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 established with MIT the federally funded research and development center Lincoln Laboratory, where the nation’s first homeland 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.
