One System, Two Narratives - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 59

A Tale of Two Meetings
In August the newly founded joint program office, with Air Force colonel Brad-
ford Parkinson as its head, attempted to get Project 621b adopted as the dnss.
However, the required approval from all of the services was not forthcoming.
Parkinson claims that he and about twelve other Air Force and Aerospace Cor-
poration personnel formulated gps at the Pentagon in the “Lonely Halls” meet-
ing over Labor Day 1973. 17 Roger Easton asserts that during the Labor Day
weekend an important meeting occurred at a motel on Spring Hill Road in
Virginia. 18 There, Easton and Captain Holmes, representing the Navy, met
Parkinson and other Air Force representatives. Ron Beard and James Buisson
from nrl recall Easton discussing the Spring Hill meeting the week after Labor
Day. Beard recently questioned why Parkinson and other Air Force personnel
from California would travel to the Washington dc area only to meet among
themselves. 19 A meeting with people residing near the capital makes sense of
their trip to the East Coast. Other evidence exists substantiating the Spring
Hill meeting. Captain Holmes's daughter, Dian Moulin, found in his papers
transparencies of a presentation about gps's origins titled “Another Naviga-
tion System? Why gps Wouldn't Sell.” The last slide, reprinted in figure 4.4,
corroborates Easton's recollections about the motel meeting.
Easton asserts that in the Spring Hill meeting, Parkinson said that 621b was
rejected because it was too expensive and Holmes offered him the Timation
system. Easton recalls that Parkinson listened but did not comment on the
offer. Ron Beard recently wrote, “There were several meetings at the motel
and elsewhere. I remember going to the motel also. The meeting that turned
the tide was one that [Easton] and Holmes were at.” 20
Obviously, recollections of events that occurred decades earlier can hon-
estly differ. Whether history should trace the compromise that led to the ulti-
mate synthesis of gps architecture to a meeting with two nrl representatives
at a motel, to the Lonely Halls Pentagon meeting of Air Force and Aerospace
personnel, or to its genesis over many months of tri-service negotiations
depends on whom one asks. Sonnemann, who was part of those negotiations
before the formation of the joint program office, offered this assessment: “In
the short interval between the rejection of the 621b system by the dsarc in
August 1973, the September 1973 Labor Day meeting, and the second dsarc
in December 1973, there was not enough time to do any more than make sure
that the elements of the system as then constituted by the navseg/navsmo