This shouldn't be downvoted, crowdfunding isn't a reliable stream of income and entirely unsuited to support decade-long experiments. Anything space-related is

This shouldn't be downvoted, crowdfunding isn't a reliable stream of income and entirely unsuited to support decade-long experiments. Anything space-related is a multi-decade effort. The other problem with crowdfunding is the complete lack of accountability on part of the founder. When the head of the European Space Acency Had A Word with his colleague at NASA about the delays with Galileo (about half of the experiments on Galileo were European) he could tell him that either the bird flies or all of Europe will forget about America and instead work with the Russians for the next 30 years. You can't do that on Gofundme, instead you lose out completely on that kind of project. No one sane is going to commit to a crowdfunded Arecibo when you don't know for certain that the crowd will support it 5 years hence.