Transit begins operational satellite navigation

The U.S. Navy launched Transit 1B to solve a specific problem: submarines needed to know their exact position before firing long-range missiles, but couldn't surface often enough to check landmarks or stars. A submarine could only get a position fix when a Transit satellite happened to pass overhead, roughly once every hour or two, and the calculation itself took several minutes. That's far slower than modern GPS, which updates continuously. But Transit proved the underlying idea from Sputnik tracking worked as a real operational system, not just a research finding, laying essential groundwork before anyone had funded a system meant for everyday, continuous use.