[SiempreViernes]

Actually, politics moved half of SKA to Australia, South Africa won the initial site selection (https://www.nature.com/news/south-africa-wins-science-panel-...).

The site evaluation itself states both sites are about the same, and I think I've read that the eventual political compromise means there will be less RFI overall, at the unspoken cost of some simultaneous coverage of the targets.

[marcus_holmes]

interesting. That's not the version of events I heard from some of the people involved ;) But I heard it in WA, so they may have been audience-pleasing

[SiempreViernes]

On just merit it seems to have been a rather close thing (though South Africa was the better site), which I think was known in advance. So the entire process was pretty highly politicised; you can find much more information here: https://www.skatelescope.org/site-documentation/ though there is quite a bit of reading between the lines.

Of note to the sort of sociological questions we are discussing here, I note not only is the Site selection report ~200 pages, but also fairly interesting is a 16 page "Report on Validation of the SKA Site Selection Process". This comes with a lot of other documents as appendices, but also lays allows one to make out the timeline a bit more.

The final site report is from February 2012, while an "evaluation plan" was set in November 2011, and a "Revised Plan for SKA Site Selection" approved in May 2011. The Siting Group was created in 2010, to help with the "final" site selection. All this paints a picture of a somewhat fluid process.