Weapons / Defense R&D
Until recently, when the corporate HQ was moved to Virginia, ATK was headquartered in this building in the suburbs of Minneapolis. ATK is a military products company that specializes in the full range of projectiles, from bullets to ballistic missiles. Also known as Alliant Tech Systems, they are...
Draper Lab is a private, nonprofit R...
For many years, an office on the third floor of this building in Wellesley was the official headquarters for a remarkable engineering company known as EG&G. Founded by Doc Edgerton, the MIT professor famous for his strobe photography, and two of his former students, Kenneth Germeshausen and...
Location of field laboratories for the United States Army Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC), headquartered at the Detroit Arsenal, in Michigan. At Fort Belvoir, research, development and engineering for TARDEC are conducted in military bridging, fuels, lubricants...
The legendary Canadian weapons engineer Gerald Bull operated a test site that straddled the international border, near Jay, Vermont. First known as Highwater Station (the name coming from the closest town on the Canadian side) the location was created on land Bull already owned in the 1960s to...
Holloman Air Force Base sits on the edge of the White Sands Missile Range, near Alamogordo, and uses some of the Range for practice bombing, and many other things. Holloman is an unusual Air Force Base, with a history of space program research and stealth projects. Holloman is home to a stealth...
A nonprofit R&D lab, specializing in weapons for the Navy, operated by Johns Hopkins University. Similar in some respects to MIT's Draper Lab, this lab was formed by the Department of Defense in WWII, as a weapons research and development lab and think tank. Located on a 365-acre compound,...
Kirtland Air Force Base is one of the most vital and active military facilities in the country, with over 20,000 people working within its secured perimeter, at the south end of Albuquerque. The heavily built up part of the base, generally north and east of the runways (that also serve as the main...
Nuclear R&D and training site operates by the DOE. For a few decades the site had a full-scale nuclear reactor prototype for testing and training of Navy personnel, operated by Knolls Lab. That site was remediated in 2006, and is now mostly gone. Other tech buildings still exist. Knolls is a...
A naval aviation research and development base, recently realigned, with some operations heading to Jacksonville Naval Air Station and Patuxent River Naval Station. Once a rigid airship factory and port, and site of the 1937 Hindenburg disaster. Two of the large hangars that once housed the...
Los Alamos National Lab is one of the three principal diversified Department of Energy nuclear research and development labs, along with Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Labs. It employs around 12,000 people, occupies 43 square miles and consumes over two billion dollars per year. The lab...
MITRE is a nonprofit systems engineering and information technology company, formed in 1958 to take over the SAGE project, developed by MIT's Lincoln Lab, located down the road. SAGE was the first nationwide automatic warning and defense system, a program which at the time constituted the largest...
Part of a network of sites that are associated with the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) based in Newport, Rhode Island, NUWC Keyport is an industrial military compound north of Bremerton, employing around 1,500 people. The NUWC is a major R&D and test and evaluation organization for naval...
Newport is home of the headquarters of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC), one of four Navy centers engaged in research, development, testing, and evaluation of weapons and other systems related to naval warfare. Most of NUWC's work is related to submarine-based systems, such as torpedoes....
The Nellis Range is a 4,700 square-mile restricted zone in southern Nevada, and one of the largest and busiest military ranges in the country. Much of the land in the range is used for combat training by the Air Force, which conducts large-scale war games over the range, and within the 12,000...
Located on a peninsula on Chesapeake Bay, Patuxent River Naval Air Station is one of the nation's premier facilities for the test and evaluation of advanced weapons systems, with emphasis on those used in Naval aviation applications. Site of the Naval Air Test Center, and Naval Air Warfare Center,...
Picatinny Arsenal includes 950 buildings on 6,500 acres. It is home of the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC). The Center performs life cycle engineering for Department of Defense guns, ammunition, fire control, and associated weaponry. ARDEC Engineers perform...
Raytheon was founded in the 1920's as an appliance company, but radar-related defense contracts in World War Two increased its sales over 5000%, making it as big as General Electric at the time. Raytheon today is the largest company based in Massachusetts, and is one of the largest defense...
The Tonopah Test Range is a 525 square mile test facility on the north end of the Air Force's 4,000 square mile Nellis Range Complex in Nevada, and is the principal weapons field test site for Sandia Labs, based in New Mexico. There are major facilities here, including barracks for several hundred...
Part of a complex of military R...