To acquire new knowledge of the physical universe, it is necessary to build large research infrastructures that replace the older generation instruments that have exhausted its scientific capabilities. This premise drives the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), an intergovernmental organization constructing two large radio telescopes with complementary science goals in Australia and South Africa. Big science requires the resources of many countries, and the SKAO was established to realize it. Although the corresponding growth in investment enables steady scientific advancement, step increments in knowledge are often serendipitous, and new-generation telescopes are designed to maximize their ‘discovery space’. Big science also needs large, multinational research teams to drive the key science objectives that define the large instruments, but often major discoveries result from the ingenuity of small groups or individuals with unique opportunities and skills. This is a personal account of my involvement in observational radio astronomy that led to the construction of the SKA-mid telescope in South Africa, highlighting the influence of privilege, providence, and lived experience on my career.

Radio astronomy is largely defined by the continued development of ever more powerful instruments with continually improving sensitivity and unanticipated and vastly better angular resolution. Particularly notable has been the construction of sophisticated radio interferometer and aperture synthesis systems that have up to 1,000 times better angular resolution than the best optical telescope, although radio wavelengths are 100,000 times longer than optical wavelengths. Many radio telescopes have not been used for what they were built for. The Arecibo 1,000 foot dish was designed for ionospheric radar experiments, not for radio astronomy. But theoretical analysis underestimated the strength of reflected radio echoes from the ionosphere, and so a very much cheaper dish would have sufficed for the ionosphere experiments. Nevertheless, the US Air Force, obsessed with anything connected with the ionosphere and incoming Russian missiles, paid for the Arecibo radio telescope to be built as designed. Later, it took a freak accident, an ambitious radio astronomer, and a powerful Senator to secure the funds to build the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope in Green Bank, WV.