Turning Soil at Last

In the summer of 1960, William Gordon and four other Cornell related families moved to Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to oversee the telescope construction work and build the needed receiver and data acquisition systems. The line feed and transmitter contracts had already been awarded and there were seven telescope construction sub-contracts that had to be negotiated. The grading and excavation contract was quickly let allowing work to start in September. By mid-1961 all of the contracts had been let. However, progress was very slow and it was soon clear that the very aggressive schedule, which had completion by September 1961, would not be close to being met. Solid progress was made, just much slower than scheduled. These delays had a real cost and 1961 saw several requests to ARPA for additions to the construction budget, all of which ARPA agreed to. The schedule and funding issues led to a major meeting of all the interested parties, ARPA, AFCRL and Cornell, in San Juan in October 1961. This meeting was highly constructive in getting everyone working together and resulted in a new completion date of October 1962.