The $2 Billion Hole

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

Jeffrey Grossholz has pulled up stakes 36 times during his career, but in 1989 he came to Waxahachie, Texas, to stay. While the 50-year-old structural engineer had helped build plenty of shopping malls and bridges in his time, they seemed like nothing when he first heard of the superconducting supercollider (SSC). Recalls Grossholz: "I said, 'This is it.' It was a helluva project, something we could all have been proud of, something we could have passed on to our kids."

Now Grossholz is in shock, as are thousands of other engineers, construction workers, scientists -- and most of Texas. With $2 billion already spent and the project 20% complete, the world's largest and most sophisticated scientific instrument, a particle accelerator designed to probe the innermost secrets of the universe, was canceled last week by a 282-to-143 vote in the House of Representatives. Said Ohio Democrat Eric Fingerhut: "This was a project that we couldn't afford. We need to take every opportunity to reduce our deficit."

The SSC's supporters were appalled. "It's disheartening that a large number of fairly intelligent people could do such a dumb thing," lamented Nobel- prizewinning physicist Leon Lederman. His frustration is understandable. Since the 1930s, physicists have been using accelerators to smash atoms together and analyze the debris, with an impressive result: the discovery that matter in all its complex forms seems to be made up of just a few simple particles operating under a handful of basic forces. But this so-called Standard Model is a puzzle that's not quite complete, and finding the last pieces would take something like the SSC. The 10,000 superconducting magnets in the collider's planned 54-mile underground oval tunnel were going to accelerate protons to nearly the speed of light, then crash them together with unprecedented power.

Pleading for the SSC before Congress, researchers like Lederman used the Ultimate Quest argument; others spoke of retaining America's leadership in science and technology, or of the jobs SSC would generate, or of practical spin-offs, including improvements in superconducting materials and computer software. Nonetheless, the project's super price tag -- originally estimated at $5 billion but up to $11 billion at last count -- was a perpetual and powerful counterargument. Specialists in other fields of science, and even different areas of physics, resented such largesse being heaped on a | relatively small number of researchers at a time of national belt tightening.

It's tempting to call the SSC's demise the end of big science, but it would be more accurate to describe it as the end of big, bloated, bungled science. The original budget turned out to have omitted several crucial items that surfaced only after Congress approved the project. The superconducting magnets had to be designed a second time after the first try failed. And in June, Energy Department investigators reported that employees were living it up at SSC's Dallas headquarters, freely spending taxpayers' money on liquor, lavish parties and office decor ($56,000 went for potted plants). Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary fired the University Research Association, the nonprofit consortium running the project, for failure to track costs and schedules.

As early as 1992, the House voted 232 to 181 to kill the SSC, but it was saved in a Senate-House conference. After last week's House vote, though, Senate supporters knew they could not rescue the SSC this time. Just about all the taxpayers have for their $2 billion is a complex of buildings and 14.7 miles of tunnel under the Texas prairie.

The loss of the SSC, along with a near cancellation of NASA's space station Freedom last spring, raises questions about whether the U.S. will ever again tackle so massive a scientific enterprise. Probably not without help, says Erich Bloch, former head of the National Science Foundation: "There's no single country, including ours, that can afford such a big project." In the future, U.S. scientists will have to rely more on international partnerships. A model is the Switzerland-based CERN laboratory, a consortium financed by 18 countries that is building its own giant accelerator. The large hadron collider will be only 40% as powerful as the SSC, but has a good chance of doing comparable science. That won't be much consolation, though, to the people who converged on Waxahachie expecting to take part in the grandest experiment of all time.

With reporting by Carlton Stowers/Waxahachie and Dick Thompson/Washington