Manua Kea itself has been a flashpoint for controversy ever since the University of Hawaii opened the first telescope there in 1970. Fifteen years earlier, a political battle permanently halted construction of the Superconducting Super Collider, another particle accelerator that scientists wanted to build in Texas. In 2008, two men unsuccessfully sued the organizations building the Large Hadron Collider along the Swiss-French border, arguing that the giant particle accelerator could open up a black hole that would swallow Earth. (The launch went off without a hitch.) An illustration of the proposed giant telescope on Mauna Kea on Hawaii's Big Island. Protesters descended on Florida again in 1997, when the nuclear-powered Cassini spacecraft was poised for launch to Saturn, sparking fears that an accident would cause an environmental disaster. In 1969, as NASA prepared to launch astronauts to the moon, black activists protested at Kennedy Space Center, arguing that NASA funding would be better spent fighting poverty. "Ever since the federal government became the leading patron of both basic and applied research after World War II, the funding of science entered the political realm,” he said. This isn't the first time a big science project has run into public opposition, says Robert Kargon, a science historian at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "In our lifetime, we could discover life - evidence of life - off the Earth, which would be one of the biggest things that's ever happened in science," says Michael Bolte, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a member of the TMT board.
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