Charles Stark Draper Laboratory
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| Independent, not-for-profit corporation | |
| Industry | Defense Space Biomedical Energy |
| Founded | 1932 as the MIT Confidential Instrument Development Laboratory 1973 became The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc. |
| Headquarters | 555 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA 02139-3563 |
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Number of locations
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6 |
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Key people
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Dr. Kaigham (Ken) J. Gabriel, President and CEO (2014-) |
| Revenue | $493 million (Fiscal Year 2010) |
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Number of employees
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1,400 |
| Website | draper.com |
Draper is an American not-for-profit research and development organization, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts; its official name is "The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc". The laboratory specializes in the design, development, and deployment of advanced technology solutions to problems in national security, space exploration, health care and energy.
The laboratory was founded in 1932 by Charles Stark Draper at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop aeronautical instrumentation, and came to be called the "MIT Instrumentation Laboratory". It was renamed for its founder in 1970 and separated from MIT in 1973 to become an independent, non-profit organization.
The expertise of the laboratory staff includes the areas of guidance, navigation, and control technologies and systems; fault-tolerant computing; advanced algorithms and software solutions; modeling and simulation; and microelectromechanical systems and multichip module technology.
In 1932 Charles Stark Draper, an MIT aeronautics professor, created a teaching laboratory to develop the instrumentation needed for tracking, controlling and navigating aircraft. During World War II, Draper’s lab was known as the “Confidential Instrument Development Laboratory”. Later, the name was changed to the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. The laboratory was renamed for its founder in 1970 and remained a part of MIT until 1973 when it became an independent, not-for-profit research and development corporation. The transition to an independent corporation arose out of pressures for divestment of MIT laboratories doing military research at the time of the Vietnam War, despite the absence of a role of the laboratory in that war.
A primary focus of the laboratory's programs throughout its history has been the development and early application of advanced guidance, navigation, and control (GN&C) technologies to meet the U.S. Department of Defense’s and NASA’s needs. The laboratory’s achievements includes the design and development of accurate and reliable guidance systems for undersea-launched ballistic missiles as well as the Apollo Guidance Computer that guided the Apollo astronauts to the Moon and back safely to Earth, every time. The laboratory contributed to the development of inertial sensors, software, and other systems for the GN&C of commercial and military aircraft, submarines, strategic and tactical missiles, spacecraft, and unmanned vehicles.
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