View of One of the Five 60 Foot Dish Antennas
 

Over a year ago the Stanford Fire Marshall found dry brush at the observatory and called for its cleanup. He also indicated that the dishes themselves were not a fire hazard, being of metal construction.  The Dean of the School of Engineering called not only for brush removal, but the demolition of the whole telescope.

Stanford's School of Engineering agreed that if our supporters paid them $20,000, they would allow us until June 30th, 2005 to develop and submit a final proposal for the site. Our supporters provided the $20,000, and we presented a proposal on time. The the funds were to cover the added cost of completing the demolition work at a later date.  Should a proposal be accepted, these funds are to be made available in support of the site. 

We developed a collaborative proposal in conjunction with the Director of Stanford's Space, Telecommunications, and Radio Science Laboratory (STAR Lab), the Director of Stanford's Space Systems Development Laboratory (SSDL), and a Professor teaching antenna technology (EE144/245) to synergistically combine Stanford academic and research use with our planned activities.  We proposed to support the use of one or more of the dishes to track scientific satellites carrying Stanford-built instrumentation as well as student-built microsatellites,  in addition to hands-on student lab use.  We presented this to the Dean, who rejected it, indicating that more professors would need to be found to use the site, even though we were originally told that only one tenure-line professor would be necessary for the proposal. We then obtained signups from several more professors who would use the site with our support, but it was again rejected. 

Following this, professors in the Stanford Astronomy Program created their own proposal to put the radio telescope back into operation, with our support, as a teaching observatory for use in conjunction with Stanford's undergraduate astronomy courses. The proposal was cleared by the Department of Physics and then submitted to the office of the Dean of Humanities and Sciences where it rose to the level of the Provost. Their request was denied for reasons not disclosed to us.

Two Stanford student clubs requested the use of the site with our support (The Stanford Astronomical Society, and the Stanford Amateur Radio Club), but their requests were denied with no explanation.

We then submitted a new proposal directly to the President of Stanford. This new approach is based on our directly leasing the site, establishing an endowment to cover operating costs in perpetuity,  and providing access for faculty and students. We wanted to learn what concerns he might have, so we could have an opportunity to address them.  Instead, a series of our letters went unanswered, and we we were finally informed by his assistant that he has denied our request to meet.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) learned about the imminent demolition, and approached Stanford's Office of Science Outreach to explore their own proposal. A number of Stanford professors wrote to JPL indicating they would like to participate. NASA's vision  was to share the dishes equally among four groups at "minimal or no cost" to Stanford: 

1. JPL outreach program, enabling high-school student access to this radio-astronomy capability, from schools in the US and overseas.

2. Stanford outreach to amateur radio-astronomers, sponsored by the Friends of the Bracewell Observatory Association (FBOA).

3. Stanford faculty and students, for projects on mechanical systems, wide-band low-noise amplifiers, RF and IF circuits, and radio-astronomy research.

4. JPL DSN Array project, for testing of arraying and signal processing, including long-duration, 24x7 tracking of NASA's deep space missions.

Our efforts to arrive at a win-win solution continues.

The image reconstruction mathematical methods developed by Professor Bracewell for these radio telescope antennas were universally adopted into the algorithms of medical CT scanners, advancing the art of medical diagnosis around the world.