
Brian Cox
32.7K posts

Brian Cox
@ProfBrianCox
Professor of Particle Physics at The University of Manchester



🚨 NEW: The UK’s largest telescope for studying space is now set to close after the Government pulled its funding It supported various Apollo missions and tracked Soviet rockets in the Cold War




The announced closure of the UK's largest telescope at Jodrell Bank is only a small part of the cuts in UK physics


Jodrell Bank is the most visible causality of UKRI’s short sighted ‘vision’ for science, but as you’ll see below, there are many other valuable UK facilities and collaborations at risk. We became aware of the problem in the autumn of last year. It is not a result of the overall funding settlement for science after the spending review, which was quite generous I would say in the circumstances. Neither as far as we can tell is it a direct decision by ministers (all of whom have now gone in any case). Rather the problems appears to have been caused by senior management at UKRI focusing on short term economic ‘impact’ (whatever that means) rather than doing their job as custodians of the foundations of science. What must happen now is that the new ministerial team make the time (and space ;-)) to review the upcoming catastrophe, and instruct UKRI to do their job and focus on making Britain the best place in the world to do science, now and in the future.


I am all for saving Jodrell Bank, but please don’t lose sight of the fact that it is simply the most visible manifestation of a much bigger problem, which isn’t solved if someone magically finds the money to keep it going, simply to shut people up.





Government says they “have to cut” the £2.8m budget for this world class telescope. How much did they spend on the PR, branding, consulting, and moving to Number 10 North? Why are we cutting funding to things that make us world leaders in Astrophysics?




🚨 NEW: The UK’s largest telescope for studying space is now set to close after the Government pulled its funding It supported various Apollo missions and tracked Soviet rockets in the Cold War
