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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.

I stand by my comments. I read with diligence most of the press clippings as this progressed, since I had once wanted to be an atomic physicist.

Most major advances in science are the result of brainpower, and not laboratory "research." If something truly requires millions and billions of dollars of research, then that money is far better spent by the private sector, which can do the job most efficienty and focus it on commercial returns. Academic labs are fiefdoms run by researchers who think their Ph.D's made them managerial geniuses -- Not!

One of the biggest problems nowadays in biotech is that most of their companies are run by pointy heads who have no conception of how to manage a business. In software, we used to have that problem. We found out that we could run our businesses far more effectively with high school and college dropouts.