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Yes. Absolutely fair point. The line about competition driving different trajectories is my social media version (ie crude version) of Mulkay and Edge’s argument from Astronomy Transformed (1976)

(That’s enough. Time for my tea)

Final thoughts (2/2): I wish #SaveJodrellBank the best, although I fear that this crisis might be too much. The cuts are not aimed only at Jodrell Bank (indeed it is its network that is being cut), but are a part of a bigger, deeper reset for UK science. Jodrell Bank, as ever, is the visible part

Final thoughts (1/2), Jodrell Bank has been made to mean many things: -astronomy (but not the Cambridge way) -national leadership -a great public spectacle -a Cold War sentinel -not engineering -planning blight -globalisation -a NW icon Its interpretative flexibility was - is - key to its survival

One noticeable trend in the last decades has been the regional attachment of Jodrell Bank. It has become, not least through years of visits by local schoolchildren, an icon of the North West - and less so the Nation Which makes its probable cancellation under a Mancunian prime minister spicy

"Every day We live in Hope They won't take Our Telescope" You can see the video on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWWb...

In 2008, during the last crisis when Jodrell Bank was threatened with closure, the campaign, as we can see from this still from a charming protest song by "The Astronomers", was to keep the LOVELL open

By then (since 1987) the Radio Telescope was known as the 'Lovell Telescope'. It is named for the scientist (Lovell) and not for the engineer (Husband), even though it was the creation of both In this small but significant way, Jodrell Bank stands for science and not engineering

Jodrell Bank's meaning to politicians has also changed. For Tony Blair, in his big 'Science Matters' speech of 2002 to the Royal Society, Jodrell Bank was a symbol international cooperation and competition, and of Britain's place as an 'innovative, forward-looking nation' in a globalised world

More mundanely (or for me EXCITINGLY) to combat interference with the Radio Telescope there were zones around Jodrell Bank where radio transmission and even building planning were restricted For neighbours, Jodrell Bank could mean planning blight

Meanings of Jodrell Bank mutate, especially as it enters the cultural realm In 1961, TV watchers goggled at A for Andromeda, starring Julie Christie Co-scripted by Fred Hoyle (a Yorkshireman) it centred around alien radio signals received at a massive fictional radio telescope (in Yorkshire)

It was Lord Nuffield who finally cleared the debt in the late 1950s. This was end of the Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope's first crisis, government funding ended and private funding had stepped in

This interpretation of the Radio Telescope was reached for only when its funding was in trouble. Half the money had come from Lord Nuffield, auto maker, philanthropist ... and Cold Warrior Nuffield hoped that “the radio telescope might one day be directed, if need be, on the steppes of Russia”

Here's another meaning for the Radio Telescope: it is a military tracker of satellites and by implication ballistic missiles (the capacity to launch is the same) A Lovell ally tells prime minister Harold Macmillan : 'the country is very lucky to have had ready a radar instrument which is capable'

The Radio Telescope becomes operational days before the great shock of the launch of the Soviet artificial satellite Sputnik Lovell's team, and Husband, work around the clock to make sure the Telescope tracks Sputnik, and also to make sure the world knows about it

Bernard Lovell is worried, but he has a new pitch ...

The redesign costs more. Budgets are overrun. By the time the telescope is finished in 1957 it costs about £1 million (of 1950s pounds) and is in serious debt What sustains it is another meaning made for a large, steerable device that can both receive and transmit radio signals ...

But compare this design drawing (1955) by Husband with the earlier one. The steel support to the bowl is now massive. The bowl is also now continuous steel plate not wire. What has happened? Partly structural worries (hence massive support), partly astronomical choice (shorter wavelengths)

... but after the war there is rebirth, as the storyboard shows The film treatment stipulated: “We end with the most impressive shot that can be obtained of the whole telescope” So: a third, very public meaning is made: the Radio Telescope stands for NATIONAL prestige and leadership

The DSIR commissioned (and the Foreign Office funded) a film, The Inquisitive Giant (1958) In it a sequence, as we can see from the storyboard, of ever larger British (and Irish) telescopes from 17th to 19th centuries ends abruptly with even bigger US ones. Oh no! leadership has been lost!