Did you know that Boeing developed big ol' scary weapons at a lab in Huntington Beach?
But now, “Building 31”, which designed rockets, lasers, plane parts and secret Pentagon weapons, is prepping to close its doors. In a post by Wired magazine's Danger Room blog, which broke the story, James Lamont, a former employee, blames the lab's imminent closure on “bureaucracy”.
Lamont described the lab to Wired as the people who “make the weapons and one-offs that scare the sh*t out of the other guys.” But, it was the “layers of bureaucracy” that doomed Building 31, Lamont says. “Customers who were used to plainly walking in and fixing the U.S. government's issues now had multiple departments and skyrocketing costs to deal with.”
]
Something else led to the lab's cracking, too. In 2005, amid talks of axing employee retirement benefits, workers went on strike, Wired reports, and Boeing accordingly gave a lot of their work away to other labs.
Needless to say, the lab's employees — both past and current — probably aren't too happy about the closure.
Lamont tells Wired:
“It's a Silicon Valley of strategic space for the U.S. government, and Boeing's crappy leadership ran it into the ground.”
The lab, which has been around for 60 years, is slated to shut down in mid-2013.
