The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) (also nicknamed the "Desertron"[2]) was a particle accelerator complex under construction in the vicinity of Waxahachie, Texas, United States.

Its planned ring circumference was 87.1 kilometers (54.1 mi) with an energy of 20 TeV per proton and was designed to be the world's largest and most energetic particle accelerator.

[8][9] Fermilab director and subsequent Nobel Prize in Physics winner Leon Lederman was a very prominent early supporter – some sources say the architect[10] or proposer[11] – of the Superconducting Super Collider project, as well as a major proponent and advocate throughout its lifetime.

In 1987, Congress was told the project could be completed for $4.4 billion, and it gained the enthusiastic support of Speaker Jim Wright of nearby Fort Worth, Texas.

[19] In June, the non-profit Project on Government Oversight released a draft audit report by the Department of Energy's Inspector General heavily criticizing the Super Collider for its high costs and poor management by officials in charge of it.

[20][21] The Inspector General investigated $500,000 in questionable expenses over three years, including $12,000 for Christmas parties, $25,000 for catered lunches, and $21,000 for the purchase and maintenance of office plants.

[23] In 1993 U.S. President Bill Clinton tried to prevent the cancellation by asking Congress to continue "to support this important and challenging effort" through completion because "abandoning the SSC at this point would signal that the United States is compromising its position of leadership in basic science".

[24] After $2 billion had been spent ($400 million by the host state of Texas, the rest by the Department of Energy[18]), the House of Representatives rejected funding on October 19, 1993, and Senate negotiators failed to restore it.

[25] Following Rep. Jim Slattery's successful orchestration in the House,[25] President Clinton signed the bill that finally canceled the project on October 30, 1993, stating regret at the "serious loss" for science.

[26] Many factors contributed to the cancellation:[4] rising cost estimates (to $12bn);[27] poor management by physicists and Department of Energy officials; the end of the need to prove the supremacy of American science with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War; belief that many smaller scientific experiments of equal merit could be funded for the same cost; Congress's desire to generally reduce spending (the United States was running a $255bn budget deficit); the reluctance of Texas Governor Ann Richards;[28] and President Bill Clinton's initial lack of support for the project began during the administrations of Richards's predecessor, Bill Clements, and Clinton's predecessors, Ronald Reagan and George H. W.

[4] Leon Lederman, a leading promoter and advocate of the SSC,[12][13] wrote a popular science book in the context of the project's last years and loss of congressional support.

The LHC's advantage in terms of cost was the use of the pre-existing engineering infrastructure and 27 km long cavern of the Large Electron–Positron Collider, and its use of a different, innovative magnet design to bend the higher energy particles into the available tunnel.

"Supercollider," a 1993 song by the Boston-based alternative band Tribe, describes the point of view of a scientist hired to help build the (then-uncancelled) project.

On the March 6, 2002, episode of The West Wing, the supercollider is discussed when Sam Seaborn is helping an old college physics professor get funding to complete the project.

[citation needed] In 2021, the project was cited as a case study of the hypothetical demon of Bureaucratic Chaos, which "blocks good things from happening" at the United States Department of Energy.