On 10 November the Department of Energy announced that the Superconducting Super Collider will be located on the Blackland Prairie corn and cotton fields around Waxahachie, Texas. The decision ended a competition entered by 25 states more than a year earlier. The contest for the SSC was reminiscent of way the site for Fermilab was chosen in 1966. Indeed, the procedure invented for selecting Fermilab was copied for the SSC, right down to the preliminary run‐off refereed by a panel appointed by the National Academy of Sciences and the visits by a government team to the final few sites in the competition. Even the complaints from local citizens and the rumors of political influence that were rife during the Fermilab competition had their counterparts in the SSC contest.

1.
For a more detailed account, see C. Westfall, PhD dissertation, Michigan State U. (1988).
This paper had its roots in an earlier paper by
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