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“Many of them moved their families to Waxahachie, and once the project was canceled, some of them never left, they made Waxahachie their home,” he said. For people in Ellis County who had been following the project for years and years, the experience was traumatic, he said, especially for those who had worked at the Super Collider. Little remembers hearing about the disappointment of people in the community. “It was just devastating for the risk takers who came to build the Super Collider,” Schwitters said. Brock walks past a board lamenting the abandoned Super Collider project in one of the project buildings in 1997. Texas General Land Office project director Mabry J. “That was a huge loss for us,” Schwitters said.Īfter spending nearly $ 2 billion on the project, the US House of Representatives voted to remove the project that summer, and Congress officially removed it on October 21, 1993. After the election, the Clinton administration was less supportive of the project. He said a lack of funding from other countries forced the project to halt.Īccording to News‘, tensions between Japan and the US over the automobile industry got in the way, and Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa decided to wait until after the 1992 US presidential election to decide on funding for the Super Collider. “Our position was that if the government wanted to build this, it wouldn’t want to build a failure that doesn’t work,” Schwitters said. Additional construction of an office facility also increased costs, he said. The Univar Solutions warehouses on the former site of the Superconductor Super Collider, a project that closed in 1993, are seen in November 2021.īecause not much was known about the accelerators, Schwitters said the project changed in size and scope once construction began, and more money and materials were needed to accommodate those changes. By July, roughly 11 miles had been dug, about 20% of the loop, and the estimated cost skyrocketed to $ 11 billion. At the time, the potential for discovery was worth the price.įor six days a week, crews used drilling machines to dig the tunnels in early 1993.
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Initial reports estimated that the Super Collider would cost about $ 6 billion in federal money. Little was at school for some of the construction work, but when he got home there wasn’t much talk about it much of the building happened underground and whatever was on the surface was off limits. “I remember literally having scientists from other parts of the world who had come to my neighborhood and were there specifically to work for the Super Collider,” Little said. (Louis DeLuca / 108249)Īccording to Dallas morning news‘, the lobby of the temporary offices had models showing what the colliding ring would have looked like, and posters explained how scientists would collide atoms almost at the speed of light.Įllis County Judge Todd Little, a freshman in high school when the project began, said his family owned approximately 800 acres of land in nearby Red Oak and, prior to the development of the project, their father sold about 150 lots to build houses. Weeds grew around a sign at the entrance to the abandoned Super Collider project near Waxahachie in 1997. Remember to be sitting in boxes with a team eager to make the project come true. The magic of the Super Collider came together in a makeshift warehouse turned office south of Dallas, Schwitters said. “And Texas … had a great site and ideal underground conditions and everything you need to build those accelerators.” “CERN doesn’t have the potential in the same way that we do, because to get really high-energy particles, you need big accelerators,” Schwitters said. He left a professorship at Harvard University to work on the Super Collider, and still believes that the project had more physics potential than CERN, one of the largest physics research laboratories in the world. Schwitters’ expertise is in high-energy experimental physics. He was called to be the project manager in 1989, just as the tunnels were being developed.
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Roy Schwitters, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin, remembers the project well. It became official the following January, and by then the city had rented space on a billboard off Interstate 35E that read: “Waxahachie, home of the Super Collider.” A year-long nationwide search for the perfect site ended in November 1988 near Waxahachie. In the 1970s, scientists had discussed the study of atomic particles and needed space for this to happen. An aerial view of the Super Collider site near FM1446 on the outskirts of Waxahachie.