PHOTO: RUBIN OBSERVATORY/NSF/AURA1030 3 JUNE 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6597 science.org SCIENCEA
top Cerro Pachón, a 2715-meter peak
in the Chilean Andes, astronomers are
building an extraordinary movie cam-
era. With its 8-meter telescope and
giant 3.2-gigapixel camera, the Vera
C. Rubin Observatory will scan the
southern sky once every 3 days, pinpointing
billions of galaxies, searching for supernova
explosions, and tracking changes in the heav-
ens. In early 2020, workers were on track to
complete the $483 million telescope by last
month. “We were a freight train moving at
full speed,” says Victor Krabbendam, Rubin’s
construction project manager.
Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Travel
restrictions slowed construction, as did
shortages of supplies such as steel. Now, the
project remains 2 years from completion,
and its cost has climbed by about 15%—
although the National Science Foundation
(NSF) has yet to set an exact figure. “When
the train comes to a complete stop, it’s hard
to get it going again,” Krabbendam says.
The Rubin observatory is only one of
many large science projects around the
world that have been pushed behind sched-
ule and overbudget by pandemic-related
delays, supply chain issues, and, now, the
worst inflation in 40 years. Scientists build
a major project using the same process en-
gineers employ to build a bridge, develop-
ing a detailed cost and schedule known as a
performance baseline that guides every step
of construction. That baseline is nearly sac-
rosanct. Ordinarily, if a project starts to ex-
ceed its budget, funders lop off parts of it to
contain costs. They increase a project’s bud-
get and stretch its schedule—“rebaseline”
it—only as a last resort.
But these are not ordinary times. The
United States’s premier builder of big fa-
cilities, the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s)
Office of Science, has 13 baselined projects
costing more than $100 million and has
or is considering rebaselining six of them.
NSF has four, including the Rubin observa-
tory, and intends to rebaseline them all. “It’s
a huge issue and a very complex problem,”
says William Madia, former director of two
DOE national laboratories.
The pandemic pushed most projects be-
hind schedule. Physicists at SLAC National
Accelerator Laboratory are building a
750-meter-long superconducting linear ac-
celerator to power a new x-ray laser called
the Linac Coherent Light Source-II. They
were just installing the accelerator when
COVID-19 struck and, on 19 March 2020, the
state of California issued a shelter in place
order that halted work for 3 months. Offi-
cials soon realized they couldn’t keep to their
schedule, says Norbert Holtkamp, SLAC’s di-
rector for the project.
In the United States, long delays invari-
ably drive up costs, Holtkamp says, because
funding agencies count labor in a project’scost. Later that summer, DOE extended the
project’s completion date from June 2022
to January 2024 and increased its cost by
8.7%, to $1.136 billion. Most of the increase
was contingency to cover further delays,
Holtkamp notes. “We didn’t know how many
COVID waves we would have.”
Projects less far along have suffered from
the same supply chain issues that have
plagued consumers. Physicists at Argonne
National Laboratory are rebuilding the Ad-
vanced Photon Source, a kilometer-long,
ring-shaped particle accelerator used to gen-
erate intense x-rays. They had planned to
start installing the new $815 million ring this
year, but rescheduled it to April 2023 as they
struggled to obtain, among other things, the
microchips needed to control power sup-
plies, says Stephen Streiffer, deputy direc-
tor for science and technology at Argonne.
“You’ll talk to a vendor about a chip that
used to be an off-the-shelf item, and they’ll
say we’ll get it to you in 6 months,” he says.
Now, inflation is straining projects even
further, as, for example, the price of steel
has doubled over the past 2 years. In prin-
ciple, a project currently under construc-
tion may be shielded from rising prices if
contracts with vendors were signed before
inflation kicked in. In practice, however,
if small vendors making highly specialized
parts have to eat the cost increases them-
selves, even bigger supply problems may
follow. “There’s a risk that companies startIN DEPTH
Completion of the
Vera C. Rubin
Observatory in Chile
will be 2 years late.By Adrian Cho
SCIENCE FUNDING
Big science projects face soaring costs, delays
Triple whammy of pandemic lockdowns, supply chain issues, and inflation hits many