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Olof Hallonsten, Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider, Science and Public Policy, Volume 44, Issue 1, February 2017, Pages 149–150, https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scw041
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The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) is among the most famous Big Science projects of all time, and certainly the most famous failure in 20th century science. Proposed in the mid-1980s as a venture that would reinstate the USA’s global leadership in particle physics after Europe’s successes in the 1970s and early 1980s, and with initial (1984) cost estimates of US$3 billion, its construction was halted by decision of the US Congress in October 1993, after 24 km of tunnel had been dug in Texas, US$2 billion spent, and there had been a stepwise increase of the final price tag to the shocking sum of over US$10 billion.
Certainly, the failure of the SSC was largely due to its size, although there is much to suggest that it could have succeeded with proper management, but there is also an important wider science policy context for the failure. While the SSC stood on the shoulders of giants in the shape of a long chain of very successful US particle physics projects, initiated by Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley in the 1930s, it was also proposed, planned, designed and shepherded through Washington during a time of radical change. The political prospects for megaprojects in esoteric scientific fields of national pride had dwindled dramatically from the late 1960s onwards, with the economic downturn, a far-reaching restructuring of the military–industrial complex, the implementation of managerialist and accountability reforms in the public sector, and the new demands of (demonstrable) utility of federal R&D investments. These changes left their mark on how projects like the SSC were launched and how they were organized from the Washington side of the table. For the first time, a new megaproject in the US system of national labs was not run by scientists alone but was directly steered by Washington bureaucrats with management models from the private sector. In addition, and importantly, construction of the SSC had only just begun when the Berlin Wall came down and the bricks started to fall that eventually ended the Cold War and transformed beyond recognition the global geopolitical order that had ruled policy-making in the USA for at least 40 years—also, not least, in the federal R&D system. Although other priorities for publicly sponsored science had started to take root long before the global events of 1989–91, the changed world order accentuated these changes and added fuel to an already frustrated debate over the (lack of) sense of investing several billion dollars in fundamental physics projects.