In 1987, President Ronald Reagan approved the most ambitious physics experiment ever conceived on American soil: the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). Designed to be built beneath the prairies south of Dallas, Texas, the SSC would have been an 87.1-kilometer circumference ring of superconducting magnets capable of smashing protons together at 40 TeV — roughly three times the energy of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which wouldn't begin operations until 2008.

The project was headquartered in Waxahachie, Texas. By 1993, workers had excavated 22.5 kilometers of tunnel and 17 shafts using tunnel boring machines. Over 2,000 physicists, engineers, and staff were employed. The superconducting magnet design, developed at Fermilab and Brookhaven, was working. The science was sound. The engineering was proven. And then Congress killed it.

On October 21, 1993, the House voted 282-143 to terminate funding. By that point, approximately $2 billion had already been spent. The estimated total cost had ballooned from an initial $4.4 billion (1987 dollars) to somewhere between $10-12 billion. The Cold War was over, removing the competitive pressure that had fueled big science spending. The project suffered from poor cost management, interstate political rivalries (states that lost the site bid had little incentive to fund it), and the simultaneous budget pressure of the International Space Station. Physicist Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate and SSC advocate, later wrote that the cancellation was "the worst thing to happen to physics in my lifetime."

What did we lose? The SSC was designed to find the Higgs boson — which CERN's LHC eventually confirmed in 2012, nearly two decades later. But the SSC's 40 TeV collision energy (versus the LHC's 13-14 TeV) would have pushed far beyond the Higgs. It could have probed supersymmetry, dark matter candidates, and physics beyond the Standard Model that the LHC still cannot reach. The entire field of particle physics lost a generation of momentum. American dominance in high-energy physics, established at Fermilab and SLAC, shifted permanently to Europe.

Here is the case for revival. The tunnels in Waxahachie are still there — partially flooded, but structurally intact. Modern high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets, particularly those using REBCO (rare-earth barium copper oxide) tape, have transformed what's possible. In 2021, MIT's SPARC fusion project demonstrated a 20-tesla HTS magnet, shattering records. These magnets operate at higher temperatures (requiring less cryogenic infrastructure), achieve stronger fields, and are smaller than the niobium-titanium magnets designed for the SSC in the late 1980s.

With modern HTS magnets, you could achieve the SSC's original 40 TeV — or significantly exceed it — in a smaller ring, or push to 100+ TeV in the original 87 km footprint. CERN is currently planning the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a 91-kilometer ring beneath the Geneva countryside, with a projected cost of $20+ billion and a timeline stretching to the 2040s. The SSC tunnel already exists. The land is already acquired. The political framework of a national laboratory was already established.

Modern advances in machine learning-driven beam optimization, room-temperature superconductor research (however controversial), and modular accelerator design through projects like CERN's AWAKE plasma wakefield experiment all suggest that a revived SSC could leapfrog the FCC at a fraction of the cost. The United States still has the engineering talent, the national lab infrastructure at Fermilab and SLAC, and — critically — the hole in the ground.

The tunnels in Waxahachie are a monument to political shortsightedness. Filling them with magnets instead of groundwater would be one of the most consequential scientific decisions of the century.