MFTF was the ultimate development of a series of machines at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) that trace their history back to the early 1950s.

Having secured a massive budget increase, and desiring a second design in case the tokamak didn't pan out, a study of the alternative concepts suggested the best developed was the mirror.

It was designed and built at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), one of the primary research centers for mirror fusion devices.

[1] Following on from the earlier Baseball II device, the facility was originally a similar system in which the confinement area was located between two horseshoe-shaped "mirrors".

During construction the success of the Tandem Mirror Experiment ("TMX") led to a redesign to insert a solenoid area between two such magnets, dramatically improving confinement time from a few milliseconds to over one second.

Limited to break-even energy balance, the magnetic mirror endcaps consumed power, but much less than that produced in a solenoid of sufficient length.

[3] In 2021, the project was cited as a case study of the hypothetical demon of Bureaucratic Chaos, which "blocks good things from happening" at the United States Department of Energy.