This is science at its best, and at bargain basement prices ($6 bn) as opposed to what the SSC was going to cost (>$14 bn). Of course, the energy would have been slightly higher, and science would have been about a decade ahead of where it is now. Also, the ISS and other cool projects might not have been funded at all. It all works out.
Still, it would have been productive if the SSC had of been completed. I'm not suggesting the ISS or any other scientific endeavour need have been comprimised for the SSC, I'm saying it's a shame they all could not have been done.
Agreed. Well, at least we got the next round of neutrino experiments back, courtesy of the political fallout from the OPERA fiasco. And the LHC still has to buy its liquid helium from Amarillo, TX. Because the world record for magnetic field density is pegged at about 25 Tesla, the next generation of colliders will need to be bigger rings, so perhaps Waxahacchi isn't out of the question. The LHC already has plans to expand the ring further into Switzerland. Leon Lederman ('The God Particle') fame did not help matters with the way he pitched the search for the Higgs boson. Reagan saw no problem with investing that much to fund our first scientific venture into the search for Higgs (a component of "nothing", literally), because he was also the president who funded "Star Wars", a technology so bound up in international space treaty law, it can never move forward in any strategic sense. Clinton made a good practical choice not to fund it at a time when the budget was still balanced and the price tag for the SSC was trending much steeper. The day Lockheed pitched working on Star Wars to a group of telecom engineers at Comsat Labs which included me, was the exact day I started looking for employment elsewhere.
