New science facilities are needed to keep America great | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Jan, 2025

New telescopes, radio dishes, and gravitational wave detectors are needed for next-generation science. Will the USA lead the way?

Some of the biggest questions in the Universe — some of which have been pondered since the dawn of humanity — are finally within reach here in the 21st century. Is there life out there in the Milky Way beyond our own Solar System? How were the elements that made complex life and biochemistry possible created throughout our Universe’s history? Are there inhabited worlds, perhaps with intelligent civilizations on them, that we can potentially visit and study? Are giant pairs of orbiting supermassive black holes creating a gravitational wave background in our Universe? And, if we build the scientific tools required to answer these questions, what else, perhaps even unexpectedly, could we discover?

Here in 2025, we’re now a quarter of the way through the 21st century. The greatest science facilities of the prior generation — including space telescopes, ground-based optical and radio telescopes, and gravitational wave detectors — have brought us up to the current scientific frontier. We’ve discovered thousands of exoplanets, measured billions of stars in our own galaxy, discovered galaxies and quasars tens of billions…