- The rockets and satellites get the funding, the magazine covers, and the minister visits.The industrial base to manufacture what goes inside them doesn’t exist yet.
In 1970, in Middletown, Connecticut, three men set up a small optics workshop.
They had a bedroom air-conditioner that they hauled to the floor each morning to keep the workspace cool enough for precision work.
They had backing from Canon Inc and Wesleyan University to make small optical components. The company was called Zygo Corporation.
Today, Zygo has over 500 employees, a 160,000-square-foot campus, 10 offices on three continents, and its computer-controlled optical metrology technology was used to test and measure the 18 hexagonal mirror segments of the James Webb Space Telescope’s primary mirror, the 6.5-metre instrument that captured the deepest infrared images of the early universe.
The humble company became one of the world’s premier precision optics manufacturers because the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Energy gave it early orders, steadily and over decades. First it was for small optics, then for the National Ignition Facility’s 1,000-plus metre-class laser optics, and eventually for space payloads.
A point to note: It was not the venture capitalists who were making this bet early. The United States (US) government decided the capability should exist and structured its procurement to create
