GPS Declassified

by Richard D. Easton

  That is all. There was no formal proclamation or presidential speech. (If NSDD 102 addresses civil aviation’s use of GPS, it is unclear why information made public at a press conference would remain classified.) Given the public relations skills that earned Reagan the “great communicator ” tag and the approach he used to announce SDI, it seems safe to say that if the GPS announcement were truly a change in policy, he would have opted to make a bigger splash. In any case, all GPS satellites orbiting at the time of Reagan’s announcement already broadcast two signals—one for the military and another for civilian use.

  In fact, from the earliest days of planning a navigation satellite system, government officials envisioned civilian use. When Deputy Secretary of Defense William P. Clements directed the services to create a joint program in April 1973, his memo included the following instructions: “The Joint Program Office would invite concerned non-DOD government agencies to participate in the DNSDP, including program planning, user equipment design, and system tests. In addition, civil user needs should be considered in the design of the space-borne equipment. ”20 Even before the Pentagon created the joint program in 1973, the top brass instructed NAVSEG, the interservice committee assembled to hammer out a joint navigation satellite system, to add air traffic control to the mix. In a November 2, 1970, memo to NAVSEG members, Chairman Harry Sonnemann wrote,

  The desire to consider how a navigation satellite system could satisfy the air traffic control needs has broadened the scope of the problem. The fact that the air traffic control portion probably should be active, and primarily oriented towards communications has decidedly slowed progress. The ever-tightening budget has also had a braking effect on the desire of the participants to be very positive in stating their needs or making any commitments. Thus, as I leave the chairmanship, I find that we are further away from a solution than when I took over, as the DOD systems concept has become one of the subsets of a national navigation problem.21

  This single paragraph captures the dynamics surrounding early efforts to develop what would become GPS. Just as the Army, Air Force, and Navy had different needs and concerns, the interests of air traffic control were not the same as those of the military, which wanted a passive system—one that broadcast signals without any need for a user to activate it by transmitting a signal that would disclose his location.

  Sticker Shock

  Controlling costs—the original impetus for the Pentagon in seeking a single, multiuser navigation satellite system—remained an ever-present concern. Sonnemann recently recalled that after the Air Force system 621B was deemed too expensive given the number of users—fewer than one thousand aircraft that would be equipped with receivers—other users within the military services as well as from the civilian community were identified and solicited. The response from both quarters was tentative. “A wide range of military and potential civilian applications were identified, but those interested took a ‘wait and see’ position, that is, when the system’s capabilities were verified with on-orbit data and its limitations identified, these potential customers would include GPS as another option to their existing capabilities, but not before ,” Sonnemann wrote.22 This meant that despite its wide range of promising uses, getting GPS funded relied primarily on selling its ability to “drop five bombs in the same hole ,” a slogan that Parkinson, the first joint program manager, posted in his office.23 Precision bombing capability was much on the minds of military leaders at the time, given their experience in the Vietnam War, when the United States conducted the most massive aerial bombardment in history. By weight, the bomb tonnage dropped in Indochina was three times as much as that used in the combined Pacific and European theaters of World War II and fifteen times the amount dropped in the Korean War.24 Fewer bombs delivered more accurately held the promise of lower costs, fewer targeting errors, and reduced casualties among pilots and noncombatants.

  Civil aviation remained on the sidelines during the GPS validation phase, which lasted five years. John McLucas, secretary of the Air Force when the GPS program began, left that post in 1975 to head the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for two years. Despite being such a strong proponent of the system that he ordered a vanity license plate that read “GPS NOW ,” he later admitted, “I could not get the FAA interested in GPS. ”25

  The program faced continuing financial pressures as oil shocks, runaway inflation, and soaring interest rates pummeled the economy for the remainder of the decade. At the beginning of 1973, crude oil was around four dollars per barrel, the annual inflation rate was just over 3 percent, and the U.S. prime lending rate was 9.75 percent.26 By December 1973, when the Defense Systems Acquisition Review Council approved GPS, the nation was two months into the Arab oil embargo, which lasted more than six months. Oil prices tripled, rising to twelve dollars per barrel, and 1973 ended with an annual inflation rate of 8.7 percent. The energy crisis was so severe that the White House Christmas tree remained unlit that year. If the GPS apps that people take for granted today had been available then, motorists would have been using them to search for the gas stations with the shortest lines or in many cases the ones that had any fuel at all to sell. Inflation reached 12.3 percent the following year before settling back into a 4–6 percent range that lasted until a second oil shock in 1979, following the Iranian Revolution. Crude oil then rose to twenty dollars per barrel on its way to a 1981 peak near thirty-five dollars, and inflation climbed to around 13 percent. By December 1980, the prime rate had soared to a record high of 21.5 percent.

  In this tenuous budget environment, the GPS program gestated fitfully and nearly miscarried. As a support system rather than a weapons system, it lacked dependable support from one or more service branches—even from the Air Force, which served as executive agent of the joint program. When President Jimmy Carter canceled the B-1 bomber in 1977, the Strategic Air Command dropped plans to acquire six hundred GPS receivers. The Air Force then postponed satellite purchases and delayed launches.27 Whereas the original plan would have yielded limited operational capability at the end of the test phase, the decision to delay pushed any practical use of GPS further into the future.

  In January 1979, one month before a scheduled second DSARC hearing to review test data prior to authorizing full-scale engineering development and production, the General Accounting Office (GAO; renamed the Government Accountability Office in 2004), issued a blistering report to Congress. Its title, The NAVSTAR Global Positioning System: A Program with Many Uncertainties, was more reserved than its findings. The validation studies, originally scheduled to run from December 1973 to March 1978, had slipped fourteen months by early 1979, and their cost had risen from $178 million to more than $406 million. Together with full engineering and production costs, the total program estimate had more than doubled, to $1.7 billion, $900 million more than originally budgeted.28 Moreover, GAO found that the program budget did not include $2.5 billion in related future costs for user equipment, satellite replenishment, and space shuttle launches. That raised the projected total program cost to more than $4.25 billion, the report estimated. Beyond schedule slippages and budget overruns, GAO criticized the program for failing to justify its high cost with hard data on the number of users or by identifying cost savings that would come from replacing existing systems. By this time, Bradford Parkinson had retired from the Air Force and gone to work for Rockwell International, the contractor building the GPS satellites. Col. Donald W. Henderson succeeded him, and the deputy program manager, Col. Steve Gilbert, moved to a post at the Pentagon, where he advocated for GPS development.29

  GPS survived the second DSARC hearing (finally held in June 1979), which authorized full-scale production, but just six months later, in December 1979, the Pentagon made across-the-board budget cuts of $512 million, or roughly 30 percent of defense spending, for fiscal years 1981 to 1986. This led the Air Force to scale back the constellation from twenty-four to eighteen satellites—too few to achieve the promised accuracy—and for three years, the Ai
r Force “zeroed out ” the program, effectively mothballing it.30 In June 1980, for example, the Air Force requested $16.3 million, a mere 6 percent of the $234.5 million the joint program office had requested.31 Whether these cuts represented simply a lack of support or a canny maneuver to shift more of the financial burden for the multiservice program outside the Air Force is unclear. Either way, backing from such top leaders as Assistant Secretary Donald Latham in the Office of the Secretary of Defense saved the program, as that office reinstated funding each year.32

  The Air Force cuts did not help win support in Congress. During the fiscal year 1982 defense budget authorization process, the House Armed Services Committee recommended terminating the program. Some observers have attributed this largely to the loss of the powerful committee member Rep. Charles H. Wilson, a Democrat from California, whose district included the GPS contractor Rockwell International and other defense plants.33 In 1980 Wilson lost the seat he had held since 1962 after the House censured him for lying about cash gifts he accepted from a foreign operative who was trying to influence a decision about pulling U.S. troops out of South Korea. Without Wilson advocating for the program, the argument goes, committee members adopted the narrow framework GAO used to evaluate costs and benefits—merely identifying existing users who would switch to GPS without trying to assess ways the system might transform military doctrine.34 Visionary thinking may not have been the strong suit of GAO, but the Senate was more receptive to the possibilities, issuing a remarkable (given the sums of money required) “build-it-and they-will come ” endorsement. “It may be difficult to understand the full potential until the system is deployed and the vast number of potential users are able to see what it will do for them ,” stated the fiscal year 1981 Senate Authorization Report.35 With President Reagan urging a massive defense buildup, the Senate view prevailed.

  Another factor probably influenced many lawmakers. Terminating GPS would have also killed a less publicized secondary use of the satellites, distinct from its navigation mission but tied to its precise positioning capability—the Integrated Operational Nuclear (Detonation) Detection System (IONDS).36 Arms control verification relies on the ability to monitor nuclear weapons tests. The United States first fielded ground sensors to detect nuclear detonations in the late 1940s, and it launched space sensors aboard satellites in the mid-1960s.37 These devices detect nuclear bursts using instruments highly sensitive to proton, electron, neutron, x-ray, and gamma radiation. Under the Vela (short for velador, a Spanish term for a watchman or guard) Program, the Air Force began launching satellites into high orbits—about a fifth of the way to the moon—six days after the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty on August 5, 1963.38 By 1970 the Air Force had launched a dozen Vela satellites, but the satellite’s design life span was just eighteen months, so the need for frequent replacement was great. (Although one satellite operated for fourteen years.)

  Soon after the GPS program began, military officials investigated the possibility of “piggybacking ” nuclear detonation sensors aboard GPS satellites. In tests conducted in 1978 and made public in 1982, satellite contractor Rockwell International studied whether it could add IONDS sensors to GPS without negatively affecting the primary navigation mission. Rockwell concluded that GPS was an “ideal host ” for nuclear detonation surveillance.39 Worldwide coverage and the ability to pinpoint the location and altitude of a nuclear burst made GPS ideally suited for the job. Spreading the sensors across eighteen satellites (the planned constellation in 1981) made them more likely to survive any Soviet antisatellite attack, a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report noted.40 The CBO report further stated that in a nuclear war IONDS could tell U.S. commanders which areas of the United States had escaped destruction, helping to coordinate recovery efforts, as well as identify Soviet targets that had escaped an initial retaliatory strike, aiding decisions about subsequent strikes. It is not difficult, given the mindset of the Cold War, to conclude that for some officials these capabilities outweighed GPS’S still-unrealized navigational potential. The CBO report, citing national security reasons, withheld budget figures for IONDS. However, the Department of Defense’s annual report for fiscal year 1981 openly listed projected costs of $40.5 million for IONDS development in fiscal years 1979 through 1982.41 NAVSTAR 6, launched April 26, 1980, carried the first IONDS sensors, and after successful testing, every subsequent GPS satellite has carried nuclear detonation sensors.

  Escalating costs for the GPS program continued to be a concern, as a GAO report issued in February 1980 demonstrates. It offered a new estimate of $8.6 billion in total program costs through the year 2000, offset by no more than $1.2 billion in savings identified from the phaseout of other defense systems. On the other hand, the report stated, “We believe that force-effectiveness studies have demonstrated that NAVSTAR could improve the effectiveness of some military missions. ”42 Beyond reducing the number of aircraft needed to achieve a particular objective and delivering munitions more precisely, the report listed en-route navigation, search-and-rescue operations, and mine-sweeping. The report also noted that the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Defense Mapping Agency had committed to purchase 14,828 receivers over sixteen years, starting in 1984. If these projections for program cost and number of committed users had remained static through 2000, the military would have spent about a half-million dollars per receiver to provide GPS service. Of course, as the system reached fruition over the next two decades the number of military users rose significantly, and the number of commercial users surpassed those in the military.

  Down to Earth

  The tiny portion of those first receivers allocated to the Defense Mapping Agency—fifty in all, or less than 1 percent—was disproportionate to their significance. Indeed, land surveying emerged as the first application of GPS to cross over to civilian use. While there were too few satellites in orbit in the early 1980s for practical navigational use, surveyors did not require real-time calculations. They could record observations using signals whenever the satellites passed overhead and process the data later. GPS saved time and boosted productivity so much that it cost about 10–20 percent of the cost of conventional surveying while offering accuracy three times that of existing methods.43 The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is part of the Department of Commerce and oversees the National Geodetic Survey, published the first technical standards for civil GPS use in the Federal Register in 1984. This step helped convince the surveying industry that GPS signals—generated by a military system—would be available for commercial use.44

  Surveyors for years had been using inertial surveying systems (ISS), which employed gyroscopes and the same principles as the INS systems used on airliners, as well as Doppler systems that relied on radio signals from Transit (the Naval Navigation Satellite System, or NNSS). This use of Transit traces its lineage directly back to the Vanguard satellite proposal, which envisioned the use of satellites for geodetic purposes. The earliest GPS receivers, designed in the 1970s to test the fledgling fleet, were built under defense contracts, but electronics manufacturers already had been building survey instruments using radio signals. As the GPS constellation grew, it was natural for some to see a new market for surveying use. The first commercial GPS receivers appeared around 1982, including the STI-5010, built by Stanford Technologies (similar to those developed for the military’s GPS ground tracking stations); the Macrometer V-1000, designed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers and marketed by Litton Aero Service; and the Texas Instruments TI 4100, known as the “NAVSTAR Navigator. ”45

  At the time, six of twelve satellites planned for the first block of the GPS constellation were in orbit—the first four launched in 1978 and two more in 1980—all lifted into space by Atlas F rockets from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. NAVSTAR 7 would have been available, but the launch on December 18, 1981, failed. These six satellites provided about four hours of useable coverage daily over
the United States, but their orbital configuration brought them into view four minutes earlier each day, making GPS signals available predominantly during daylight hours for six months of the year and predominantly at night for the other six months.46

  The Macrometer was nothing like the handheld or pocket-sized devices common today. It was a cubical metal box roughly twenty-five inches on each side, weighing about 160 pounds, with a separate antenna that weighed another forty pounds. Equally hefty was the price—$250,000 in 1982 dollars.47 Transporting these units to a survey site often required tethering them beneath a helicopter.48 Users stored the field data they collected in small cartridges and processed the information later. Because technical limitations prevented the use of GPS signals for clock synchronization, surveyors needed two of these behemoths, synchronized to each other, making the cost and effort suitable only for larger projects.49

  While the Macrometer sounds massive by today’s standards, it was svelte compared to the first GPS receiving unit Rockwell Collins built for the Air Force to test the fledgling constellation in 1977. The Generalized Development Model (GDM) was the size of a tall bookcase, weighed 270 pounds, and stood with two high-backed seats for its operators atop a large, square pallet on casters, designed for loading onto aircraft during flight tests.50 The TI-4100, by comparison, was a trim fifty-three pounds, about the size and appearance of a small microwave oven, with a separate six-inch, cone-shaped antenna and a handheld keypad and display screen connected by a coiled cord.51 This receiver, which could simultaneously track four GPS satellites, marked a transition toward more, and more practical, commercial applications.

  In March 1985, with nine GPS satellites in orbit, Texas Instruments introduced a new software package called Satplan, which allowed users to create a precise satellite availability schedule in tabular form by date and location. The company’s announcement, which appeared in such publications as Maritime Reporter and Engineering News, called it “an enhancement that makes the Global Positioning System (GPS) more productive as a navigation/positioning tool. ”52