GPS Declassified

by Richard D. Easton

  The Global Positioning System, now so universally recognized that the Associated Press uses the GPS acronym without elaboration, was not yet complete when Romero was born.3 The first GPS satellite was launched in 1978, two decades after the Soviet Union surprised the West with its launch of Sputnik, but the twenty-fourth satellite—the minimum number required to provide uninterrupted, round-the-clock coverage worldwide—did not go into orbit until 1994. That was three years after the Soviet Union dissolved and three decades after the first conceptual schemes for such a system emerged in the 1960s.

  Over the course of five decades, the development of GPS has featured scientific genius and foresight, interservice rivalries among the branches of the military, defense contractor controversies, cancellations, delays and budget cuts, stunning success on the battlefield, and impressive entrepreneurial innovation—all against the backdrop of shifting foreign policy, wars, recessions, and unexpected events beyond the confines of the program. By the fall of 2009, when OnStar recorded that first successful carjacking intervention, what began as a classified Cold War military program had spawned a private-sector GPS industry with a multitude of uses dwarfing those related to defense and a global market in the tens of billions of dollars. Despite varying estimates of the size of the global market, most analysts predict a combined annual growth rate above 20 percent through 2016.4

  GPS is at once a simple concept and a vastly complex technology. Stripped of the intricate math and physics—in this case, it is rocket science that makes the system possible—GPS may best be understood as a set of free radio signals available worldwide that enables scores of individual applications requiring precise positioning, navigation, or timing. Although GPS achieved fame first for its ability to guide bombs accurately and later for changing the way people find their way around, its ability to synchronize time across vast distances—a key element of its origin—now enables the smooth flow of electronic data across worldwide networks. The degree to which private industry has leveraged this free service is phenomenal, making GPS a vital public utility today.

  For example, OnStar, with more than 2 million subscribers in 2009, generated a billion dollars for GM, even as the automaker faced bankruptcy and survived only with a federal government bailout.5 By 2013 OnStar boasted more than 6.4 million subscribers in the United States, Canada, and China, and nearly a million GM vehicle owners used its RemoteLink mobile phone app to remotely access OnStar services.6 The company also created FMV (For My Vehicle), an aftermarket replacement rearview mirror with an OnStar button, making many of its services available in other manufacturers’ vehicles, but rival carmakers have quickly ramped up their own similar systems. Considering that more than four hundred people die and many more sustain injuries each year in high-speed police pursuits, it is no surprise that law enforcement officials share vehicle owners’ enthusiasm for the vehicle slowdown feature.7 “It helped us not only recover a vehicle for a local citizen, but also prevented a dangerous high-speed chase and allowed us to quickly apprehend a suspect ,” said Sgt. Steven Phillips of the Visalia police. “It’s a win for everyone. ”8

  Or nearly everyone. Cable news channels televise high-speed police chases hoping viewers will stay glued to their screens in anticipation of a dramatic conclusion. The advent of electronic news gathering using helicopters made live aerial coverage of automobile chases a common feature of television newscasts by the mid-1990s.9 With the emergence of a twenty-four-hour news cycle, the ability of local news operations to instantly uplink their video to national cable networks, and the celebrity factor embodied in the iconic 1994 slow-speed chase of O. J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco, cable news found a winning formula that presaged the era of “reality ” TV. Cable executives may appreciate this irony: just as satellite technology enabled video crews to take live coverage aloft, the ever-expanding use of GPS satellites now offers the means to make high-speed police pursuits obsolete.10

  A few naysayers worry that GPS will do to our innate sense of direction what keyboards have done to penmanship. Longstanding concerns persist about the technology’s misuse by terrorists or governments, even against their own citizens. But for the most part, the march of GPS technology from the laboratory to the battlefield to everyday life has gained momentum with each passing year, especially since 2000, when the government stopped deliberately degrading the signal provided for civilian use. The boost in accuracy unleashed a torrent of consumer electronics aimed at helping motorists find their way, avoid traffic jams, and locate points of interest. Industry watchers estimated at the end of 2009 that more than a third of U.S. households had at least one personal navigation device (PND), and when in-dash vehicle systems and GPS-enabled phones were included, the figure rose to more than 55 percent.11

  When CNN launched, in mid-2008, a new program covering world events, Fareed Zakaria GPS, viewers had no trouble making the connection when the host announced, “Welcome to the very first edition of ‘Global Public Square.’ ”12

  By the end of 2009, GPS had become such a household word—used interchangeably for the system and the gadgets that use it—that numerous television advertisers were tying their products to its popularity:

  Big-box jewelry retailer Jared showed a man sitting in his car asking a voice navigation system for directions. The unit’s sultry female voice comments on his purchase and refuses to cooperate until he placates “her ” by hanging a necklace around the GPS unit.13

  TurboTax touted its tax preparation software as being as easy to follow as GPS: “These days, if I need to get someplace, I just use the GPS on my cell phone. I get turn-by-turn directions, which show me right where I need to go. I do my taxes the same way, with the TurboTax Federal Free Edition. ”14

  Fidelity Investments adopted a moving green line and the slogan “Turn Here ” to promote its financial and retirement planning services, a clear allusion to turn-by-turn GPS guidance.15

  An ABC News online article in December 2009 listed GPS among its “Top 10 Innovations of the Decade. ”16 A WashingtonPost.com blogger that same month asked his online readers to rank a list of the decade’s top ten consumer tech developments. One week into the voting GPS placed fourth, behind the iPhone, Mozilla Firefox, and the iTunes store.17

  For individuals the GPS revolution is most visible in how they shop and travel in their cars and on foot. From 2005 to 2010, consumers accounted for 59 percent of GPS equipment revenues in North America.18 Mobile phone apps are increasing consumer exposure to GPS. By January 2013, 129.4 million Americans owned smartphones, or about 55 percent of the nation’s 235 million mobile phone subscribers.19 By 2016 there are projected to be 1 billion smartphones in use worldwide and 340 million mobile subscribers using a turn-by-turn navigation app or service.20 While analysts expect PND sales to decline by about 40 percent through 2016 as users shift to phones, at the end of 2011 there were 150 million PNDs in use worldwide and 60 million factory-installed and aftermarket in-dash systems, ensuring they, too, will remain a key part of many people’s daily lives.21

  Most GPS users need not know and probably do not care how the technology works or where the satellites and ground stations transmitting the signals are located. But casual users should be aware that the satellite platform they rely upon for GPS service is one more example of public infrastructure—like bridges, highways, and water mains—that ages and that government finds increasingly costly and challenging to maintain. Those who do not personally own or use GPS devices—from the standpoint of mobile phones, that is becoming a rarity—might consider the issue irrelevant, but they should know that the technology now touches virtually everyone and every sector of society. In addition to military use and personal navigation, GPS has become indispensable for a host of commercial applications in aviation and space operations, trucking and shipping, fishing and boating, agriculture and forestry, surveying and mapping, grading and construction, and mining and oil exploration. Beyond positioning and navigation, GPS now provides atomic-clock accuracy for the
synchronization and split-second timing needs of telecommunications and data systems, financial networks, and electric power grids.22 A recent study estimated that GPS technology would provide U.S. commercial users annual direct economic benefits between $67.6 billion and $122.4 billion as its adoption by commercial users approaches 100 percent.23

  As entrepreneurs have imagined new uses for GPS, demand for better accuracy has led to multiple ground- and space-based systems that augment the satellite signals. Other nations are developing their own versions of GPS, giving rise to the generic term GNSS, for any global navigation satellite system. While nations pledge to make their GNSS systems work together, they actively compete with one another as they do in all other areas. These systems contribute to an increasingly interconnected and complex world in which the systems’ interoperability, sustainability, and security create political and economic issues affecting the entire population.

  Recognizing the growing demands for positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services and the need to set clear policies involving the use of GPS, President George W. Bush issued a directive in 2004 creating a National Executive Committee for Space-Based PNT.24 President Barack Obama reaffirmed the commitment to GPS in 2010 as part of his National Space Policy directive.25

  Addressing the PNT advisory board in November 2009, Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said that global navigation satellite systems today are better understood as information technology infrastructure than merely as aerospace products.26 With such a large installed user base, he said, introducing new signals or systems resembles rolling out new computer operating software, with similar concerns about backward compatibility and users’ willingness and ability to upgrade. Everyone who has endured the learning curve of a new software program or deliberated over the purchase of a new computer that would necessitate costly upgrades can identify with that statement and appreciate where the GPS marketplace now stands. But, far more than the computer or consumer electronics industries, how GPS evolves depends on what the government does. That makes understanding the history of GPS development helpful for anyone hoping to construct informed opinions about public policies regarding its future.

  This book attempts to present that history—from the scientific breakthroughs that made such a system possible to the people and institutions that oversaw its development—in an accessible manner for a general audience. As with planning a trip using GPS guidance, multiple options were available to tell this story. This work aims to strike a balance between following the shortest, most direct route and making sure readers visit the most important points of interest. At the end, you should have a better understanding of a technology that continues to revolutionize how humans travel, how we work and play, and perhaps even how we think.

  1

  New Moons Rising: The Satellite Age Arrives

  From the vantage point of 2100 A.D., the year 1957 will most certainly stand in history as the year of man’s progression from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional geography. It may well stand also, as the point in time at which intellectual achievement forged ahead of weapons and national wealth as instruments of national policy.

  Geophysicist Lloyd V. Berkner, Foreign Affairs, January 1958

  Two seconds after liftoff and four feet into its flight, the Vanguard rocket stalled as if held by an invisible tether and sagged back toward the launch pad. As the bottom of the first stage, filled with liquid oxygen and kerosene propellant, crumpled against the platform, the engine’s orange exhaust erupted into a massive fireball that engulfed the tottering seventy-two-foot rocket. In the final moment before flames obscured its tip, the nose cone could be seen breaking free.1 Under that cone was a grapefruit-size aluminum sphere with batteries and transmitters packed inside and a half-dozen solar cells and antennas attached outside. The entire twenty-two-thousand-pound, three-stage rocket assembly, which an Associated Press story described as “a ton of metal and 10 tons of fuel ,” had been designed for the sole purpose of hurling the three-and-a-quarter-pound ball three hundred miles above Earth.2 For the United States, the effort of putting its first satellite into orbit had gotten off to a dismal start—in full view of millions of Americans who watched televised images of the conflagration on the evening news on December 6, 1957.

  Few people watching that night would have believed that, within a decade, the same scientist who designed that first tiny U.S. satellite would conceive a multi-satellite system for determining the precise location and exact time anywhere on the planet or in the air. By the time the forerunners of GPS were hitting the drawing boards, the public had shifted its attention to the race to put men on the moon. Plans for a global satellite-based navigation system, largely classified and visionary beyond what most of the military brass saw as practical, would have to wait years for technical advances and conventional thinking to catch up. However, any discussion of GPS must begin with the launching of the first man-made satellites at the dawn of the space age. The system’s DNA traces directly back to the technologies, the scientists, and the military institutions that participated in what sometimes has been called “the first space race. ”3

  After crews extinguished the fire and began cleaning up the Vanguard launch site, they found the satellite lying on the ground. It survived a seven-story fall, a 3,500-degree inferno, and being doused with tons of water. Its antennas were bent but the sphere was intact, and ground receivers set up to monitor its orbits confirmed that it was transmitting two radio signals, as designed.4 Martin Votaw, who built the small transmitters (using early transistors in place of vacuum tubes), was listening as the satellite made its short journey to the ground. Votaw went to the launch pad to retrieve it. “There it was, clean as a whistle ,” he recalled clearly in an interview fifty-two years later.5 He placed the battered satellite in a brown cardboard box and took it to the man who led its design team, thirty-six-year-old Roger Easton, future head of the Space Applications Branch at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL).

  “What should we do with it? ” Votaw asked.

  “Take it home, I guess ,” Easton replied.6

  In a move that today would provoke intense questioning, if not an airport lockdown, Easton nonchalantly carried the box with the satellite aboard a commercial flight back to Washington DC.7 “It sat on our kitchen table overnight ,” his daughter, Ruth, recalled.8 Easton delivered the satellite to John P. Hagen, director of Project Vanguard, who later donated it to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, where it remains today.9

  Fig. 1.1. Roger Easton (upper right) and Martin Votaw (below, seated) look on as the National Air and Space Museum’s David Devorkin opens the Vanguard TV-3 satellite in 2008, during a fiftieth anniversary gathering. Chris Hagen, son of Vanguard Project director John P. Hagen, points at the artifact. (Courtesy Roger Easton Jr.)

  Bad Press

  While Vanguard personnel busied themselves repairing the launch facility and readying a backup rocket, the public reacted with panic. The incident plunged the nation, already in a state of high anxiety following the Soviet Union’s two successful Sputnik launches, on October 4 and November 3, into a period of humiliation, second guessing, finger pointing, and political jockeying. “Vanguard Rocket Burns on Beach; Failure to Launch Test Satellite Assailed as Blow to U.S. Prestige ,” read the headline in the New York Times the next morning.10 “Oh What a Flopnik! ” chided the London Daily Herald.11 “How about some relentless looking around for possible sabotage? ” the New York Daily News asked.12 The Baltimore-based Glenn L. Martin Company, the prime contractor for the Vanguard rockets, and General Electric, the subcontractor for the engines, blamed each other for the problem.13 Sell orders forced New York Stock Exchange officials to halt trading in Martin’s stock the day after the explosion.14 The launch pad fiasco came just eleven days after a brash Texas senator with presidential ambitions, Lyndon Baines Johnson, began hearings on Sputnik in the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee. That same day, November 25,
President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a mild stroke. Many wondered if he was healthy enough to continue as president, and there were some calls for him to step down.15 American preeminence in world affairs and military and technological prowess, taken for granted since the end of World War II, was being openly questioned, as evidenced by Johnson remarking after the Vanguard failure, “How long, how long, oh God, how long will it take us to catch up with the Russians’ two satellites? ”16

  From a modern perspective, with partisan bickering over foreign affairs routine and lack of faith in government pervasive, the reaction to the Sputnik launches and Vanguard failure may not seem unusual, but Americans viewed the federal government differently then. A 2013 Pew Research Center survey found only 26 percent of Americans trusted the government to do what is right “just about always ” or “most of the time. ” That is slightly better than 2010, when the figure was 22 percent, but the trend has been mostly downward for decades. When Pew first polled the question of trust in government in 1958, as part of the National Election Study, 73 percent said they trusted the government to do what is right most of the time.17

  The satellite woes came at a time when American idealism was being shattered in popular culture as well. Over the preceding decade, television had transformed American home life. About 3.9 million U.S. households, less than one in ten, had a television in 1950.18 By 1957, the figure had grown to 38.9 million of the nation’s 49.5 million households, nearly four in five.19 TV advertising expenditures reflected the growing power of the industry. Between 1950 and 1960, ad spending on television grew ninefold, from $170 million to $1.53 billion, propelling the medium past radio and magazines and fueling a trend toward newspaper consolidation.20 But the TV business was rocked by scandal when it became public in 1957 that quiz shows—so popular they represented five of the top eight shows—were rigged.21 Later in the year, the public also learned that record companies were giving kickbacks—“payola ”— to radio disc jockeys.22 With or without in-home television, every American could witness the Vanguard explosion via grainy, black-and-white Defense Department footage in a Universal-International newsreel titled “Satellite a Bust: Rocket Blows Up in First U.S. Try. ” Narrator Ed Herlihy, whose distinctive broadcast voice most people would recognize even if they don’t know his name, laments, “What happened is already unhappy history—another setback for the United States in the race into outer space. ”23