Defense Navigation Satellite Systems Proposed Prior to GPS

Roger L. Easton, Thomas B. McCaskill

Abstract:	Several scenarios describing the start of the Global Positioning System (GPS) have been presented. These stretch all the way from someone dreaming up the system in the dark of night, to its being a derivative of Transit, to "it was developed by the Department of De-fense (DoD) primarily for the U.S. military to provide precise estimates of position, velocity, and time". This quoted sentence narrows the size of the source from a few billion people to something close to one million. Wouldn't it be nice to narrow the possibilities to a smaller number? We are often told that the system started in 1973. Some say it was designed on Labor Day weekend of that year. However, were there no concepts existing before this date? Was it designed from scratch on that weekend? The answer is that the design started long before 1973. Fortu-nately, we have a snapshot of this development at the EASCON '69 meeting, held October 27-29, 1969 at the Sheraton Park Hotel in Washington, DC. Three articles given at that meeting [1], [2], [3] are of special interest: "Low-Altitude Navigation Satellite System" by R.B. Kershner of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), "Mid-Altitude Navigation Satellites" by R.L. Easton of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), and "Satellite Systems for Navigation using 24-Hour Orbits" by J.B. Woodward, W.C. Melton & R.L. Dutcher, of the Aerospace Corporation. We plan to summarize all three papers to give the audience an idea of GPS proposals before GPS ex-isted. We also summarize a prior paper [4] "Study of Sat-ellites for Navigation" by Roy E. Anderson of General Electric (GE) made under contract to the National Aero-nautics and Space And Space Administration (NASA).
Published in:	Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1999) June 27 - 30, 1999 Royal Sonesta Hotel Cambridge, MA
Pages:	57 - 61
Cite this article:	Easton, Roger L., McCaskill, Thomas B., "Defense Navigation Satellite Systems Proposed Prior to GPS," Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1999), Cambridge, MA, June 1999, pp. 57-61.
Full Paper:	ION Members/Non-Members: 1 Download Credit Sign In