Electronics Research Center

The Electronics Research Center (ERC), was a NASA research facility located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, across the street from MIT at Kendall Square. The ERC opened in September 1964, taking over the administration of contracts, grants, and other NASA business in New England from the antecedent North Eastern Operations Office (created in July 1962), and closed in June 1970. The campus is now the site of the United States Department of Transportation's John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center.

It served to develop the space agency's in-house expertise in electronics during the Apollo era. A second key function was to serve as a graduate and post-graduate training center within the framework of a regional government-industry-university alliance. The ERC was just as important a NASA field center as the Langley Research Center or the Marshall Space Flight Center. By fiscal 1968, NASA planned for the ERC to be employing 1,600 professional and technical workers plus another 500 in administrative and support positions (Kelley, n.p.).

The Center was located in Cambridge after Massachusetts politicians unsuccessfully lobbied for the Manned Spacecraft Center. The location of the ERC allowed it to take advantage of the proximity to MIT and (to a lesser extent) Harvard University, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories, and the electronics industry located along Route 128. At the time, the technical, industrial, and commercial aspects of microelectronics were ascendant, especially in the Boston-Cambridge technopolis.

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