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Dahlgren 



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Present computational facility at the Dahlgren Laboratory. 



good, and we needed new floors — all kinds of things. So when the Public Works 

 Officer added up the costs of all the requests he had for renovation, it came to 

 about a half million or maybe $800,000. He said, "You know, it would be better 

 if we built a new building than it would be to keep renovating those old 

 buildings." So that kind of sparked things, and Captain Simons, being some- 

 what of a salesman, said, "With these space programs building up now, we 

 ought to go out and try to get a new building." We had the POLARIS Program 

 at that time, and we had the Space Surveillance Program. We were doing some 

 work on the Transit Navigation Satellite System, which APL* developed. Those 

 three things were right in the forefront at that time. They were modern 

 programs that were expanding with a lot of glamour attached to them. We used 

 that as backing, and we went in with the request that we needed a building like 

 this one for housing the computers and people. It would be more efficient. We 

 kept pushing it, and we finally sold it. 



Once the building was constructed, then the issue about closing Dahlgren 

 sort of went away because when people would come down, they'd see a new 

 building. They'd figure things were going good, and maybe Dahlgren 

 shouldn't be closed. I think, also, the Navy began to realize that maybe the real 

 estate here was the best they had on the East Coast. Land was getting scarce, and 

 there wasn't too much interest in going out and buying new land. The govern- 

 ment already had a lot of land, and many people were saying they were taking 

 on too much land. So I think all of these things kind of came together at one 

 time, and we were just lucky to get the building when we did. Of course, we've 



*AppUed Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University. 



