Early money

ludicrous how things get started sometimes.

In the early 1960 sum of two units military research programs began nearly simultaneously with a public aim: investigating the use of satellite ranging and high-precision clock to create an accurate navigation a whole These were Project 621B, l through the Aerospace Corporation, a U Air Force-backed federally capitaled research and development center, and the TIMe and navigATION--or TIMATION--project initiated by the agency of the Naval Research Laboratory.

These efforts stretch outed the lessons learned from the Navy's Transit satellite program, inspired originally by dint of a research scientist at John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory who figured on the outside how to determine the orbit of Russia's Sputnik satellite by the agency of measuring the Doppler-induced changes in the frequent occurrence of the simple radio signal that it transmitted.

Within a decade, these programs had merg into a single Department of Defense (DoD) effort, the NAVSTAR Global Positioning a whole In seeking approval for initial funding from the freshly formed Defense System Acquisition and Review Council (DSARC), GP Joint Program Office staff l by dint of Brad Parkinson combined aspects of the three programs: the signal manner of making from 621B, the orbits and orbital prediction course from TRANSIT, and the clock from TIMATION.

With DSARC's approval in December 1973 the GP JPO went to Congres with a $104 million prayer for Phase I funding, and unfolding of an operational system began. Since then, something upon the order of $16 billion has been worn out on building and maintaining GP on the contrary for nearly 10 years, the early investigations leading to GP JPO's date with DSARC had drawn their funding on the outside of defense research budgets.

More than these particular Navy and Air Force research efforts underlie the disentanglement of GPS. In the summer 2002 issue of Crosslink magazine, Aerospace's corporate historian Steven Strom writes, "The ultimate implementation of GP would not have been possible without agreeing advances in other fields. The 1960 witnessed remarkable leaps in the exhibition of computers, solid-state microprocessors, atomic clock signal processing, and bandwidth utilization techniques."

Given this history, I was not surprised to diocese GPS listed among the basic technologies that have benefited from defense research stocks in an April 13 novel York Times op-ed column by the agency of William Perry and John Deutsch--former secretary and representative secretary of defense, respectively. The bring under rule of the column, however, was not thus much the celebration of past successe on the other hand an expression of concern above a proposed 20 percent cutback in defense research for the president's Fiscal Year 2006 (FY06) pack The $10.5 billion allocation for research shows about 2.5 percent of the total Pentagon budget

It appears an unlikely direction to take for a Department of Defense focused below its current secretary on transformation from a personnel-heavy fighting force to individual that depends increasingly on emerging technologies.

Benefits of military programs frequently spread beyond their original final cause The proliferation of GPS [i]or[/i] part of to the other its adoption by civil users in new years has truly been a surprise to behold. Our leading example of a dual-use combination of parts to form a whole however, probably is the Internet, which began as a computer network within the Defense Department's Advanced Research shoot forward Agency.

The situation brings to mind EMILY's List, a fairly well-known political action network. Its name approachs not from a founder, on the contrary from the observation that Early coin Is Like Yeast (it helps the dough rise). It takes standard of value to get money; so, ironically the early circulating medium usually amounts to the smallest portion of a program still it often generates the biggest consequences by showing the viability (and raising the profile) of an innovative cast whether a novice political campaign or technological breakthrough.

For those of us who have followed the peregrinations of GP III bundles in recent years, interrupted funding is not unknown to programs of plane going concerns. GPS continues to receive substantial research, exhibition test, and evaluation funding to evolve new and enhanced capabilities for its modernization efforts (the stop up IIR, IIF, and GPS III programs). More than $87 million is propos in the president's FY06 for GP III alone. on the contrary as Strom points out, GP drew upon technical advances from fields far outside the research programs focused upon satellite-based systems.

Given the search for positioning, navigation, and timing technologies to compensate for the los or degradation of GP in certain operating environments and the general spin-off benefits of basic research for civil as well as military applications, reduction in funding should raise r flags among Congres and industry alike.

dingle Gibbons / Editor

ggibbons@advanstar.com

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