[MUSIC]
I'm Jeff Hoffman, Professor
in the AeroAstro department.
Today when we hear
the name Draper
it evokes images of a
splendid building, which
houses an excitingly productive
applied research organization,
but 50 years ago, when the
Apollo program that we're
celebrating today
was approaching
that climactic
first moon landing,
the name Draper evoke the image
of a man, Professor Charles
Stark Draper.
Who, as you heard
from Dan Hastings,
led the MIT
instrumentation lab, which
was part of our
department at the time,
and he was department head.
So before we begin
this symposium where
we're going to bring together
some of the instrumentation lab
engineers who developed the
Apollo guidance and navigation
system with some of
the Apollo astronauts
who used and really
depended on those systems,
we thought it would be nice
to hear a few words about Doc
Draper the man, personally,
from Professor Larry Young, who,
back in the day,
was lucky enough
to have had Doc Draper as
a mentor and, for a time,
as an employer.
So, Larry.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Jeff and colleagues.
Let me tell you, compared to
being a principal investigator
and a crew member, there
is a tougher job and that
is following Charlie Bolden.
Charlie, you don't
make it easy, but I'm
delighted to call you a friend.
Yeah.
In many ways, [? MIT ?] and
Apollo started with Doc.
Occasionally a dreamer
with unbounded optimism
combines solid science
with the skills
of a really handy handyman,
and one of the handiest
these people can turn
this dream into reality.
And certainly one of them
was Charles Stark Draper,
who we see on the roof
of the Instrumentation
Laboratory with the optical
and navigation suite
that the instrumentation
lab designed for the Apollo
missions.
Now, when we talk about
inertial navigation,
yes it's true the father
of inertial navigation
was Maximilian Schuler,
a German physicist who
published the idea in 1923.
But the godfather, in
the sense, the person
who pulled together a team and
supported him and made it work
was certainly Doc.
After his work with the
Instrumentation Laboratory
on developing gun sights,
which were largely
credited with winning
the war in the Pacific,
Doc recognized that in order to
maintain a stable navigations
platform for a very
long period of time,
more than just the maneuvering
time of an airplane,
he would need to
reduce the friction
and the disturbance
torques in the gimbals that
supported the gyroscope,
which was the stable reference
scheme.
And with Professor
Robert Mueller here
in the MIT Aero department,
he incorporated a couple
of major new innovations in
gyroscopes which really enabled
long term inertial navigation.
First, they took the instrument
and they floated it in a fluid.
So when G-forces came along,
instead of the instrument being
forced out to the
edge of the bearing,
it would continue to
float neutrally and spin
without external and unwanted
disturb disturbance torques.
And then, when it did
move slightly off center,
they realized that they could
use electromagnetic forces that
have a magnetic
suspension, which
would bring the gyro bearing
back to its neutral positions.
Well, it's a long story which
we don't have time for now,
but it succeeded in
generating gyroscopes which
would drift at only about
hundredth of a degree per hour,
and that indeed was
the key to what enabled
inertial navigation
in submarines
under the polar caps, airplanes
flying across the continent,
and enable them to propose
a guidance system which
became the Apollo system.
Now, Draper's enthusiasm
infected students like me.
You see, I found my
Instrumentation Laboratory
badge, so if they'll be
let me back in there.
His enthusiasm infected
students and colleagues alike,
and he regularly
married hardware
to the underlying
theory in his lectures
and in his discussions.
Doc began teaching
at MIT in the '30s.
He came over here
in 1922, by 1951
he was appointed Head of
MIT's Aero department,
while continuing, as we heard,
to lead the Instrumentation
Laboratory.
That's where I came in.
In 1957, 62 years ago.
I had more hair--
it was brown--
and I was a senior
in electrical
engineering here at MIT
and needed to write
a bachelor's thesis
and the Instrumentation Lab
was the first place to do this.
With patient help,
from an experience what
Doc would call electronica, I
designed a vacuum tube analog
to digital converter for
use in navigation systems.
After graduating and working
for Sperry gyroscope, which
had supported Draper
early on and following
a Fulbright in France,
Sputnik was launched.
And I became a Space Cadet
on October 4th, 1957.
I was grateful to be
accepted back into MIT--
thank you, Jim Nevins--
brought me back into the
Instrumentation Laboratory
and into a program called
the instrumentation
doctoral program.
And in keeping with Doc
Draper's legendary record--
you know that he had the record
for taking more courses at MIT
than anyone ever has--
that program in instrumentation
required that we pass--
Charlie, can I use my fingers?
One, two, three, four, five
departmental qualifying exams,
and two languages.
Once you got through
that, however,
you felt reasonably comfortable
with a wide range of hardware
and instrumentations.
And I want to relate
just one story
about being a
student under Draper
and then I'll
yield the platform.
Because it tells more about
Doctor than it does about me.
So I was searching for a thesis
topic, and quite by accident
I learned a little bit about the
vestibular system, the balance
organ in the inner ear.
Most of us are familiar
with it for motion sickness,
but it's our balance mechanism.
And I saw the parallels
between the semicircular canals
in the inner ear and rate gyros,
and between the otolith organs
in the inner ear and
linear accelerometers,
and maybe even between
the central nervous system
and an onboard computer.
And I thought this might
be a really cool thing
to look at for a PhD thesis.
I went to see Draper up on the
fifth floor of the old shoe
polish factory out
on Albany Street.
And there followed the
most important hour
in my entire educational career.
Doc greeted me cordially
and listened to my pitch
to measure and model human
eye movements, the parallels
to inertial guidance,
and he told me
that when he was an
undergraduate at Stanford
he majored in psychology
and furthermore,
that he knew all about eye
movements and he liked my idea.
And he said he would fully
support it, both intellectually
and financially.
And he told Professor
[? Widmark ?]
to oversee the use of
the instrumentation fund
to support me.
And he recruited a
fantastic professor,
[? Yao ?] [? Tsu ?] [? Li ?]
to give me guidance and adult
supervision.
My thesis work involving sample
data systems was well received.
Draper offered me a
position, which I accepted
in the Aero department.
We began our studies of
space motion sickness, which
at the time NASA
called Space Adaptation
Systems, because space
adaptation is good
and the right stuff.
But we proceeded to
make our mark out
and flew experiments anywhere,
from Mir all the way up
through the International
Space Station.
Most important for me, Doc
made me his collaborator--
could I see that, get that
next slide up-- let's see,
I can do this, maybe--
Doc made me his
collaborator on a paper
which attracted some attention
both at home and abroad.
"The Roles of Men
and Instruments
in Control and Guidance
Systems for Spacecraft"
by Draper, Whitaker, and Young.
And I'll tell you, to have a
paper co-authored by Draper
in those days was something.
He was president of
the International
Academy of Astronautics.
He was well known on both
sides of the Iron Curtain,
and I was privileged
to be recognized
as his co-author, given
lots and lots of vodka,
and welcomed warmly into the
International Space sphere.
Let me tell you that
the instrument--
the intimate relationships
between the Aero department
and the Instrumentation
Laboratory,
which began in this
period of the late
'50s and '60s continued well
into the era of the divestment
of the lab, of the renaming
of the Charles Stark Draper
Laboratory, which
hurt Draper greatly,
but that's it that's
another study--
story.
I want to close by telling
you that we have continued
through our laboratory,
the Man Vehicle Laboratory
to train people who
went on to fly in space.
One of my very first
graduate students
is my friend Charlie Duke, who
you'll hear from a little bit
later today.
He studied the accuracy
of tracking a target light
from a moving spacecraft and
then tested it on his way
back from the moon.
Several other
students of our lab
went on to fly on the
space shuttle, and--
I always wanted to go to space.
I got as far as being an
alternate payload specialist
on space lab.
I did my best to try to get
Neil and Buzz, who you see here,
to figure out how they
let me hitchhike a ride,
but I didn't get into space.
Neither did Doc Draper.
But our laboratories
and our colleagues
participated in numerous
space adventures
from Apollo to
the Space Station,
and we here owe the lighting
of our fuse to Doc Draper.
I'm privileged to have
been part of that,
and I have to say thanks, Doc.
[APPLAUSE]
