Timeline milestone
The Pentagon approves a unified GPS programme
From How GPS Became Invisible Infrastructure: Satellites, Smartphones and Precise Time
-
Precursor
The Pentagon approves a unified GPS programme
The U.S. Department of Defense approved NAVSTAR GPS, combining ideas from earlier Navy and Air Force programmes. The design centred on satellites carrying precise clocks and continuous global service.
Before 1973, the Navy and Air Force were separately developing competing satellite navigation systems, each solving pieces of the same problem differently. The Pentagon merged them into a single program, NAVSTAR GPS, built around one core design choice: instead of satellites broadcasting their own position and letting a receiver do complex calculations, each satellite would carry an extremely precise atomic clock and broadcast the exact time. A receiver on the ground could then calculate its own position just by comparing the arrival time of signals from multiple satellites, a much simpler approach that could scale to millions of receivers built by anyone, not just specialized military hardware.
Sources & references 1 source
Continue reading
