City and NASA sign Agreement about Lab Site

Cambridge and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration yesterday moved one step closer to the construction of NASA's $60 million electronics laboratory in the eastern part of the City M.I.T.

Officials of the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority (CRA) officially agreed transfer 29 acres in Kendall Square SASA for the laboratory. The area acquired by Cambridge under urban renewal laws, and for the past several months, the CRA has been demolishing building on part of the site.

NASA yesterday got title to just a little more than one acre of the cleared land; it will receive another plot of at six acres in the early summer. The agency then, plans to begin construction be complex's first three buildings--5-story tower and two three-story pictures.

Cambridge will transfer the rest of the to NASA over the next four years, the electronics complex will be built stages. A second phase of the project already calls for another 26-story tower two more three-story buildings, a NASA spokesman said yesterday. Planning for a third phase has not begun yet, more buildings are anticipated.

When completed, the NASA research laboratory will be one of the largest of kind in the country. NASA officials continually stressed the proximity of M.I.T. and Harvard as the chief reason locating the laboratory in Cambridge other than any other part of the metro-urban area.

The electronics complex is located almost adjacent to M.I.T., and many local observers have termed the laboratory "a third Tech campus." They single out James R. Killian, chairman of the M.I.T. Corporation, as one of the chief moving forces behind bringing NASA to Kendall Square.

Yesterday's ceremony was held in NASA'S temporary quarters at Technology Square, a large private development located near the site of the electronics laboratory.