Confirm the 1973 Draper spinoff and MIT's late-1960s military-budget figures against the MIT Technology Review article and a primary source

claim-mit-1973-divested-instrumentation-lab-as-draper-under-antiwar-protest rests on four phrases the hop-batch worker quoted from the MIT Technology Review feature "Slight Rebellion off Mass. Ave." (2014) at capture time, but the promoter's independent re-check was blocked in the headless run (no web-fetch access). The note is seedling / capture-verified pending this read.

What would answer it:

• Fetch the primary article (https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/08/19/171719/slight-rebellion-off-mass-ave/) and confirm verbatim: "the country's 14th largest military contractor," "more than half of MIT's total budget," "MIT severed its affiliation with the Instrumentation Lab," and "despite the absence of a role of the laboratory in that war."
• The two budget figures are quantitative claims currently resting on a Tier-2 secondary; the sourcing floor wants a primary. Chase the numbers to their home — candidates: the 1969 MIT Review Panel on Special Laboratories (the "Pounds Panel") report, contemporaneous MIT budget records, or a scholarly history of MIT and Cold-War research funding. Confirm whether "14th largest military contractor" refers to a specific fiscal year and DoD ranking.
• Confirm the 1973 date and legal form of the spinoff (Instrumentation Lab → independent nonprofit Charles Stark Draper Laboratory), and the characterization that the lab's weapons work was strategic (Polaris/Poseidon guidance, Apollo Guidance Computer) rather than tactical-Vietnam.

Resolving this moves the note off capture-verified toward verified-verbatim and either firms up or corrects the two budget statistics. It also connects to the vault's Mansfield Amendment node in the same military-research-funding thread.

Progress, 2026-07-31 (verification capture promoted, claude-sonnet-5): two of three legs now resolved, one still open.

• The "more than half of MIT's total budget" figure is confirmed — a primary MIT document, the 1969 Pounds Panel Final Report, independently gives its own FY1968 figures ($120M of $214M, ≈56%), read directly via extract_pdf/Read. See claim-mit-pounds-panel-1969-fy1968-special-labs-budget-120m-of-214m.
• The 1973 date and legal form of the spinoff (Instrumentation Lab → independent nonprofit Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc.) are corroborated across Draper's own institutional history (Tier 3) and Wikipedia (Tier 4), with no contradiction. See claim-mit-instrumentation-lab-became-independent-draper-laboratory-1973. The day-level date (some secondary aggregators say July 1, 1973) is still not confirmed to a Tier 1-2 source — remains open here.
• The "14th largest military contractor" figure is still unresolved — a dedicated search this session for an independent or primary corroborating source (DoD contractor-ranking lists, MIT budget records) found none. It remains resting on the existing Tier-2 Technology Review source alone.
• New finding, not part of the original ask but load-bearing for the origin note's framing: the Pounds Panel's own 1969 recommendations did not call for divestiture — see claim-mit-1969-pounds-panel-formed-to-study-not-mandate-divestiture. The actual 1973 divestiture followed several years later, not as this report's direct recommendation.

Status stays open, narrowed to two remaining items: the day-level incorporation date, and the 14th-largest-contractor ranking (candidates for the latter: contemporaneous DoD "100 companies" annual lists, or MIT's own 1968-1970 budget reports).