Deciding to put more than a billion dollars behind a science experiment like the LIGO project (the one that detected gravitational waves for the first time) is not a straightforward task.
There isn’t a single person at the federally funded National Science Foundation who assesses a given mega-project, it’s a large diffuse process.
“When it comes to big asks like LIGO — and big telescopes and ships and accelerators and so on, there we are looking to a bigger community to make those decisions,” said France Cordova, head of the National Science Foundation.
