Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–204
might say, of the TMT. It was called CELT—the California Extremely Large Telescope—then.
I think that was Wal Sargent’s name. I had some money. The University of California had a
little bit of money. I said to Koonin, “What will it take to move us forward?” He said, “You’ve
got to get this thing evaluated.” I said, “What if I’m willing to produce a concept study—I don’t
have enough money for a design study—a concept study, and we get an outside committee to
review it as if it were a serious project?” He said, “You have the money, let’s do it.” And so we
did. We worked for almost a year to produce something called the Green Book, which was a
very attractive book. It would have been nice to have had the Green Book before we had that
meeting at Mauna Kea, but it was pretty close in time.
We held the next meeting up in Oakland. We had an outside committee of considerable
repute. This was a Who’s Who. We picked an interesting guy to chair it—Ed [Edward] Moses.
Koonin knew him because Moses had saved the National Ignition Facility after it fell on hard
times. They had an associate director, Mike [E. Michael] Campbell, who turned out to not know
what he was doing—or maybe he did know what he was doing but was some parts fraud or selfdelusion.
Anyway, they were going to build this big laser for plasma physics—plasma fusion—
research for $800 million. At last count, the cost is probably closer to $3.5 billion. Anyway,
Moses is one of the world’s great project managers. Clearly, he was running NIF very well.
Previously, he’d run AVLIS [Atomic Vapor Laser Isotope Separation], the laser isotope
separation facility at Livermore, which was a brilliant piece of work, probably harder than NIF in
some ways. This is a tough guy whom you’re not going to sell garbage to, and he gave us a lot
of credibility. He had a strong committee with him, and they gave the TMT Green Book an A.
They liked the proposal. That certainly had its effect on David Baltimore. I was going after, I
hoped, $25 million from the Moore Foundation gift of $300 million to Caltech. Baltimore was
still skeptical, because he thought that UC plus Caltech was still too small a footprint. But when
Richard Ellis [Steele Family Professor of Astronomy] and I found another partner, the
Canadians, it became clear that we had a big enough footprint. Baltimore authorized us to go
after $17.5 million from the Moore Foundation, and the University of California also went after
and got the same amount. So we now had $35 million.
ASPATURIAN: Can I back you up for one moment? Was Richard Ellis brought in around this
time specifically with the TMT in mind?
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