At the time of it’s building in the 1950s the Lovell Telescope in Jodrell Bank went over budget from the projected £120,000 to a pricey figure of only £750,000 – it was a project that was nearly doomed. But eventually, not only was it completed, but was the largest steerable radio telescope in the world. Weighing 3,200 tons 250 feet wide and impressive 292 feet in height, it was the brainchild of an innovative English physicist called Bernard Lovell, and it became called upon by both Russia and U.S. as the “only” scientific instrument in the world to confirm that Russia had indeed landed a spacecraft, the unmanned Luna 2, to the moon. I’ve seen this beautiful structure which is HUGE but well worth every penny of something that was built for less than one million in the 1950s (the current largest radio telescope is the FAST telescope being built in Guizhou province, south west China at a cost of 120 million, and it is fixed and due to be completed in September this year)
