Guizhou province will invest 5 billion yuan ($727 million) to develop tourism in the areas surrounding the “Eye of Heaven” telescope, or Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), in rural Pingtang county, Xinhua News Agency reported on March 21.

Cradled inside the county’s jagged karst peaks, the FAST became the largest radio telescope in the world when it was completed in September 2016, and the giant dish is one of the symbols of China’s emergence as a science and technology superpower.

Yet the countryside around the huge telescope is among the poorest in China, with Guizhou’s per capita GDP ranking 29th out of China’s 31 mainland provinces, according to an IMF-World Economic Outlook report from April 2016.

The provincial government is aiming to bring prosperity to these poverty-stricken mountain areas by taking advantage of the popularity of the “Eye of Heaven”, which has already become a tourist attraction in its own right, with visits limited to 2,000 people per day.

Guizhou plans to build on this success by investing billions of yuan in 13 FAST-themed tourist projects, which will be located inside the nearby Pingtang International Radio Astronomy Culture Park. The projects include hotels, parking lots and radio astronomy pavilions.

Authorities hope the culture park will become a comprehensive base for astronomical research, popular science tourism and adolescent popular science education in the future.

Edited by Domnic Morgan