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Sorry, but the SSC was the biggest pork barrel project that we have ever witnessed in the sciences, and a sheer act of arrogance by the particle physics community. Basically, they said spend $40 billion -- and it would have probably been substantially more once overruns were factored in -- or else we will totally lose the particle physics race. There was no room for compromise, and they money dwarfed all other spending on sciences at the time.

I have talked to people in particle phsyics, and even they admit that they really blew it with the SSC. Some "science" is just not worth the cost. I would certainly put the civilian uses of the space shuttle and the international space station in that category. I would be tempted to put the "war on cancer" ther also, and leave cancer cures to the pharmaceuticals.

The scientific community can be incredibly arrogant, is often extraordinarily biased to produced scare-mongering chicken little prophecies in order to get more attention and funding and has lead to university faculty which is more interested in raising money for their labs and promoting orthodoxy rather than uncovering new knowledge.

I am a refugee from the "temple," and everything I have seen made me feel that politics (personal and governmental), rather than intellect, were what was primarily rewarded in academia.

Basically, they said spend $40 billion -- and it would have probably been substantially more once overruns were factored in -- or else we will totally lose the particle physics race.

You're pulling these numbers strictly out of your ass. The costs of the SSC were known up front. If congress had set aside $5 billion in 1986, that's what it would have cost. But of course dollars aren't constant, and when appropriations fall short of what's needed, it stretches the program out. Those two factors alone stretched the cost to $11 billion, which was then determined to be too much.

There was no room for compromise, and they money dwarfed all other spending on sciences at the time.

More sphincter-calculus. The U.S. never spent $1.5 billion in any year on high energy physics, and it's well under a billion even now. The U.S. spends tens of billions a year on research.

I have talked to people in particle phsyics, and even they admit that they really blew it with the SSC.

We blew it big time, and it cost us most of our field. But understand this: the failures were entirely political and not scientific.

Some "science" is just not worth the cost.

Agenda revealed.

Who remembers "Operation Mole Hole", another taxpayer-funded waste of money by the ivory-tower scientific community? I say that if the project is so great and so necessary, surely they should be able to attract private investors to fund a project. The government invests too much money in these worthless ventures.

a sheer act of arrogance by the particle physics community

Some questions won't be answered for decades that could have been answered quickly. Is it worth our public effort to understand the world as best we can? Now others are filling the gap, delayed, and it is not American facilities. We are not competing well among nations, not up to the level we need to sustain dominant preeminence.