
Can America’s Premier Lightning Lab Revive Its Renegade Spirit? - pseudolus
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lightning-lab
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boulos
My immediate question was “what’s their annual budget anyway?”.

It seems like the lab is funded primarily from its initial endowment, and that
for 2017 they only needed an extra $225k [1]. What’s unclear is whether the
additional support from NMT has stopped, NSF / grant funding for the equipment
and studies has dried up, or something else.

I couldn’t find any other details on the Langmuir Trust/Endowment.

[1]
[https://www.nmt.edu/leadership/minutes/regents_minutes_septe...](https://www.nmt.edu/leadership/minutes/regents_minutes_september_2016.pdf)

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ianai
If what they need are more lightning bolts then they may need to branch out -
For instance I’ve heard Los Alamos has higher than average incidence of
lightning.

It sounds more like they’re short on funds and students. It might be hard to
draw students with the large vacuum of the tech industry sucking up all the
best talent. So maybe they need a private industry “pivot”? Ie look for
applications which could lead to patents and companies looking to develop them
into products? Just articles like this are good though for drawing public
interest.

