Oh, man. The argument to keep building it was that we would have had (in some senses) better knowledge of particle physics in the 90s than what we're currently

Oh, man. The argument to keep building it was that we would have had (in some senses) better knowledge of particle physics in the 90s than what we're currently waiting for from the LHC. I'm too young to have been part of the physics community at the time, but talking about the SSC can still elicit winces and melancholy today. I'm sure it was over budget; I suspect that most big government projects are. (I've heard people talking about the SSC say that that was standard: that an expectation of overruns was essentially built into the system on all big projects, from the scientists all the way up to Congress.)