Not all aerospace projects are gigantic multi-million-dollar behemoths. From At the ‘Bike Shop,’ Secretive Defense Work Starts at Home Depot:
Defense contractors spend many millions of dollars each year on product development. Some, like Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co., have well-known groups of scientists who dream up pie-in-the-sky flying machines. At Raytheon the radical thinkers of the company’s research operation work in the Bike Shop, named for the bicycle shop where Wilbur and Orville Wright invented the airplane.Engineers in jeans create prototypes of Raytheon’s most revolutionary ideas in quarters about as impressive as a high-school science lab. The Bike Shop employs a corps of 15 handpicked scientists and engineers striving to bring advanced concepts to life — and to market — as quickly as possible. For its models, employees buy components off the shelf from stores such as Home Depot rather than order from big defense suppliers. As important as the inventions themselves, the goal is to help inspire a more creative environment at Raytheon. “We have more fun than is generally allowed on company time,” says James Small, the team’s chief and a former university physics professor.
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Mr. Small, who earned a doctorate from MIT in laser physics and taught for 14 years before joining the defense industry, himself has 20 U.S. patents. The 59-year-old says the Bike Shop has evolved over a decade, but got its name only last year.The special-projects unit’s first project was a miniature unmanned glider called Silent Eyes. Mr. Liebsch, a veteran of the Tomahawk cruise-missile program and now Mr. Small’s deputy, fashioned a test launcher out of bungee cord. He had help from his then 11-year-old son (who now works at the Bike Shop). Messrs. Liebsch and Small improvised a wind tunnel by driving down a highway with the drone attached to a car. It worked: The Air Force recently bought Silent Eyes, which is dropped from other drones to assess battle damage, to conduct test flights.
Mr. Small built his team by scouring Raytheon for creative, eccentric and bored talent. To vet a laser operator, he asked a candidate to engrave his name on a penny. Mr. Small provides world-class equipment and a unique perk: credit-card privileges for the group — of up to $250,000 a month — to free them from Raytheon’s bureaucratic purchasing procedures. The Bike Shop’s budget is in the millions, say Raytheon executives. It’s a tiny portion of the $487 million the company spent on research and development last year. Some of that was funded by government contracts.