Seen from the A34, the mighty Jodrell Bank radio telescope erupts from the Cheshire countryside like a curiosity from another age. It is in danger of becoming just that.

Two hundred and fifty feet across, and weighing in at 3,200 tons for its parabolic dish alone, Britain's first and biggest radio telescope is still fathoming the mysteries of deep space half a century after its completion. It is used by scientists from all over the world, and even in its current guise, as part of a linked network of telescopes 217 kilometres across, can produce images of the cosmos a thousand times more detailed than the Hubble Space Telescope. That capability is being enhanced still further: a £7.6 million upgrade to the network, known as eMerlin, will link its telescopes with fibreoptic cable and in the process make it 30 times more sensitive than before.

In an advanced economy that puts a premium on research, the case for financing a project such as eMerlin should be self-evident. The ability to track a nuclear blast wave expanding from a dying star at four million miles per hour may not be of direct benefit to the Exchequer. Radio astronomy generally may not have as many obvious commercial applications as molecular biology or nuclear physics. But it is one of the best tools we have for wrestling with the Universe's great unanswered questions. British scientists were pioneers in the field and are still among its leaders. For this country to aspire to leadership in a globalised knowledge economy, but allow pure science of this kind to atrophy, would be obtuse.

Yet this is what is happening. Despite informed and articulate protest from an all-party House of Commons committee and a panel of the country's most eminent scientists, the eMerlin project is being positioned for the axe.

The process began with the ill-advised merger last year of two science funding bodies to produce the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). Withdrawal of funding for eMerlin was among the council's proposals to make up an inherited budgetary shortfall, in real terms, of £80 million. As we report today (see page 12), an independent assessment of the proposals concluded that to shut down eMerlin would waste the millions already invested in it, deprive the UK of a unique training facility for young astronomers and jeopardise Britain's hard-won position in astronomy as second only to the US, and pre-eminent in Europe. Even so, the STFC has ranked the project second from bottom as a funding priority. If it slips one notch, it dies.

Real science at Jodrell Bank is at risk of being choked off by wilful myopia cloaked in bureaucratic jargon, and all for a trivial sum by the standards of modern “big science”. In their review of the STSC's proposal, the independent experts said eMerlin was “guaranteed to lead to major discoveries” even though it was hard to predict where those discoveries would come. At this extraordinary observatory, it was ever thus: Sir Bernard Lovell built the telescope to study cosmic rays. It never found any, but it did yield dozens of discoveries that Sir Bernard never imagined, nor sought funding for, from black holes and quasars to the magnificence of meteor showers. Professor Keith Mason, the STSC's chairman, has said he gets “fed up” with people saying British astronomy is on its last legs. He has only himself to blame.