC to look back on 2005 as a year of major steps forward in the project:

2005 was a seminal year for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA): the SKA science case and a comprehensive description of SKA engineering studies were published; the site selection process moved forwards with four proposals [from Argentina-Brazil, Australia, China and Southern Africa] being received at the end of the year and comparative site characterisation being completed; investment of ~€80M was committed to SKA R&D and pathfinder projects around the world; the funding agencies of interested governments met to discuss the project for the first time at Heathrow in June 2005. In addition, the International SKA Steering Committee (ISSC) and the International SKA Project Office (ISPO) and its working groups have produced a detailed project plan and have defined an SKA reference design.⁶⁹

3.4.2 ESO as a Possible Host for European SKA Activities?

Another thread in the governance story began to emerge in Europe in late 2005. For several of the European funding agency representatives at the Heathrow meeting, it seemed sensible to bring European participation in SKA under the umbrella of the largest astronomy organisation in the world, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) . ESO was a Treaty Organisation founded in 1962 with a European-wide membership, and a well-established, long-term funding channel from participating governments. The thinking went that it would be far simpler for European funding agencies if SKA were to be a new department of ESO and so take advantage of an existing organisation rather than set up a new entity.

To this end, Tim De Zeeuw, chair of the Scientific Strategy Working Group of ESO Council invited Phil Diamond (ISSC Chair), Anton Zensus (ESKAC Chair) and Schilizzi (SKA Director) to a meeting at ESO in January 2006 shortly before The Hague Funding Agencies meeting in order to explore possible roles for ESO within the SKA project. Following an earlier consultation with RadioNet Board and European SKA Consortium members to agree the approach, Diamond presented three options for SKA in Europe: (i) set up a separate legal entity to manage the European SKA project on behalf of radio astronomy; (ii) ESO Council becomes the inter-governmental umbrella for SKA within Europe enabling SKA to access ESO services; and (iii) ESO takes on the SKA and it becomes an integral part of the ESO program. If within ESO, a requirement from the radio astronomy community was that funding lines for the SKA and ESO’s own ELT project were independent.⁷⁰ Without such a safeguard there was concern that the SKA would be “parked” behind the ELT in terms of priority.

A clear preference emerged in the ESO Working Group for option (iii) but with the ESO Council controlling the budget for all projects including the SKA, rather than there being separate earmarked funds for SKA. There was little enthusiasm for the “bolt-on” option of a separate radio astronomy division, as there would be little return to ESO. There was an equal lack of enthusiasm among the radio astronomy participants for the SKA to be integrated into ESO with no independent control of its budget, which was the preferred choice of the Working Group.⁷¹

A month after the Hague meeting in a discussion with Diamond, two funding agency representatives, Colin Vincent (PPARC, UK) and Ronald Stark (NWO, Netherlands) voiced some scepticism about integration of the SKA project into ESO, partly since some restructuring of ESO was expected following the completion of Catherine Cesarsky’s term as Director-General in 2007. And there this issue was left until 2009 when Tim de Zeeuw had become ESO Director-General; we take up this story again in Sect. 4.4.3.2.

3.4.3 The Hague Meeting in February 2006: “Blood on the Floor”

Again, the ISSC provided position papers on the SKA as input to the meeting—the “Discussion Document” on the formation of an Inter-Agency Group⁷² (the source of the quote at the end of Sect. 3.4.1), and a revised Project Plan⁷³ taking into account the changed approaches to site selection and technology development resulting from the Heathrow meeting discussed briefly in Sect. 3.4.1 and more extensively in Sects. 7.3.7 and 6.2.1 respectively.

The Discussion Document noted:

As the SKA gathers momentum and astronomers and funding agencies look towards proposals for construction funding at the end of the decade it is necessary to start addressing the issues that will lead towards an appropriate and sustainable international status for the project in its next phase.

The view of the ISSC is that this is best achieved by the formation of an inclusive inter-agency group that will work with the ISSC in developing the SKA. Such a group could be analogous to the FALC: Funding Agencies for the Linear Collider.

The membership of the proposed group, possibly called the FASKA [Funding Agencies for SKA], should be defined by the Funding Agencies meeting in The Hague in February 2006.

Compared to an earlier draft of the Discussion Document,⁷⁴ the last sentence was a substantial change. This followed a robust Special Teleconference of the ISSC on 16 January 2006⁷⁵ and a subsequent telling email discussion among a number of leading members of the ISSC. The earlier draft, with minor clarifications indicated by square brackets, read:

One crucial activity to be undertaken by the [inter-agency group] in 2006 would be the writing of a Memorandum of Understanding for the establishment of an SKA Board, possibly in 2007. While the broad membership of [the group] would be appropriate for drafting the MoU, only those agencies actively contributing to the project would sign the MoU and contributions would be recorded in an annex to the MoU.

The earlier formulation brought a simmering issue in the ISSC to the fore during the ISSC teleconference: how to account for the different tempos and levels of funding for SKA development in different parts of the world in any new governance structure, and in particular in leadership of the project in that new structure. Related to this was how realistic were the project schedule and construction costs set out in the project plan.

Diamond, ISSC Chair, addressed this issue directly in an email to the ISSC,⁷⁶ again with minor additions in square brackets for clarity:

…there is a significant fraction of the global community and the ISSC [Europe, Australia and South Africa] that has money now, has prospects of significant funding in the near term, and is generating the political will within its governments to push the SKA forward. Then there is a second group, within which the USA is dominant, that has unfortunately little prospect of significant funding [before the US Decadal Review had run its course], and little prospect of generating the necessary political will to get involved with other governments and make the decisions that need to happen.

Diamond felt that the first group could not be slowed down or their funding would dry up and the SKA would ‘wither and die’. A means had to be found to ensure the second group stayed involved, provided appropriate input, and participated in making decisions in a way acceptable to the governments financially supporting the first group.

Jim Cordes⁷⁷ (Cornell University) expressed a widely held view among US ISSC members that:

…funding for the SKA could not be considered in a vacuum that ignores how current resources are spent on cm/m wavelength astronomy. Since radio astronomy has been especially good at encouraging global sharing of facilities, the decision-making processes for the SKA should be based on a systems view that takes account of how resources for cm/m facilities are best allocated over the next decades. These decisions are major ones and should be made with full participation of all the stakeholders’. He held that any analysis of current funding would show the US as a major contributor to radio astronomy with a major stake in what happens in the SKA for its own sake as well as for continued funding for US facilities, even if it was not contributing significant amounts of direct funding to SKA at any given time.

In the context of the Project Plan, he also contended that the project plan total cost estimate (€1 billion) and 2014 start of construction reflected an ideal situation, its presentation to Funding Agencies now was “presumptuous”. Until this point, the ISSC, with little demur from its members, had always approved project plans including start of construction early in the 2010s decade.

However, Cordes was a pragmatist at heart, and had already conceded during the ISSC teleconference a few days earlier that the SKA Board, if established, would be the embodiment of the Golden Rule: “Whoever has the gold, rules”.⁷⁸

To the Europeans this change of heart on the part of the US ISSC members appeared driven by the latter’s understandable desire to continue as a major force in the project and be represented on any future SKA Board. Again, to the Europeans, this meant that the US, to maintain its position, would need to delay the global project timescale to match that of decisions on US funding, something that would put the whole project in danger.

Dewdney, one of the ISSC members for Canada at that time, pointed out⁷⁹ that there was nothing preventing an official plan that acknowledged that the SKA would be built in stages, the first of which to be funded initially in Europe and subsequent stages funded in the US and elsewhere. All current and future participating countries would have input at all stages. The important point was getting such a plan adopted by the funding agencies, and an SKA Board with US representation could be set up to reflect that plan.

This point won the day and led to the more inclusive formulation on Board membership in the final version of the ISSC discussion document on the formation of an Inter-Agency Group.

This was the first occasion when a crack in project solidarity became apparent. Although the crack closed up after the Hague meeting following the agencies’ decision to take a cautious approach to involvement in the SKA and form a Working Group rather than a formal SKA Board (see below), the fault-line remained, as we discuss in Sect. 4.5.3 regarding the US withdrawal from the project at the end of 2011 following the 2010 US Decadal Review. With hindsight, the project schedules created by the ISSC and the Project Office were optimistic and an earlier realisation of that might have led to a more explicit phased approach for the SKA acceptable in the near-term, as well as in the white paper submitted to the Decadal Review in 2009. This may have led to a different outcome from the 2010 Decadal Survey.

Invitations to the Hague meeting went to the countries of the parties subscribed to the ISSC Memorandum of Agreement and to Argentina, Brazil, the European Commission, Japan, the OECD and New Zealand.⁸⁰ In the event, only the Chinese and OECD Global Science Forum representatives could not attend, the former due to the Chinese New Year celebrations, and the latter due to a schedule clash.

At the meeting in a spectacular location on the top floor of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, delegates heard presentations by the ISSC on science (Boyle), the project (Schilizzi), and organisational aspects (Diamond) , and then went into closed session. Two main conclusions resulted from the Agency enclave:

Site selection: a shortlist of acceptable sites was required with no prioritisation, rather than a ranked list of the four sites. No suitable site was to be excluded at this stage. The Funding Agencies clearly envisaged a political-level negotiation at the end with the “acceptable” sites to see which site came up with the best offer in terms of host country premium. As Richard Wade put it, they wanted to see ‘blood on the floor’!

SKA Board: in recognition that the project had made substantial progress since the Heathrow meeting, the agencies decided to form a working group, the Funding Agencies for SKA (FASKA), comprising representatives from all countries with an interest in the SKA independent of any commitments of funding. It would meet twice a year to discuss the SKA project with the ISSC and in closed session. A sub-set of the plenary group of agencies, the Funding Agencies Working Group (FAWG)—UK (chair), USA, Netherlands, Australia, South Africa, Canada and the European Commission—was formed to prepare discussion issues for the full working group. These included the site selection process beyond short-listing, future governance, and constraints on the timeline including phasing issues with regard to other large astronomy projects and how they might be addressed. The acronym, FASKA, did not survive its first use, and was replaced by SKA Funding Agencies Group or plenary group of Funding Agencies until the PrepSKA period when the Group took on formal roles in the project development and changed its name again (see Sect. 4.4.2).

Concluding Remarks

There is no doubt the Funding Agency comments at the Heathrow and Hague meetings had a profound effect on the SKA project. The Reference Design was formulated in December 2005 some years earlier than had been the ISSC’s intention; the final site selection in 2006 became a site short-listing; the potential for the SKA to be built in scientifically useful stages—phased implementation—was adopted as a fundamental part of the Project Plan (see next chapter); and, as a consequence of the site short-listing, major SKA precursor telescopes were designed and built in Australia and South Africa, the two short-listed candidate sites, as fall-back outcomes were the site decision to go against them.

The Hague meeting marks the point when the SKA project began its transition from a global grass-roots collaboration to a global project with a new legal entity at its heart and funded to take on the Pre-Construction Phase. In the next chapter, we trace how this transition was accomplished in project governance and funding. Other chapters describe the transition from a set of independent national and regional, in the case of Europe, engineering efforts into a coherent global SKA design process (Chap. 6), the maturing of the site selection process following the Funding Agency intervention at the Heathrow meeting in 2005 (Chaps. 7 and 8), and the formulation of a focused policy on industry engagement (Chap. 10).