Innovation Meets Reality: The SKA Design

Abstract

This chapter is an account of the creativity of a host of engineers and scientists to build a groundbreaking radio telescope with the performance needed to extract the scientific treasures buried in weak radio signals from the distant Universe, of which there were previously only hints. Always moving forward, it describes the road from the ambition to overcome barriers and harness new technologies to the reality of thousands of difficult individual decisions that had to be made to successfully yield a realisable design in the available time. The global milieu in which this was done as an international project has set many precedents.