Raytheon’s campus in Fullerton designs radar, missile defense, and mobile command and control systems, especially for systems manufactured overseas by NATO partners. The site has five buildings and employs several hundred people, but it is just a fragment of what was once one of the largest radar and control systems testing and production centers in the world. It started when Howard Hughes’ Hughes Aircraft purchased 313 acres of orange groves here in 1957, and developed the company’s Ground Systems Group, with 100 buildings and temporary structures, building radar and defense systems for the US and allies. Employment here peaked in the mid 1980s, with 15,000 people working across three million square feet of enclosed space, but shrank at the end of the Cold War. Raytheon purchased most of Hughes Aircraft in 1997, and sold 293 acres of the Fullerton site to developers, who removed the building and testing locations to build a shopping center and hundreds of homes. Raytheon continues to be the nation’s primary supplier of ground systems for radar, missiles, and missile defense, with thousands of workers in El Segundo, and many more in other states.