Thread by @gauravsabnis

One of our current bedtime rewatches is #YoungSheldon. I had seen those episodes before where Sturgis gets a job at a supercollider in Waxahachie Texas. And assumed it was a made up thing cos I'd never heard of it before.

Looked it up. What a rabbit hole! 3 times the CERN LHC!!

The Superconducting Super Collider in Wakahachie was very much a real thing and even had a 1980s Texas appropriate nickname - Desertron 😎😎

Its development, construction, and eventual cancellation is a VERY American government story. Worthy of a short thread for sure.

Desertron was supposed to be 3 times and long and powerful as the CERN large hadron collider. For the same purpose. And scientists agree that if completed, it would've detected the Higgs boson a decade before the Europeans, underlining American excellence! And huge tourism too.

You can wiki the whole story. But here's the crux of it.
In the 80s, when this project was proposed, it was originally meant to be a global collaboration, with many countries, including India, willing to contribute to the budget.

But this was 80s Reagan era. Murrca Number 1!

The budget was over 4 bn so obviously it needed Congressional action. And the then Congress wanted the project to be a dazzling display of American superiority, thumbing their noses at the Soviets. Cold War was intense those days.

So Desertron construction started.

The other money all went to CERN, where things were a decade behind the US in development.

The project had a hefty price tag but was sold as
A. Murrca Number 1!
B. Huge economic & tourism boost for the greater Dallas thing

Would've delivered both if completed.

But it was a huge construction. The LHC in Geneva is 27 km in circumference. Desertron was going to be 87 km!

Construction started in the late 80s. And costs and delays and other issues inevitably started cropping up. It was a huge moon shot type project!

But the world changed.

The iron curtain crashed with remarkable speed. Five years into the project, suddenly you no longer had a blank check to stay ahead of the Soviets.

People had never been entirely sure what it was all about anyway. Unlike going to the moon or Mars which everyone understands.

By 1993 as Bill Clinton took office, the project, never really popular in Congress, had become an easy target for anyone pretending to care about taxpayer dollars and budget deficits.

The budget for the project had ballooned to 12 billion. (We spent 2500 billion in Afghanistan)

Clinton tried to save it, but there simply wasn't a big enough champion for the project in DC and he also wasn't THAT into it.

There was no visual tangible "win" like a Mars landing, you know. Plus the Soviets were gone.

12 bn seemed better spent on pointless fighter jets.

In 1993, Congress officially killed the project. Clinton didn't put up a fight.

Whatever was constructed has seen many uses since. Of course, data centers being one of them. But the project is dead. Unlikely to ever be revived.

While we spend a trillion a year on "defense" 🙄

The US Congress' myopia was a boon for Europe. Though CERN was well behind the Americans, they were now the only game in town. They completed their super collider. In 2012, they got where Desertron would've probably gotten in 2001. And it's a popular tourism destination too.

We spent 2.5 trillion in Afghanistan.

We killed a super LHC over an extra 7 billion.

The military-industrial-media complex is winning everything in America this century.

The popular narrative is that SpaceX etc are filling in valuable gaps left by funding cuts to NASA.

The actual reality is that funding has been systematically cut from NASA for decades to give billionaires a chance to make even more money.

The US govt's research infrastructure, something that worked very well, was scaled down & privatized over 30 years so Apartheid Clyde types could pretend to be responsible for reusing rockets instead of actual scientists who do the work. And raise billions from the myth.