Harold R. Kaufman (born November 24, 1926 - January 4, 2018) was an American physicist, noted for his development of electrostatic ion thrusters for NASA during the 1950s and 1960s. Kaufman developed a compact ion source based on electron bombardment, the "Kaufman Ion Source," a variant of the duoplasmatron, for the purpose of spacecraft propulsion.[1]
Born in Audubon, Iowa, USA, in 1926, Kaufman grew up in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.[2] He trained in electrical engineering during World War II through an electronic technician program in the US Navy. After the war ended, he took a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Northwestern University.[3] After college he joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the predecessor of NASA, working on turbo jet engines[4] at the Lewis Research Center (now NASA Glenn) in Cleveland.
He then moved to a group studying electric space propulsion. After concluding that a Von Ardenne source was insufficient, he developed the electron bombardment source in 1958/1959,[5] and was responsible for the development of two ion thrusters that were tested in space (SERT-1 and SERT-II missions).[6] The Kaufman ion source is now also used for other applications, such as ion implanters used in semiconductor processing.
Kaufman was awarded a Ph.D. from Colorado State University (CSU) in 1970, and an Exceptional Scientific Achievement Award by NASA in 1971.[3] He joined CSU as staff in 1974, then left academia in 1984 to work at Kaufman & Robinson, Inc., in Fort Collins, Colorado. He invented the end-Hall ion source in 1989.[7]
In 1991, the AVS awarded him its Albert Nerkin Award.[8] In September 2016, Kaufman was inducted into the NASA Hall of Fame for his advances in ion propulsion.[9]
He was a professor emeritus of the CSU department of physics.[10]
