Mauna Kea is one of the logical places to put the proposed 30 meter telescope. In fact just recently a small station was put up near the summit to study the suitability of conditions for the 30 meter telescope...

Unfortunately I dont think there is a chance of the TMT being allowed to be built there... Tiny construction projects on the summit are held up for years in court by protesters, something as massive as this would require a miracle.

Activists have used lies and misdirection to slander the observatories- I can't speak for the other observatories, but I know my organization is very sensitive to the ecological and cultural concerns... A couple of years ago I noticed what looked like a piece of blown out tire that had been blown down the side of the Pu'u several hundred meters away from the road... (most likely it was from a tourists car).

I notified our people about it and they notified the office of mauna kea management and it was cleaned up. We clean up the litter left by visitors to the summit, and once or twice a year we run a strong magnet over the property surrounding the observatory to pick up any steel debris buried in the cinder.

Our water is trucked up, and our waste is trucked down...

Once, in what I think was a gesture of protest, someone left a religious offering in front of the observatory. We were told to not touch it and treat it with respect...

It is the tourists that show the most disrespect (and by tourists I mean mostly locals that come up to the summit every winter to stomp all over the cinder cones to go sledding and skiing and to shovel snow into the back of their pickup trucks...)

Personally, I think that if some people believe the mountain is sacred then what could be a more sacred thing to use it for than understanding creation? On our commute up to the summit we pass through military land used for live fire execises, where Pu'u's are shelled, brush fires are started, bombs are dropped... WHY aren't the activists fighting that destruction?

I have mixed feelings about the activists, the native hawaiians were mistreated, their culture was oppressed and their population decimated, but some of the most vocal activists were not even born in Hawaii...

The observatories contibute a lot to the economy of the island and also donate time and money to help local schools with various programs. If the observatories were to be kicked out the economy and quality of life of the island would suffer.