Charles Stark Draper

Charles Stark Draper was an American scientist and engineer, widely known as the 'father of inertial navigation,' who founded and directed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Instrumentation Laboratory, later renamed the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in his honor. His laboratory designed and built the Apollo Guidance Computer and its associated inertial guidance system, the onboard navigation technology that allowed the Apollo spacecraft to determine their position and orient themselves for course corrections, lunar orbit insertion and landing without relying solely on ground-based tracking, a contract NASA awarded MIT in 1961 as the very first piece of hardware commissioned for the Apollo program. Draper's earlier work on inertial guidance systems during and after the Second World War had already made him a central figure in American missile and aircraft navigation technology, and he personally offered to fly on an early Apollo mission to demonstrate his confidence in the guidance system's reliability, an offer NASA declined. He received the National Medal of Science in 1964.