Global Positioning System Reference
In-Depth Information
mand. 20 The amount may seem small, even adjusted for inflation, but Easton
commented that having an authorized program was important, and he could
mix the seed money with other funds. 21
Kleczek was born in Boston and studied at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, but the Depression forced him to drop out after two years for
financial reasons. Later he completed his degree at Northeastern University.
As a sponsor for Timation at Naval Air Systems Command, he faced arguments
in Pentagon meetings such as: Why do they need another navigation system
when the government already supports forty-three navigation systems? Klec-
zek responded by asking which of them could give a Navy pilot his position
over the South Pacific. There was a system, inertial navigation developed by
Charles Draper, that could do it, but Kleczek knew that the people he was
speaking with were unaware of it. However, inertial navigation could not be
reset in flight if the power failed. Kleczek won approval to go to production. 22
Kleczek feared that others would steal the idea for Timation and claim they
invented it. Many people tried to find out how Timation worked, and Kleczek
dodged their questions by telling them that nrl was still working on it. Klec-
zek recalled the period in a 2009 interview:
I learned how apl worked. There was a satellite launch called Transit and
they put out gravity gradient stabilization on a satellite and the damn satel-
lite kept wiggling back and forth. They didn't know why. And nrl built one
with gravity gradient but they put a damper between the satellite and the
gravity gradient satellite, so there wasn't a strong coupling between the lower,
the dummy, satellite and the real satellite and it's sort of slowed it down this
way and it worked, it stayed vertical. Well, apl wrote a letter and they back-
dated it [saying] they had already invented it. I said, “Oh, you think we're
going to tell them about Timation?” [Laughing.] That's what happened. But
anyway that was just the skepticism that they would steal it and this was
going on all over the place during those times. 23
After the convertible test, nrl scientists simulated satellites using airplanes.
An important breakthrough in winning support for continued research was
explaining passive ranging using satellites in comparison to celestial naviga-
tion. Navy officers had for centuries navigated by measuring angles to stars.
The Timation technique transformed this into measuring the time a signal
took to travel from a satellite to a receiver. This explanation made sense to the
Navy and facilitated its acceptance. 24
 
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