How ‘the China’s Eye of Heaven’ FAST Project Was Created

Abstract

Thus far, the FAST radio telescope in China is the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope. After the collapse of the Arecibo telescope (AT) in the United States and before the completion of the international big science project SKA, it will continue to maintain a leading advantage for two decades. The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical telescope (FAST) originated from the idea of the large radio telescope (LT, referred to as the SKA after 1999) that was put forward by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). In 1994, China tried to become an important site selection for the LT plan, but it failed. After that, based on the AT in the United States, China proposed the original engineering concept FAST, made a few key technological innovations, and successfully completed the project by mobilising national scientific and technological forces. China evaluated the technological, economic, and social value of FAST during its operational phase and demonstrated the cautious and obsessive attitude of the Chinese team towards the open sharing of FAST data resources. To trace the early history of LT and the formation of China’s scientific community in radio astronomy in a global context, I use the social history of FAST as a window to provide a perspective for contemplating the complexity of the influencing factors and the dynamics of the process in the historical story of building large-scale scientific facilities in developing countries. By comprehensively adopting research methods such as engineering field research, archive review, literature review, and oral interviews, we explore this process that involved balancing self-reliance and international cooperation under the influence of complex factors, such as politics, technology, economy, and society.