Science Center Weathers Slowdown in Defense Spending

A reversal of fortune at other defense laboratories does not mean it has happened at the Thousand Oaks research and development wing of aerospace giant Rockwell International Corp.

Rockwell’s Science Center has weathered the slowdown in defense spending by converting much of its defense-oriented research into other commercial ventures.

Rockwell’s lab once drew 70% of its funding from defense work and 30% from other contracts. But in the past six years, those numbers have been transposed as it now does research in factory automation, food-processing, refineries, water- and air-purification facilities, newspaper printing presses, memory storage, miniaturization of mechanical devices and vision technology.

The effort has resulted in keeping its work force reduction relatively small. Rockwell says its present staff of 356 employees is down 18% from its 1989 peak of 435, a smaller drop than at most local aerospace operations. Joseph T. Longo, vice president and general manager of the Science Center, doesn’t foresee any more staff reductions, even if there are further government contract cutbacks. Rockwell budgets $60 million a year to keep the elite research center running.

Included in Rockwell’s commercial projects being prepared for market are a new generation of electronic microchips and the development for law enforcement agencies of a sugar-cube-sized holographic memory bank that could could hold up to 10,000 sets of fingerprints.

Other new potential products are photo detection rays that monitor traffic flow, an errant lane detector for automobiles, a more legible process of manufacturing liquid crystal displays and gyroscopes that are a fraction the size of a penny.