Rather than a large number of people painting it for a small period of time, which requires a startup and close down overhead; they have instead resourced it so that they can keep a small number of people employed permenantly who accumulate expertise and minimise the mobilisations costs.
Agreed, but it is still more expensive in terms of direct costs than ‘do nothing’ which seems to be the case for the telescope.
Whoever downvoted me, thanks a bunch. Not sure why.
Running a team of painters still costs more than nothing. The cost of painting doesn’t cover the cost of ongoing inspections for metal fatigue etc etc. Engineering reviews, government oversight and so on.
Large bridges, especially with vehicle traffic, vibrate quite a lot and this is causes major ongoing concerns with fatigue, which means extensive monitoring along with the painting. More costs (not saying it’s unjustified).
Keeping a team going is efficient as you say, but more expensive than nothing.
Telescopes are not typically "do nothing. I am not aware of the details of Arecibo, but the big telescope in Greenbank has a paint crew work for 8 hours a day for multiple weeks each summer. And after several years the entire telescope is repainted and they start all over from the beginning. During the day time hours when the paint crew the is working the telescope can not be moved to point at objects, but is still taking data in the form of drift scans, recording whatever passes through the field of view of the telescope. A whole bunch of pulsars has been found that way.
Probably not to different from refactoring the same CRUD applications over and over to keep up with with the other poor bastards who had to do it first.
That’s a pretty bad analogy because you don’t refactor for maintenance. A better equivalent would be swapping out hard drives in a major storage system or servers in a data center on the scale of Google. It’s mind numbing work but it’s better than many other “pick and place” style manual labor. At least with painting a bridge the scenery is better although the temperature is more harsh.
Paint is preventative maintenance. It's a lot cheaper in the long run than not painting at all.
For those that don't know, paint should be considered a non-optional component of most iron or steel objects, since paint serves the important role of preventing rust formation. It's less important in most uses of aluminum, since aluminum oxide tends to form a protective layer instead of flaking away.
"Painting the Forth Bridge" is an expression in these parts describing a never ending task. However, with better pain this is apparently not the case anymore:
Rather than a large number of people painting it for a small period of time, which requires a startup and close down overhead; they have instead resourced it so that they can keep a small number of people employed permenantly who accumulate expertise and minimise the mobilisations costs.