Up the Decade! 50 Years of Astronomy and Astrophysics Surveys

The American astronomical community has just completed its sixth decadal survey, reporting past successes, predicting future advances, and, most important, prioritizing the new, expensive facilities that will be needed to achieve future discoveries. The first such process led to the 1964 Whitford Report, followed by Greenstein, Field, Bahcall, McKee-Taylor, and Blandford. The first five requested 106 identifiable items, about one third of which were achieved with mostly federal funding within 15 years, one third accomplished other ways (private funding, built by other countries, etc.), and the last third never done at all. The Blandford report requests only 7 specific items and so is bound to be either more or less successful than earlier prioritization. Other countries have recently followed in our faltering footsteps: Australia focusing on people and peaceful implementation of changing priorities; Germany emphasizing structural issues; and the UK report bravely indicating which facilities and programs to withdraw from and when, to free up funds for participation in a European Extremely Large Telescope, a Square Kilometer (radio) Array, and other mostly European projects. They even made use of some of my data on production of papers and citation rates for specific existing telescopes!