Factsheet – Background Information About Sandia National Laboratories
Sandia National Laboratories is involved in a full range of national security research and development projects. It employs about 7,900 people and manages about $1.8 billion of work a year. Sandia has two primary facilities: a large laboratory and headquarters in Albuquerque, New Mexico (over 6,800 employees) and a smaller laboratory in Livermore, California (about 850 employees). Sandia is a government-owned / contractor-operated (GOCO¹) facility. It is funded primarily by the U.S. Department of Energy and is managed by the Lockheed Martin Corp.
Sandia's precursor, Z Division, was created in 1945 as the ordnance design, testing, and assembly arm of Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Division soon moved to Sandia Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico to be near an airfield and work closely with the military. In 1948, Z Division was renamed Sandia Laboratory and became a separate branch of Los Alamos. Both laboratories were born out of America's World War II atomic bomb development effort – the Manhattan Project. In 1949, President Harry Truman wrote a letter to AT&T President Leroy Wilson, offering the company "an opportunity to render an exceptional service in the national interest" by managing Sandia. AT&T accepted, and managed the labs for nearly 44 years.
In 1956, Sandia opened new facilities in Livermore, California to support the nuclear weapons work of the new Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Sandia became a national laboratory in 1979. In 1993, the Department of Energy awarded the Sandia management contract to Lockheed Martin.
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Sandia’s core vision is "Helping Our Nation Secure a Peaceful and Free World Through Technology".
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1 During the Manhattan Project, the US federal government asked the University of California to operate what is now the Los Alamos National Laboratory. This gave rise to a new model for managing R&D labs: the government owned the laboratory site, the buildings and the equipment, while the University provided the employees and managers. The GOCO model has been replicated many times over the past 50 years, primarily within the Department of Energy and its predecessor agencies.
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