6/21/2023 0 Comments Supercollider waxahachie texas![]() ![]() In an interview with Summer of Science, Dr. This includes little support from presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton, as well as the American public. We would have been running for ten years now.”Īlthough Schwitters cites Congressional funding as the major factor effecting the projects cancellation, there may have been other factors that contributed to the end result. “As time has shown, it was a real loss of pace in science. “It was a huge disappointment for everyone involved,” Schwitters said. However, Congress declined funding in 1993, leaving an unfinished laboratory and over 2000 staff members disheartened after devoting the past few years of their lives to the project. The former Harvard professor and his family moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Dallas in 1989 to begin work on the buildings construction. Roy Schwitters, the SSC Project Director, saw the project as an opportunity to conduct breakthrough scientific research. The goal was to build a facility powerful enough to discover the Higgs Boson, a particle that is intimately related to the basic property of all matter and thought to give mass to everything in the universe.ĭr. The project was first envisioned in 1983 by the National Reference Designs Study. How did this laboratory come to be and why was it left unfinished? ![]() What was once planned to be the world's largest and most energetic particle accelerator complex is now 200,000 square feet of empty factories and 14.6 miles of water-filled, underground tunnels. Since 1993, the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), also known as the "Desertron," has sat vacant, surrounded by country roads and a dairy farm. However, beyond the old courthouse lies another building of unique and historical importance. Many factors have been cited as contributors to its abandonment, including the end of the Cold War with Russia and the comparable amounts being budgeted for the United States’ contribution to the International Space Station – at the time, it seemed to many to that spending as much on the SSC as the ISS would be folly (images via Jim Merithew, AmusingPlanet, Wired and Wikipedia).Waxahachie, Texas is known by many for its Victorian architecture and picturesque town square. Since then it has remained empty, but has again been purchased, this time by a chemical company. With an independent power grid and dedicated fiber optic line it seemed like a good fit, but when its would-be developer died in an accident the plans were scrapped. The complex has since gained the apt nickname ‘Desertron’ for obvious reasons.Įxcept for underground generators, most of the major machinery was removed from the site before it was deed to the local county, which in turn sold it to a private corporation planning to turn it into a data center. ![]() Located on a site near Waxahachie, Texas (south of Dallas, shown on a map below) without existing tunnels (which helped in the building of the LHC), removing millions of tons of soil proved to be a budget-breaking expense for the SSC. ![]() By that time, billions of dollars were already spent and the expected tag had tripled from 4 to 12 billion, 17 shafts were dug and 14 miles of tunnel excavated (out of a total of 51 planned). Designed to break records held by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the Superconducting Super Collider built (and abandoned) in Texas features fourteen miles of unseen and unused underground tunnels.Ĭonstruction on what was to be the largest particle accelerator in the world started in the early 1980s but funding cuts in the early 1990s caused the entire project to be shut down. ![]()
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