Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–201
There were many things that were unexpected, and I’m going to start with one of those,
and now we have to go back to the fall of 1998. Koonin and I and a number of others are
celebrating some anniversary—maybe for Owens Valley—and he says, “Well, when are you
going to produce a proposal for the next big telescope?” I said, “Hey, boss. That’s a great idea.
I think we’re going to start on that this afternoon.” So Wal [Wallace L. W.] Sargent [Bowen
Professor of Astronomy] is up there, because his wife, Anneila, is director of the observatory. I
said, “Hey, Wal. How’d you like a big telescope?” That started what has become the TMT
Project. Koonin and I started it. We had $1 million from Gordon Moore. Gordon was very
generous, has always been very generous. But he hadn’t picked that particular project. It was
money he’d given Caltech, and Koonin gave it to me and said, “Get this thing started.” We put
some other money together, and we got started on that. After about a year, we discovered that
Caltech just couldn’t do it alone. Caltech did not have much expertise in optical telescope
building, although lots of expertise in observing on the telescopes. So we pulled in the
University of California and then added other partners. But that brings up strategy from the
point of view of a division chair. Except for this $1 million in seed money, there was really no
movement forward of trying to get any TMT funding out of the campaign that was getting
started. Baltimore was not convinced it was a project worth funding. Something interesting
happened. Bud [Albert D.] Wheelon, one of the trustees, had said to me privately, “You know,
the trustees would really like to go to some off-site things, rather than just always meet at
Caltech or Smoke Tree or wherever.” I said, “Oh, yeah? You have anything in mind?” He said,
“Well, we could go to LIGO.” Then the penny dropped, and I thought, “You know, Bud, I have
a different idea.”
So I went to Baltimore and said, “I’ve heard from Bud Wheelon that the trustees would
like to go other places. What if we had an off-site trustees’ meeting on the Big Island of Hawaii
at Mauna Kea?” He said, “That’s a great idea. But what would they do?” I said, “Well, we’re
close to the telescopes, so I guess I could arrange that people would give some talks, and we
could have some tours of the observatories. We’ve got the sub-millimeter observatory. We’ve
got the Keck Telescopes. You know, we could really make it into an interesting meeting.” He
said, “Oh, that’s good. We’ll do that.” I thought, You don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m not
going to tell you. So, of course, what did we have? We had talks by Ed Stone about how the
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