NSF will not fund either team in the race to build a US segmented-mirror telescope

Science : Last week NSF announced that it does not expect to fund the building of either the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) or the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) until 2020 at the earliest. The two university consortia in charge of the giant ground-based telescope projects have raised tens of millions of dollars in the hope that NSF would be able to come up with the balance, and both the TMT and the GMT were scheduled to start operations before 2020. The hope was not unfounded. In its most recent decadal survey, the National Academy of Sciences recommended that NSF should pick and fund one project, a recommendation that Congress later mandated but didn’t explicitly fund. To stay on schedule, both teams will need to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in private funding or else find international partners.