They've finally given up, and are going to sell the site for the superconducting supercollider.

Ellis County officials would like to sell it and put the debacle behind them, but while potential buyers drop in occasionally, they have never been able to close the deal.

"It's pretty much a single-use facility," says Ellis County Attorney Joe Grubbs, who handles the legal work of disposing of the property. "One building is 28 feet wide and 600 feet long and it curves. There are not a lot of uses for that building. You couldn't even use it for a shooting range."

In the 1950s, the Naval Research Laboratory attempted to build a radio telescope big enough to listen to radio communication internal to the USSR *reflected off the moon*. The "Big Ear" would have weighed as much as a contemporary aircraft carrier, and would have been the largest movable object on land in human history.

They had built the circular foundation, which incorporated a curved underground control room, when they ran out of money. Like Ellis County, there were no buyers. The underground control room ended up as office space for some government agency.

Seems to me like that building, long, thin, curved, would be a great place to put a great big long skate-board track.

Two words: Indoor slalom!

A true crying shame! We have eaten our seed corn instead of planting it. I know the project got shut down several years ago, but still. Isn't this a legitimate role for the federal government- research into the extremes which has no near term conventional economic payback?

I thought that they used the partially excavated underground track for raising mushrooms. Poetic, no? In the dark and fed shit....