After the AAS session, Robert Kirshner, the TMT’s executive director, told Astronomy, “There’s a long way to go, but I’m cautiously optimistic.” Referring to the mood in the room, he said, “You could hear it, you know — there’s a reason to be hopeful.”
Kirshner was hired on as TMT's executive director just a year ago. He sees the fact that he is new to the issue as “a good thing,” and cites TMT community outreach efforts as part of a new approach from the astronomical community, shifting from persuasion to dialogue. “Instead of telling people, ‘Oh, we’re going to do something for you,’ it’s much better to listen and see what people want,” he said.
And, he suggested, there is an appetite among astronomers to deescalate tensions. “We’ve been, you know, in this zone where it looks like — well, it is conflict. That’s not a comfortable place for people who care so much about finding out about how the world works.”
Breathing room
Komeiji is frank about the challenges facing the MKSOA board, which are not just political but also logistical. The authority is starting from scratch; at the time of the AAS meeting, it had yet to hire any staff and Komeiji said he wasn’t even sure how to access the $14 million in funds that the state has appropriated for it. Key personal connections also still had to be made: After the MKSOA panel ended, Kirshner walked up to Komeiji to introduce himself and give him his business card.
“What I’m trying to do is make sure that we build the agency as quickly as we can,” Komeiji told Astronomy, “and then on a parallel track start having discussions about TMT, about decommissioning, about new leases.”
Komeiji has previously served as president of Hawaiian Telecom and general counsel and vice president for Kamehameha Schools, the prestigious college-prep school system founded by Hawaiian royalty in 1887. But he knows that steering the MKSOA may be his most challenging job yet. “There has not been one person that hasn’t called me crazy,” he said on the panel. “But you know, Hawaii has been my home. Hawaii is very important to me. And I get emotional about this. Because … this is probably the most divisive issue that has come for all of Hawaii in my lifetime.”
When asked by Astronomy whether he was feeling time pressure from observatories, he wryly replied, “In my life, I’m very much aware of timeframes and people’s time requirements.” Then he added: “The one timeframe that is not as clear to me, but I’m always thinking about, is what the timetables are for the funders.”
In good news for him, at the AAS meeting in Seattle, one major potential backer of the telescope, the National Science Foundation (NSF), signaled an openness to letting the process play out. So far, the U.S. partners of TMT are all universities or private institutions. Unlike the other nations involved in TMT — Canada, China, Japan, and India — the U.S. government has not committed significant funding.
But that would change if NSF decides to invest in the project. And the agency is considering doing so, spurred by a strong endorsement from the influential astronomy decadal survey published in 2021 by the National Academies of Sciences. That report recommended that TMT and a rival telescope, the Giant Magellan Telescope — currently under construction in Chile — combine forces, with NSF coordinating a joint organization to encompass both facilities.