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Spain Offers $1.14 Billion To Get Thirty Meter Telescope Moved To Canary Islands (behindtheblack.com) 183

Posted by BeauHD from the uncertain-fate dept.
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Behind the Black: In a new bid to get the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) to move from Hawaii, which has blocked its construction for more than a decade, the Spanish government has put together a $1.14 billion package that would not only pay for construction on the Canary Islands, but would finance an additional half century of operations. Tech Times provides some additional details: The package is conditional on the TMT International Observatory formally choosing La Palma as its construction site. The financing architecture has three pillars and two additional contingent instruments. The first pillar is 400 million euros (approximately $456 million USD) from Spain's Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, routed through the Centre for Technological Development and Innovation (CDTI). This figure was first pledged a year ago in July 2025 as Spain's initial bid.

The second pillar is a 300 million-euro (approximately $342 million USD) loan from the EIB [European Investment Bank] itself -- subject to satisfactory completion of the bank's technical, financial, and legal due diligence and approval by its governing bodies.

The third is a potential 300 million-euro (approximately $342 million USD) participation from the Instituto de Credito Oficial (ICO), Spain's state development finance institution, evaluated under equivalent conditions to the EIB loan but subject to its own separate analysis. Spain's export credit agency, Cesce, may also provide coverage instruments, and the EIB has left open the possibility of expanding its support through intermediated financing mechanisms or guarantees.

Spain Offers $1.14 Billion To Get Thirty Meter Telescope Moved To Canary Islands More | Reply

Spain Offers $1.14 Billion To Get Thirty Meter Telescope Moved To Canary Islands

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  • “Mauna Kea is the most sacred dormant volcano of Native Hawaiian religion and culture, and in Knaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) tradition is home to the sky god Wkea and other gods.” ref [wikipedia.org]

    I don't see what the problem is. Once the TMT is built, the khuna can sacrifice the astronomers to the sky father Wkea /s

    • I donâ(TM)t understand - what better monument to the sky gods could you build than an absolutely fecking mahoosive telescope?

      • Re: Hawaii blocked the TMT for more than a decade (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @08:48AM (#66271920)

        I donâ(TM)t understand - what better monument to the sky gods could you build than an absolutely fecking mahoosive telescope?

        The "Native Hawaiians" want us the Haole out of there, the blocking of the Space Telescope is just a way of messing with those they hate.

        • Re: Hawaii blocked the TMT for more than a decade (Score:4, Insightful)

          by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @02:58PM (#66272622) Homepage Journal

          What all the hate? It's so weird, they act like someone overthrew their government, occupied them, then forcibly annexed them.

          • The first two I believe are accurate based on my reading of history, but I would argue a bit with the last. There was a vote to join the union in 1959 [wikipedia.org] and registered voters turned out in record numbers and the vote was overwhelmingly approved ('at least' 93% in favor).

            Now, you could quite reasonably argue that if the aforementioned annexation had not occurred then the make up of the population of Hawaii might look different, and so in 1959 no plebiscite would happen, etc. But, it always surprises me how o

      • Business Interests (Score:5, Informative)

        by Wdi ( 142463 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @10:26AM (#66272122)

        At least some of the most vocal opponents organize, in collaboration with energy drink maker Red Bull, motocross races on the slope of the volcano, right up to the top. These will have to stop because of the dust they produce. Just maybe there are real religious objections, but certainly there is money.

        • Re:Business Interests (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @12:18PM (#66272312) Homepage

          I take native Hawaiian religious objections seriously. These are people who take a fatalistic "Pele will take what she wants, it's pointless to try to stop her" attitude toward lava flows running over their houses that seems utterly insane here in Iceland. We'll buy up every available water pump on the international market and walk on active-flowing lava fields to save a harbour for a couple thousand people. We'll keep running tourist sites right next to a volcano that erupts every couple months by building multi-story-high berms around it with giant bulldozers and cooling anything that tries to overtop to make the berms even higher. And it totally works . But Hawaiians will sit back and watch incredibly slow-flowing flows with easy diversion paths take out everything they hold dear. At best they'll point to some primitive failed attempts in like the 1940s as a reason to not try, but then when pressed, it often comes back to: "Pele will take what she wants to take."

          Another example: geothermal drilling on the Big Island. Massive protests. Massive resistance, way beyond the token NIMBY resistance here. Meanwhile Hawaii continues to generate most of its electricity from oil, at great cost. Hawaii is the only other place (outside of Iceland) to have accidentally drilled into a magma chamber. In Hawaii they treated it as a major incident and immediately shut down the well. When we did it? Our reaction was, "WOW, we can produce REALLY hot steam from THIS well!", made it into a production well, and started planning to drill more.

          I guess one major difference here is that in the early Icelandic cosmology, volcanoes weren't the product of a high-ranking creator goddess, but rather, Surtr, who was practically a demon and was fated to destroy the world. It's good to resist Surtr!

          • Hawaiian eruption last a long time and the lava flows persist for years. That's a very different problem from Iceland. There is of course a very big attitude difference owing to the difference in culture. There is a practical side that it is easier to move people and build coffee shacks than divert a lava flow reliable for months or years, without it spilling over into someone's property and creating a legal nightmare. In Hawaii, if the lava is coming your way, you load up all the pets and kids into your tr

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by PPH ( 736903 )

              you load up all the pets and kids into your truck and move out.

              And how do they thank the bringers of trucks?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Rei ( 128717 )

              Hawaiian eruption last a long time and the lava flows persist for years.

              Your effusive eruptions last on average no longer than our effusive eruptions. The fact that Iceland also has phreatic eruptions doesn't change the fact that most of ours are effusive basalt, just like yours, with corresponding eruptive dynamics. Also, FYI, for a given total effusion volume, slow eruptions are easier to divert. Diversion is much more challenging when an equivalent volume of lava is effused in a short period of time.

    • Good plan! Should be a LOT of virgins working in the observatory!

    • Re:Hawaii blocked the TMT for more than a decade (Score:4, Interesting)

      by RUs1729 ( 10049396 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @02:39PM (#66272582)
      It is just the native Hawaiians using the excuse of religion to stick it to the man. You can hardly blame them, bearing in mind how they have been treated historically. It is a safe bet, however, that if the political circumstances were different - e.g. if it were entirely up to native Hawaiians how things would be run in that location - the religious objections would disappear.

  • Sounds like the smart move (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @04:29AM (#66271684)

    Ancestor spirits - saved, astronomy project - saved.

    Win/win.

  • Sacred Mountains? (Score:3, Informative)

    by jmurtari ( 3898239 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @07:14AM (#66271792) Homepage
    Wow! I read the article and the reasons why the project got stuck. Not a problem with "Environmental Impact", more like "Spiritual Impact to small groups", or should that be "Imagined Spiritual Impact ..." Of course, you can't be too sensitive! That's what I'm told....
    • Remaining Hawaiian natives fantasize a primitive paradise, where volcano gawds and warlords & priests slaughter sacrificial victims much like the Azteca to ensure bananas, coconuts and pineapples fall from the trees. Just another pretentious neo-stone age culture riding Western industrialization while bitching incessantly. Spiritual sensitivity my azzwhole; rise early, grab a beer and sit on the beach; remind you of anyone ? Most Hawaiian natives who wante
    • If someone doesn't want you to build somewhere, is it not there right to refuse as much as it is for you to try to build? This is how society is supposed to work.

  • Let them choose (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @07:40AM (#66271826)

    I'm all for keeping a nice environment, but whenever someone trots out the word 'sacred' I want them to fuck all the way off.

    You know what should be sacred? Science and discovery. Even before it had a name and was formalized, science was advancing humanity's state. It's the reason we're not still wandering the savannahs and forests of the world in small groups, subject to every random whim of Nature.

    It's a bad time to invest in anything knowledge-based in the US anyway.

    • Why not let the people who were first on the land choose? Europeans decimated indigenous Americans with disease and war. Or perhaps the intangibility of justice means it, too, should bend the knee to science.

      • Re: Let them choose (Score:4, Insightful)

        by snowshovelboy ( 242280 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @08:45AM (#66271914)

        Because those people lost the war and they are not actually harmed by it being there.

        • That kind of thinking gets you a corporate windmill in your front yard. You won't be harmed and you can still call it your front yard. Why we're at it lets put one in your backyard too.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            I wish I had enough land to fit 2 windmills...
            where can I sign up?

          • The problem with your moronic hypothetical is that nobody lives at the summit and the nearest homes to it are dozens of miles away. Its not in anyone's "front yard".

      • Because none of the people who were first on the land survived to the present day. All the people there now were 'on the land' at approximately the same time.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by pla ( 258480 )
        For the same reason you can't just drop in at your former childhood home to dig up Sparky's corpse: Not yours anymore. It sucks what happened to Hawaii, but the opportunity for the people to say "yeah, not happening" and send a handful of American stuffed shirts on a long trip in a short canoe expired 130 years ago.

        The idea that we're sacrificing basic science in the interest of not offending ghosts is utterly insane. Mauna Kea is uniquely suited to ground-based observatories; if we were talking about any

      • Why not let the people who were first on the land choose? Europeans decimated indigenous Americans with disease and war. Or perhaps the intangibility of justice means it, too, should bend the knee to science.

        Better check out the people you are bending the knee to. Unless you are a "Native Hawaiian" they consider you as the enemy.

        Does inclusivity and liberal guilt include supporting people who have a special "Kill Haole Day" Or do we support racists because at one point we were pretty racist as well, and must be punished. The pendulum of racism won't ever eliminate it.

      • Re: Let them choose (Score:5, Informative)

        by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @09:33AM (#66271992) Journal

        Why not let the people who were first on the land choose? Europeans decimated indigenous Americans with disease and war..

        Right, the land rightfully belongs to whoever owned it second-to-last! Not to the people the second-to-last owners forcibly ejected from it, of course, and not to the people who own it now, only to the second-to-last.

        </sarcasm>

        I think we should have more respect than we do for the indigenous peoples, but pretending that there was no war and no forcible land grabs before the Europeans arrived is not just ahistorical but ignorant of human nature. Polynesian history, which includes the Hawaiians, is incredibly bloody. The Europeans dominated when they arrived not because they were more violent -- there's a good case to be made that they were less, though it's a question of degrees, not kind -- but because the Enlightenment gave them much better tools. And, of course, because centuries of city living had bred up a bunch of diseases, but that's part of the same story.

        Did European arms and power make it "right" that the natives were conquered? No. But it wasn't "right" that the natives conquered each other, either. Humanity -- also as a result of the Enlightenment and the long, slow development of humanism -- has become more moral and less violent, and we now have more respect for other cultures and other peoples. And that's a good thing! But it doesn't make sense to project our own moral views back in time, and it definitely doesn't make sense to do so selectively, demonizing the winners and lionizing the losers.

        The only thing that really makes sense is to apply our improved (though still very imperfect) morality to the situation we have now, messy, complicated and conflicted as it is. It's nice to give the native Hawaiian culture some respect, but it's wrong to give it more respect than that of Hawaii today.

      • All property rights are ultimately derived at gunpoint (or whatever weapon was popular at the time). The white man had better guns.

        • You're not wrong. That doesn't make it just. But it is a reasonable argument to make that justice is merely some combination of a tool of those with guns to make it less costly to manage those without guns, together with a figment of false hope for those same vanquished populations.

          • There is no "just" among peoples/states/cultures. The strong do as they will; the weak(er) do as they must. A few really really smart culture-pairs intermarry and share trade , craft & farming  skills.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by sabbede ( 2678435 )
          That's a very strange thing for a Locke to say.

          Property is defended with force, and sometimes acquired through force. The actual Locke probably would have put a greater focus on settling and working the land to establish one's right over it, though it's been a while since I read him.

          • "John Locke" is actually a reference to Peter Wiggin's online name in Ender's Game, not to the actual philosopher. I've read some of the real John Locke's philosophy and found it rather tedious, but I can't really say he was wrong about anything. Locke was pro-science, pro-education, pro-freedom of religion... Republicans would have hated him.
            • Only if your understanding of Republicans is a straw man. You're talking to one who is telling you otherwise. Locke was utterly brilliant and one of the most important philosophers of the Enlightenment. He built the foundation for modern democracies and was a major figure in the field of epistemology.

              Moreover, when I was a student, it was my left-leaning classmates who didn't like him. The Enlightenment ideals he espoused have been discarded by the post-modernist Left.

      • Because nobody was every "first" on any land. Current residents butchered-off the bronze-age farmers who offed stone-age gatheres which itself had butchered off a hunter/scavenge culture which itself had butchered off some of homo-sapien.x which in turn had butchered-off a homo.erectus batch of wanderers. Do you think <10-K BP> Beringian migrants thru the ice-sheets treated much earlier < 40-K BP > kelp-highway explorers with respect? And so on ...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Because nobody was every "first" on any land.

          Are we talking Wheel of Time, Battlestar Galactica or some version of Hindu or Buddhist infinite cyclic time?

          Hawaii is in the middle of nowhere. Finding it is a very long shot that seems to have happened only twice. By the best evidence we have, Hawaii was first settled by Polynesians around a thousand years ago and stayed pretty isolated up until James Cook stumbled upon it in 1778. The queen of Hawaii was overthrown in 1893 by US marines and US fruit growers, a

          • I thought the "over-throwers" were ranch owning cattle-barons. You could be right and I wrong. NOTE: I have zero sympathy for mercantile colonialism. But. when I here terms like "1st-nation / 1st-people etc " whether in Hawaii or SAfrica or New Zealand or Palestine or North America my amatuer historian revolts. It's blood and conquest all-the-way-down. Bet when the current Hawaiian allele-set immirated in , the few wanderers/*.erectus living on Maui were quickly sacrifice

      • Have you ever see pictures of the land in question? It's a high altitude volcanic wasteland. There's no agriculture. There's no industry. There's no commerce. And the only "housing" is for the occasional overnighters (or overDAYers) because astronomers work on odd schedules. But no one LIVES there.

        Some unnamed native Hawaiian was undoubtedly the "first on the land". But whoever that person was, they were "first on the land" in the sense that Hillary was "first on the land" at the top of Everest. And

      • Because the "native" Hawaiians "displaced" (or ate) those people when they showed up in ~300 CE.

    • It wouldn't be so sacred if native Hawaiians got paid a lot of money. Apparently, having the TMT on Spanish territory means people would have to pay the Spanish government to use it. I guess that makes it "sacred" to them too given that they're going to have to pay for a whole lot of new "citizens".

      But here's a question: is the TMT sitting in a warehouse somewhere waiting to be installed? If not, what's the big deal?

      Wait, I've got a solution. Let's move it to the Bear's Ears.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        Let's move it to the Bear's Ears.

        Atacama.

        • Southern hemisphere, there are already the ELT and the GMT being built there.

          The TMT is supposed to observe the north. Canary Islands thus make sense even if less ideal than Hawaii.

    • https://www.science.org/conten... [science.org]

      I guess not.

      It has gone on for decades as you note. They just want "white" people out. The sacred mountain thing is just a symbolic avenue of attack. In irony, people who probably consider themselves inclusive and support the Native Hawaiians are supporting a group that would presumably leave them aghast. People who have a "Kill Haole Day" while denying it aren't terribly inclusive.

  • Just built it for your own/EU scientists, stop caring about the US. In the end they can built the one in Hawai too, more telescopes is better for the science community.
    • There's more to it.
      The Canary Islands Observatory was one of the seven or so locations on the original list of potential sites.
      The Federal Government isn't putting any (more) money into it, they've focused on a telescope project in Chile.
      It's currently funded by a consortium whose members are CalTech, a Foundation, Japan, India (building half the mirrors), China (though they may not be participating financially), and Canada (who almost pulled out in 2019). It looks like Spain is offering to buy int
      • If they had multiple locations, then why haven't they chosen another instead of going to court for 19 years... That's just stupidity..
        • I can't disagree with you on that. It is stupid. They've had to fight repeated lawsuits and spent $9 million protecting the site from protesters. As much as I'd like to see those protesters lose in court, it's time to cut the losses and move on.

  • Patronizing Comments on Hawaiians Misses Point (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Koreantoast ( 527520 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @12:24PM (#66272324)
    For all the usual patronizing comments mocking the Hawaiian traditional religion and discussions on the sacredness of the site are missing the broader issues that are driving the protests. I'll first note that the vast majority of native Hawaiians are Christian or agnostic/atheist. This is really a highly visible protest against a perceived sense of outside interests continuously ignoring concerns about natives and locals and doing what they want on the islands. The last century and a half has been marked with powerful outside interests coming in and building military bases and firing ranges [nbcnews.com], private billionaire enclaves [forbes.com], and suppressing native language and culture [uhfoundation.org]. These protests blew up with TMT because it's a target they can actively and continuously protest without being steamrolled by the Federal government on national security grounds or billionaires with their lawyers and private security forces.

    Mauna Kea should probably be more viewed as "sacred" in terms of a site of significant, deep cultural / identity importance rather than religious. So think of it roughly analogous to someone wanting to plow over Yellowstone or Arlington National Cemetery to build a telescope.
    • People often have two reasons for doing something: a good reason, and the real reason. In this case, the good reason is religion, while the real reason is the chance to exact some revenge for historical injustices.

      • That's backwards. Religion is never a good reason for anything, but revenge can send a message that what you did was not OK and you shouldn't do it again

        • Religion is never a good reason for anything,
          Depends on the religion.
          And depends on the reason.

          There is nothing wrong to go to any farking temple, for any farking religion, for any farking reason: and pray.
          Or meditate.

          Sure, praying that your spouse not only survives the war, but kills a gazilion of enemies: might be wrong.

          Because praying for the kills "feels" wrong.

          I am not a religious person. But I go to temples. Because of the art work and an underrated English word: tranquility.

  • Hawaii does not need the telescope and American scientists don't need it to be in such an expensive location should they choose to visit. There is no reason to want that hardware to be in Hawaii which will only become more crowded and more expensive to visit and live in.

    Isolation on the Canary Islands is pure win for all concerned.

    • Re:No reason exists to use Hawaii. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Jiro ( 131519 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @07:33PM (#66273220)

      Hawaii does not need the telescope and American scientists don't need it to be in such an expensive location should they choose to visit. There is no reason to want that hardware to be in Hawaii which will only become more crowded and more expensive to visit and live in.

      What are you talking about? The telescope is in Hawaii because Hawaii is close to the equator and if you're closer to the equator you can see more of the sky. It's noticeably closer to the equator than the Canary Islands. And mountaintops are better because of thinner air, less water vapor, and less light pollution.

      It's a telescope site for a reason, not just because scientists wanted a trip to Hawaii.

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