Tevatron’s construction program built up a lot of industrial capacity for superconducting magnets. This was by design, in the hopes that it would drive induced demand for them. One of the first beneficiaries were MRI machines, which became a lot more affordable to produce.
The DOE hoped to repeat that success in the 1990s with the much larger SSC, but it was cancelled.
ISABELLE, which was a cancelled proton-proton collider. Major delays with its magnet design meant that it was overtaken by existing programs at CERN and Fermilab. RHIC reused its hall.
It looks like they’re playing more with indirection features now (created for vdev removal) for other features. One of the recent summit hackathons sketched out using indirect vdevs to perform rebalancing.
Once you get a lot of snapshots, though, the indirection costs start to rise.
A combination of events conspired to cause the seal failure and blow-through, yes. But it wasn’t just Max-Q that defeated the slag, but that they experienced much stronger high altitude winds in flight than any flight before or after.
They rolled 20 at liftoff and then a 1 at altitude and that’s all she wrote.
NASA came close to getting away with it. They were due to introduce a redesigned field joint in late 1986 based off the lightweight solid boosters planned for the USAF missions out of SLC-6. Had they launched Challenger a day earlier or later they might have proceeded to the new joint, and no catastrophic seal failure.
The DOE hoped to repeat that success in the 1990s with the much larger SSC, but it was cancelled.