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Dr. Jones is a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering. He is not only a significant aeronautical engineer and applied mathematician, but an astronomer, a biomechanist, a violin maker, an author, and an innovator.

[[underlined]] Dr. Charles Stark Draper [[/underlined]] was born on October 2, 1901 in Windsor, Missouri, and received his Sc.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1938. He began investigations of inertial guidance in 1938. In the next ten years, he advanced the technology enough to suggest a combination of stellar and inertial systems to guide a bomber to its target. A B-29 was flown from Bedford, Massachusetts, to Dayton, Ohio, and soon after to Los Angeles in 1948, completely guided by Spatial Inertial Reference Equipment. This effort was later applied to Submarine Inertial Navigation Systems and the launch of the Mark I Polaris guidance system in 1960, and the Mark II guided the extended range 2,500-mile Polaris in 1962. An inertial system guided Titan ICBM launched in 1961 on a 5,000-mile trajectory.

The MIT Instrumentation Lab, under Dr. Draper, undertook its greatest challenge in 1961--the 250,000-mile trip to the moon and back in the Apollo Program. From 1968 to 1972 seven Apollo lunar missions were flown to the moon and returned safely to Earth.

The efforts and brilliance of Dr. Draper span 35 years, starting in World War II, when the U.S. Navy rushed gyroscopic gunsights, designed in the MIT Lab, into use. In its first battle the system enabled the USS [[underlined]] South Dakota [[/underlined]] to down 32 Japanese aircraft.