A Federally Funded Research and Development Center modeled after JPL — led by Oklahoma's research universities, funded by the Department of Defense, and built to produce the unmanned aerospace systems that define the next era of national security.
The lab is named for Donna Shirley, a groundbreaking aerospace engineer born in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, who rose to manage the NASA team at JPL that built and landed the Sojourner rover on Mars in 1997 — the first successful rover mission on another planet.
That was not a small achievement. Sojourner required managing thousands of engineers across multiple NASA centers, navigating Congressional budget scrutiny, building instruments that had never existed before, and landing a vehicle on a planet 200 million miles away on the first attempt. She did it. Oklahoma-born. Pauls Valley-raised.
The Shirley Lab is named in her honor — as an Oklahoma-rooted institution with JPL-tier ambition in unmanned systems. If it can be built for aerospace defense, it will be built here.
Structured as a Federally Funded Research and Development Center, managed jointly by OU and OSU. The same model that gave us JPL, Lincoln Lab, and Sandia. Long-term government contracts. University talent pipelines. Institutional stability.
No commercial drone delivery. No agricultural surveying. Every program, every dollar, every flight hour serves one mission: unmanned aerospace superiority for U.S. national defense. Focus is the multiplier.
Kratos, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics, and emerging defense firms collaborate on-site. Shared test infrastructure. Joint development programs. The gap between lab and production line collapses to zero.
The world's most battle-tested drone operators and manufacturers as formal partners. Combat-proven tactics, rapid iteration cycles, and manufacturing scale that the U.S. defense sector needs but doesn't have domestically.
One of only 14 FAA-licensed spaceports in the United States. One of North America's longest runways. Purpose-built for military training, UAS testing, and advanced air mobility operations. Automated detect-and-avoid systems deployed.
Dedicated ground-level field testing facility for unmanned systems operations. Real-terrain environments for drone deployment, recovery operations, field maintenance protocols, and tactical scenario simulation under controlled conditions.
Ukraine has become the world's leading innovator in military drone warfare. Their manufacturers plan to produce over 3 million FPV combat drones in 2026 alone. The U.S. built 300,000 in all of 2025.
The Shirley Lab formalizes this partnership on American soil. Ukrainian drone expertise, manufacturing velocity, and combat-tested iteration cycles integrated directly into a U.S. national defense laboratory. No other institution offers this.
The U.S. and Ukraine have already drafted a memorandum outlining defense cooperation on drone production and military technology. The Shirley Lab is the institutional home for that collaboration.
The Shirley Lab exists because unmanned aerospace superiority will define the next era of national defense, and the nation that builds the lab builds the future. Oklahoma has the ecosystem. The universities have the talent. The partners have the technology. The mission is clear.