Professional History

My first professional job, out of school, was as a test equipment designer at Autonetics. I was due to enter AF pilot training, and the date for reporting kept being pushed back, so I needed a job. I as eventually called to active duty and entered pilot training, but found out I wasn't much of a pilot, and washed out. I was posted to a SAC Test and Training Unit, the 394 Strategic Missile Training Squadron (Minuteman missile), stationed at Vandenberg AFB, California. While it was a reasonably exciting time, the testing was for reliability statistics, and wasn't that advanced. I wanted to be involved at an earlier point in development, and for that matter, wanted at that time to be involved more in research. While the AF was involved in some research, the research slots were very few. I decided to return to school for a Master's degree, and go to work in private industry.

My research interests at that time were aimed at magnetosphere research, mapping out newly discovered phenomena such as the Van Allen radiation belt. My adviser was heavily into plasma physics, which was then an exciting field. My thesis project involved microwave radiometry on a high power, high density plasma.

With graduation imminent, I interviewed with a number of organizations, including a few NASA centers. I ended up at McDonnell Co., soon to become McDonnell Douglas Corporation, in the McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Co. . They were gearing up to work extensions to the Gemini capsule, and soon to work on what was known as the Apollo Applications program. This was a program in parallel, and somewhat later than, the lunar landings, and intended to use the Apollo hardware for scientific research in Earth orbit. My role was developing advanced scientific instrumentation. I learned that I was as happy designing scientific instruments as doing the research using these instruments.

The Apollo Applications program was stillborn, and never came to be. My group then began development of technology for earth resources satellites. While McDonnell was winning new programs, all the programs I worked seemed to be jinxed, and RCA won the first earth resources satellite. I then worked on the Viking spacecraft to Mars, and the space telescope, which eventually became the Hubble. But we lost the bids for those programs also. I did have a chance to work on Skylab, one of my few space projects that actually flew. I began to specialize more and more in electro-optics and EO sensors.

Then followed over a decade of military R & D, mostly on infrared trackers and infrared cameras such as FLIRs. On one program I needed some very special lenses for a laser homing seeker I was working on.  At first, I wrote my own lens design program on an HP desktop computer.  Then, our company leased the ACCOS-GOALS program, the predecessor of today's ACCOS lens design software.  I did put in a year or so as a lens designer, and often ran this software later to charactorize optics we intended to use on our sensors.

During some work one of our old associates had moved to Fairchild, who were developing CCD imaging chips.  We brought in a chip for evaluation, but did not use it in any of our work.  I was  fascinated by solid state imagers, however, and did work on the theory of the performance of these chips.  I did a numerical investigation of the MTF of discrete sampling imagers, some of the first work done in the area.  However, since I was bootlegging time, I could not ask management for permission to publish anything on the work.

The last seven or eight years at McDonnell Douglas involved an ongoing program to protect optical sensors against the threat of laser weapons in space. While much of this work is still classified, it represented some of my best technical work, and the majority of my published papers.

During this program I worked extensively with the Honeywell Technology Center in Minneapolis, and when, in 1983 we decided to move from St. Louis to a more northerly climate, I joined the center, in Minneapolis. The first few years were again with electro-optical sensors, supporting a Honeywell division that produced such sensors. However, Honeywell decided to sell that division. In the meantime I had become section chief of the Advanced Optical Sensors section. The sale of that division meant much less demand for optical sensors, my section was soon absorbed into another section, and I returned (happily) to technical work. One highlight of this period was a temporary assignment to a Honeywell division in Florida to work on the Space Station Freedom star tracker.

The reduction in demand for optical sensors meant that I had to pick up a second technology, and the section I joined was developing a fine new magnetic sensor. We developed a strategy t0 bring our aerospace technology into ground transportation technology. One program was sponsored by the FAA, to develop sensors to precisely track aircraft on an airport's surface. A number of collisions, some involving a number of fatalities, have occurred between aircraft on the ground at airports. This effort is moving very slowly, and while it continues, I have been working on other things.

We developed a fascinating method of providing lateral guidance for automobiles or other highway vehicles, that could be used for automated highways of the future. This system uses our magnetic sensor to measure the magnetic fields around a 3M magnetized traffic marking tape. 3M has been more progressive in marketing this system than Honeywell, so look at their SmartTape web site.

That project seems to be too futuristic for continued development, and while I am the HTC advocate for this technology, I needed something for full time activity. My latest work involves laser Doppler anemometry. Our first applications are for military aircraft, but we see a number of other applications, including wind shear and tip vortex tracking at airports.

Bibliography of papers;

D. R. Stauffer, "Optical Effects of Shock Front on Nose Mounted Optics," Applied Optics, March 1974.

D. R. Stauffer and S. J. Babjack, "Protection of Scanning Infrared Sensors from Laser Threats by the Use of Non-Linear Materials," Proc. 18th IRIS IR Countermeasures Symposium, April 1980.

R. G. Wagner, A. G. Hogg, K. V. Richmond, D. R. Stauffer, and E. W. Youngling, "Hybrid Simulation of an Imaging Infrared Target Acquisition System," Proc. of IRIS Imaging Specialty Group, May 1975.

D. R. Stauffer et al., " Satellite Materials Hardening (SMATH), Vol. II, Optical Payloads," AFML TR-73-105, August 1978.

D. R. Stauffer et al., " Satellite Materials Hardening (SMATH) Component Demonstration, Vol. II, Optical Payloads," AFML TR-83-4005, March 1983,

J. M. Schlupf, A.B. Whitaker, J. E. Carroll, and D. R. Stauffer, "Missile Warning Set Simulation," Proc. 24th IRIS Symposium on IR Countermeasures, Oct. 1987.

D. R. Stauffer, J. Bergstrom, and N. Pequinot, "A Spectrally Agile Missile Threat Warning System," Proc. 27th Symposium on IR Countermeasures, April 1989.

D. R. Stauffer, B. Haas, B. Cole, "Performance of a Thermal Scene Generator," Proc. SPIE Conference- Infrared Systems and Components III, (Vol. 1050), 1989.

D. R. Stauffer, G. F. Rouse, and H. B. French, "Solid State Magnetic Azimuth Sensor for Small Satellites," Proc. SPIE Small Satellite Technology and Applications, Vol. 1495, April 1991.

D. R. Stauffer and B. Cole, "Thermal Scene Projectors Using Microemitters," Optical Engineering, Vol. 30, No. 11, Nov. 1991.

D. R. Stauffer, H. French, J. Lenz, and G. Rouse, "A Multi-Sensor Approach to Airport Surface Traffic Tracking," Proc. 12th Digital Avionics Systems Conference, Oct. 1993.

D.R. Stauffer, M. Barrett, N. Demma, T.J. Dahlin, "Magnetic Lateral Guidance Sensors for Automated Highways," Proc. Collision Avoidance and Automated Traffic Management Sensors, Philadelpia, PA, October 1995.