Why Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington?: How the National Science Foundation Chose LIGO's Sites

Physicists and social science scholars claim that two powerful U.S. Senators battled for the placement of large-scale interferometers of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). They also claim that LIGO's Livingston, Louisiana location was placed in the south due to political connections and a lack of large-scale instruments in the region. I argue that by collapsing this history, as has been traditionally done, provides an inaccurate picture of how LIGO's sites were chosen. Using historical methods and legal analysis, I show that the selection process was far more complex than a decision rooted in Senate and focused on the lack of instruments in a particular region. Spanning from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, LIGO's site selection began with physicists conducting the search for sites themselves and then assessment at the LIGO Laboratory-level through a site selection committee, a history covered in my dissertation and forthcoming article and book manuscript. This talk will focus on the next phase, which was relatively short and included many government officials across the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Science Board, and U.S. Congress. A key actor was Walter Massey, then-Director of NSF, who ultimately selected LIGO's sites. Each of these actors had to consider budget justifications, local acceptance of such facilities in their areas, and the scientific suitability of the candidate sites for hosting a gravitational wave detector. My approach reveals the previously obscured importance of local acceptance and scientific soundness to maximize the possibility of detection of such an expensive endeavor. I have expanded this research the siting of instruments across multi-messenger astronomy.