The Cambridge, Mass.-based non-profit Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc., said on July 28 that it is expanding its operations in Florida in tandem with the lab’s increasing footprint nationwide.
Draper “has acquired 5.295 acres of land from North American Properties in Titusville, Fla., within Riverfront Center development near the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex,” the lab said, adding that the location “will enable Draper to provide engineering and research and development services for its customers principally in national security, space systems and electronic systems.”
Jerry Wohletz, the president and CEO of Draper, said in the lab statement that last year “Draper saw most business growth from outside of our campus in Cambridge.”
Beside the Cambridge headquarters, Draper locations include Bedford, Mass.; Reston, Va.; the Washington Navy Yard in Washington, D.C.; Cape Canaveral, Fla., to provide technical support for the U.S. Navy Trident guidance program; St. Petersburg, Fla., where Draper has a rapid prototyping center; Pittsfield, Mass. for a Navy integrated repair facility; Houston, Texas in support of the NASA Johnson Space Center; Huntsville, Ala.; and Odon, Ind.
Among the focus areas for Draper has been hypersonic systems, including simulating their high heat and speed for the Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) Mayhem program (Defense Daily, Jan. 17).
A Leidos [LDOS] team won a $334 million, 51-month AFRL contract for Mayhem last December and said that the initial task order would be the $24 million System Requirements Review/Conceptual Design Review in a digital engineering environment effort (Defense Daily, Dec. 19, 2021). Leidos’ System Design Agent (SDA) team for Mayhem includes Calspan, Draper, and Kratos [KTOS].
Mayhem is to develop an air-breathing hypersonic system and is formally known as the Expendable Hypersonic Multi-mission ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) and Strike program.
“Draper will lead the integrated product team for Mayhem’s guidance, navigation and control (GN&C) system, and will support the integrated product teams for systems engineering, software and test,” Draper Laboratory said in January. “Draper is applying its expertise in model-based engineering (MBE) trade space analysis to explore performance envelopes of hypersonic systems, as well as to evaluate designs of subsystems. Development in this area is challenging because hypersonic systems require a digital modeling and simulation environment that can simulate the extreme conditions of heat and speed common in hypersonic flight.”
Draper said that its work on Mayhem “builds on [Draper’s] legacy of support to the U.S. government, which began with Draper’s design of the Apollo Guidance Computer and includes current programs, such as the Trident II (D5) missile.”