Four years later, construction began in one of China’s poorest regions, in the karst hills of the southwestern part of the country. In 2007, China’s National Development and Reform Commission allocated $90 million for the project, with $90 million more streaming in from other agencies. Undeterred, Chinese astronomers set out to build their own powerful instrument. But in 2006, the international SKA committee dismissed China, and then chose to set up its distributed mondo-telescope in South Africa and Australia instead. In the early 2000s, China angled to host the Square Kilometre Array, a collection of coordinated radio antennas whose dishes would be scattered over thousands of miles. FAST has been in the making for a long time.
