[Pontiac]

Sounds to me like they have ignored preventative maintenance on the telescope for quite some time.

To have two cables break in such a short period of time tells me that they have not inspected the cables in a long time or have ignored degradation in the cables found during inspections.

If you have performed periodic inspections cable breaks do not catch you by surprise.

After the first break all of the other cables should have been inspected ASAP. If they found any other cable was degraded the load on that cable should have been removed immediately.

[tired&retired]

Part of the Clinton shift to China was the production of wire rope or steel cable, including elevator cables.

A friend of mine owned a large wire rope manufacturering plant in the US. After China dumped cheap garbage cable on the market and took his customers, they came to my friend and offered to purchase all his manufacturing equipment so they could ship it to China.

He refused to sell to China, but still had to shut down.

All that Chinese made garbage steel cable is now surfacing.

[Hootowl99]

I strongly agree that this incident shows to be caused by long term deficient preventative maintenance. The root cause, I believe, is most likely due to chronic under funding blended with administrative level incompetence.

What a loss to science of this wonderful tool. It was structural simplicity expanded to a grand scale.