I was surprised that they aren’t grilling him more, considering the importance of the Department of Energy in stewardship of our nuclear arsenal. But maybe they’re hoping that if he guts DOE, all our nuclear warheads will fall apart from neglect and Trump will be unable to accidentally start WWIII.

Is it really true that most surveys are in the north? DES and DESI are in the South, and of course the big one relevant for TMT is LSST, which is also Chile. That’s even neglecting all the radio (SKA), submm (ALMA) and CMB (SPT,ACT) instrumentation in the south.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I guess what I’m saying is that it doesn’t seem like a big deal to me if some fraction (~ 30%?) of the sky is not covered by 30-m class telescopes. The kinds of objects that occur in that portion of the sky will occur in the rest of the sky.

My understanding was that TMT already was slated to be constructed on the site of an existing observatory. So it’s hard to sympathize with the native Hawaiians’ complaints about this.