I got to see it too, and got an informal tour by one of the grad students. He showed us a steel tie about a meter long, and said they'd calculated that two of them could hold down the Space Shuttle while it was trying to launch. To hold the machine together while it operates, they need 38 of them.

It's not surprising they they have so much trouble getting time on the machine. They barely have the funding to run it. During the budget problems last year they went a whole year without running it at all.