Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA

The Soviet launch of Sputnik in October 1957 shocked American leaders into creating the Advanced Research Projects Agency on February 7, 1958, to make sure the United States would never again be surprised by an adversary's technology. It was renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1972. Unlike most labs, DARPA owns no laboratories. It funds research by universities, companies, and government labs through programs run by temporary program managers.

Its model relies on small staff, about a hundred program managers hired from industry and academia for terms of three to five years, who are given wide latitude and a budget of several billion dollars a year to pursue ambitious goals, accepting that many projects will fail. ARPANET, which DARPA funded beginning in the late 1960s, became the foundation of the internet. Its research contributed to GPS, stealth technology, unmanned aircraft, voice recognition, and early funding for mRNA vaccine technology.

DARPA's Grand Challenge races for driverless vehicles in 2004 and 2005 helped launch the autonomous vehicle industry. The agency's success inspired imitations elsewhere in the government, including ARPA-E for energy in 2009 and ARPA-H for health in 2022. Debates about it center on how to keep its risk-taking culture while making sure breakthroughs move into actual military use, a gap often called the valley of death.