MIT Lincoln Lab 300 GHz radar dish structure (Millstone)

Football-field-sized aluminum structure, tolerance of ~3 mm over 100 yards. Project budget grew from $20M to $100M. No welding shop would bid because tolerances were beyond imagination. Eventually fabricated by a firm doing Electric Boat submarine work. Belmonte's prior firm helped design it. Used to illustrate joint efficiency, gusset-plate design, and welding-shop capacity limits.

MIT used to have, in the physics department, something called Millstone — a great big radar dome. They had it as a physics experiment, kind of ran out its course, and they gave it away. MIT Lincoln Laboratory took a $20 million project, which turned into a $100 million project with overruns, so they could do 300-gigahertz radar into space. Why do they want to do that? There are all kinds of little things flying up there in space in these little satellites, and the Russians didn't always send us a photograph and a spec sheet on each one of these satellites.