Third History Installment, Project 621B and Beyond

Basic Timeline of GPS Development

GPS World magazine (an outstanding resource, by the way) published the outline below.  I’ll fill in some of the spaces between the out;ine bullets with my personal experience .. or critiques (smile)

Basic Timeline of GPS Development

- Late 1960s, concept development
- Early 1970s, program funding and establishment of a Joint Program Office within the Department of Defense

        Thus, of course, is where those two programs we talked about previously came together (Transit and Timations) as well as an independent Air Force initiative known as Project 621B.  Great early documentation here (with pictures).  During this time I was blissfully unaware of any space programs, spending my working days lugging black boxes back and forth from the flight line and repairing and calibrating them .. star finder systems, doppler radar and even magical ded reconing computers (originally on the Bomarc missiles) that could sometimes tell an aircraft’s position within a few miles.   Cutting edge stuff.

- December 1973, proposal for GPS approved by the Defense System Acquisition and Review Council (DSARC)

- Mid-1970s, ground testing

  By this time I was working in Cheyenne Mountain, the NORAD Command Center Complex.  This was about the time that command and control minds began to realize that this new idea would be useful for a lot more than just knowing where missiles were launched from.  A lot of the testing was done out in the New Mexico desert and it wasn’t only dedicated testing organizations ,,, turns out we had a NORAD mission that even us ‘grunt leverl’ technicians didn’t know we had.  You can discern a lot about what’s happening just by knowing who is talking at each end of a ’secret’ circuit.

- 22 February 1978, launch of the first satellite

- 1986-1989, hiatus following the Challenger space shuttle disaster

- 1989, revived launch program and changes in the design of the satellite constellation

- 1989, Magellan Corporation introduces first hand-held GPS receiver

- January 1990, first issue of GPS World

- January 1991, use of GPS in Operation Desert Storm

- December 1993, declaration of Initial Operational Capability (IOC) by the U.S. Secretary of Defense

- 2 May 2000, SA is turned off by presidential directive; inexpensive civilian GPS receivers increase their horizontal accuracy from “no worse than” 100 meters to 15-25 meters

Tio be continued