New facilities will keep Lincoln Laboratory at the forefront of advanced prototyping
In 1951, the Department of Defense (DoD) needed a homeland air defense system. To develop one, they partnered with MIT to create Lincoln Laboratory, the federally-funded research and development center, where the nation’s first air defense system, SAGE, was successfully prototyped. In the nearly 70 years since then, the laboratory has continued to innovate technology for the nation — radars, imagers, lasers, and microelectronics that are key to modern defense systems. As technology has progressed, however, some Lincoln Laboratory facilities have not: The original 1950s buildings still make up nearly half the square footage of the laboratory. In 2014, the DoD acknowledged a critical need for facility modernizations following seven years of independent third-party and government studies. As a result, Lincoln Laboratory and the DoD developed a phased facility modernization plan that will allow the laboratory to continue to field state-of-the-art capabilities to address national security needs. The first building will replace critical, yet...