As a matter of fact I was not a big fan of the SSC. From my understanding there were several problems, among them:
1. The cost was going through the roof and "promised" foreign financial cooperation was not forthcoming.
2. The SSC was basically duplicating the work being done by CERN in Europe.
By the way, I was working on superconductors when I retired in 1991 - among other things.
You know how that game is played. Congress is handed a schedule: this is what we're going to do, and this is how much it will cost each year. Then congress says, great, we'll give you this smaller amount. That stretches the project out and raises its cost. Congress cuts it again the next year, which raises the cost still more. This continues until congress says, look at the cost! We didn't agree to that! And they kill it.
and "promised" foreign financial cooperation was not forthcoming.
Again, that was a politically created problem having nothing to do with the machine or the physics. Japan, for example, was looking for a little cooperation from the U.S. for a project of its own (TRISTAN II/BELLE). They thought it was all worked out, one hand washing the other. Then we stiffed them and went our own way (PEP II/Babar). There are other examples, but the upshot is that our government was so uncooperative that we couldn't expect any cooperation in return.
2. The SSC was basically duplicating the work being done by CERN in Europe.
That's simply flat-out wrong. Perhaps you're thinking of the Isabelle project that was cancelled a decade or so before the SSC.