The $1 billion Giant Magellan Telescope Project is being built at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile on Cerro Las Campanas, elevation 8,285 feet. It is 200 feet tall and 3,961 square feet of total collecting area of mirrors with a resolving power 10 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope. The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) project consists of an international consortium of leading universities and science institutions, including: Astronomy Australia Ltd., The Australian National University, Carnegie Institution for Science, Harvard University, Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, Smithsonian Institution, The University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, The University of Arizona, and University of Chicago.

Spire was engaged to establish the enclosure building cost, including the cost of the structural and mechanical components as well as all the cost associated with building the enclosure building. A cost estimate for the fabrication and assembly of the GMT enclosure building and its subsystems was provided.

The broken down costs were made available to the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization (GMTO) and included the costs of items, such as procurement for various packages (e.g., steel package, concrete package); enclosure building and subsystems fabrication; factory assembly and test; logistics and transportation; site assembly, erection, and test; and commissioning.

Spire’s project controls experts bring a comprehensive suite of skills and extensive field experience to the job site. We help project teams and management determine how far a project has progressed at any given time regarding schedule, cost, productivity, and risk and compare against contractual expectations, scope, performance criteria, and milestones. Controls can be applied to all phases of a project, from preconstruction to closeout.

Here are just some of the services our construction project controls consultants can bring to your next project:

Project controls are essential to keep complex construction projects on budget and on time. They help teams and stakeholders identify emerging risks early, before they become expensive, time-consuming problems. With advance warning, these issues can be mitigated or avoided altogether. Project controls also give leadership the data they need to set realistic expectations, manage subcontractors, and plan with confidence.

During the course of a project, program and project managers use controls to monitor time and cost expenditures and compare them to project lifecycle forecasts. They also rely on them to coordinate onsite execution with the milestones established during the design, procurement, entitlement, and pre-construction stages.