Dr. Bradford Parkinson (USNA 1957) is a well-respective professor at Colorado State University and Stanford University, as well as the holder of multiple former president and CEO positions in the private sector, including with PlantStar and Trimble Navigation.
However, over Labor Day weekend 1973, he was a career officer with the U.S. Air Force, a colonel at the time, and, as detailed in “From the Sea to the Stars: A Chronicle of the U.S. Navy’s Space and Space-related Activities, 1944-2009,” got a lot of work done over the BBQ.
On Labor Day weekend, 1973, Colonel Parkinson met with Aerospace engineers, together with Mr. Roger Easton of the Naval Research Laboratory and Navy Captain Daniel Holmes, to “synthesize” details of the GPS constellation. At one point, Colonel Parkinson reportedly came into the room and said, “Well, we’ve got a problem: our system is too expensive,” and Captain Holmes replied, “Why don’t you take our Timation] system and manage it?” That, in effect, is essentially what happened; the concept settled on was the one designed and demonstrated in Easton’s Timationsatellites.*
*With approved funding from the Joint GPS Program, Roger Easton and his team at the Naval Research Laboratory continued the Timation satellite program – renamed Navigation Technology Satellites (NTS). As NTS-1, the Navy-built Timation-IIIA satellite was launched in July 1974. In addition to further demonstrating the validity of the passive-ranging concept for position determining, NTS-1 carried NRL’s new rubidium time standard into space. NTS-2, launched into the GPS-constellation orbit in June 1977, had as objectives: (1) to demonstrate the feasibility of using a cesium atomic-clock standard developed by NRL in future GPS satellites; (2) to demonstrate the GPS navigation payload, and (3) to function as one of the satellites in the GPS Phase I constellation. NtS-2 achieved the JCS-required three-dimensional accuracy of “less than 60 feet” against aircraft flying over a calibrated test range. The success of NTS-2 helped keep support for the GPS program alive in 1977, when it had serious cost and schedule problems.
Less than five years later, in February 1978, the first Block I developmental Navstar/GPS satellite, Navstar 1, launched, with Parkinson as the head of the program. Three more Navstar satellites launched by the end of the year.
And, the rest, as they say, is GPS history, with Parkinson remembered today as the Chief Architect of GPS.