My original idea for the story was a light-hearted short news piece. A physicist at the University of Kansas, Steven Prohira, had just posted a proposal for wiring up a forest to detect high-energy neutrinos, using the trees like giant antennas.
Chatting to experts, what at first seemed silly started feeling like a hook for something more. Prohira has a strong track record, and the experts I talked to took his idea seriously. They had significant doubts, but I was struck by how answerable those doubts were, how rather than dismissing the whole enterprise they had in mind a list of questions one could actually test. I wrote a blog post laying out that impression here.
The editor at Ars was interested, so I dug deeper. Prohira’s story became a window on a wider-ranging question: how do experiments happen? How does a scientist convince the community to work on a project, and the government to fund it? How do ideas get tested before these giant experiments get built?
I tracked down researchers from existing experiments and got their stories. They told me how detecting particles from space takes ingenuity, with wacky ideas involving the natural world being surprisingly common. They walked me through tales of prototypes and jury-rigging and feasibility studies and approval processes.
The highlights of those tales ended up in the piece, but there was a lot I couldn’t include. In particular, I had a long chat with Sunil Gupta about the twists and turns taken by the GRAPES experiment in India. Luckily for you, some of the most interesting stories have already been covered, for example their measurement of the voltage of a thunderstorm or repurposing used building materials to keep costs down. I haven’t yet found his story about stirring wavelength-shifting chemicals all night using a propeller mounted on a power drill, but I suspect it’s out there somewhere. If not, maybe it can be the start of a new piece!
4 gravitons 
One great story of the Indian science establishment’s thrift is that India’s probe to actual send something to Mars to explore the planet was cheaper than the Hollywood movie “The Martian” about a manned mission to Mars (in addition to being much cheaper than a comparable U.S. Mars probe mission), as explored in a Wired Story. https://www.wired.com/2017/03/these-scientists-sent-a-rocket-to-mars-for-less-than-it-cost-to-make-the-martian/
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The history of science is full of these origin stories.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory maintains an impressive collection of archives, https://www.nrao.edu/archives/. Among its most prolific contributors was Woodruff T. Sullivan III, who located and interviewed around 250 scientists involved in the early development of radio astronomy; transcripts or recordings of these interviews (from the mid-1970s) are at https://www.nrao.edu/archives/collections/show/55.
The first stored program computer in the US was SEAC, built at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) in 1950. A brief history is at https://www.nist.gov/mathematics-statistics/standards-eastern-automatic-computer
NBS also built the first portable computer, DYSEAC — it occupied two semi-trailers. My father worked on that project, his files show the difficulty that analog generation had in developing “bi-stable devices” for holding binary data.
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