Celebrating Draper's 50th Anniversary

Message from Our President

Draper is proud to mark our 50th anniversary as an independent nonprofit and 90 years as an innovation engineering organization. Our legacy from the past five decades is one of commitment to serving our nation’s interests and security needs with excellence. We honor and sustain that commitment today.

Our success is due in large part to our talented, dedicated, and innovative employees. Working across our 9 campuses and 42 states, they continue to excel and make us proud.

Despite the challenges our nation has faced, they have found a way to solve our customers’ most challenging problems with original solutions in guidance, navigation, and control systems; instrumentation; and vanishingly small systems. Designing world-class technologies, they helped humans take bold steps on the Moon. The Apollo Moon landings continue to be humanity’s greatest achievements and make us among an elite few to land humans on the Moon six times.

Our employees work also has helped humans take bold steps here on Earth by pioneering first-of-a-kind technologies that range from inertial navigation, integrated circuit processor, software, digital controls, microelectromechanical systems, and microfluidics to name a few.

We’re proud of the work that we’ve led to enhance our customers’ mission effectiveness in an increasingly complex world. We look forward to continuing to build on our legacy, defend our democracy, protect our nation, and support humanity. - Jerry Wohletz, Ph.D.

Click here to view a downloadable version of our 50th Anniversary book.

Draper Features

Draper Feature

The Draper Impact

Draper Feature

Origins of Charles Stark Draper and His Laboratory

Draper Feature

The Future of Innovation

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Photos Through The Decades

SPIRE drawing of bombing by inertial methods from a presentation Doc made in Washington, 1950.

Picture diagram of SPIRE inertial navigation systems, 1950.

Family tree of the lab, 1954.

Mars probe prototype design, this concept would be used later for the Apollo mission. Photo is from June 10, 1959.

Clip from a film of the test launch for Polaris, 1960.

Radar Antenna model, it notes this as Apollo, no other description available, photo from April 7, 1960.

Project Tac all maneuver flight control system, 1961.

Apollo Class “A” release master data punch card, 1963.

Apollo, command module primary guidance and navigation system, 1967.

Lunar gravimeter, this was used on the lunar rover, 1971.

Saturn V launch, 1973.

Personnel from lab publicity brochure from the annual report in 1972, biomedical computer for cardiovascular patients. 1972. This was joint project with MIT clinical research center for the development of computer programs for improved care of cardiovascular patients.

Margaret Hamilton with computer sheets, 1973.

Air force planes

Engineer Ken Houston tests a Draper-designed artificial larynx that more closely approximates normal human voice and speech production than the mechanical devices then in use, 1998.

MCM Module John Earle, Draper designs and builds microelectronic systems employing various multi-chip module (MCM) and Chip-On-board (COB) technologies, 1999.

Biomedical thin film processing for tissue engineering. A three-dimensional microscaffold undergoing fluidic testing. These scaffolds will be used for growth of implantable, vascularized, tissue-engineered organs, easing the shortage of human-to-human transplants.