Labor Day weekend, 1973. In a remote-site meeting at the Pentagon, an Air Force colonel sat down with his own team of officer-engineers and two people from the Aerospace Corporation. Nobody else was invited. Bradford Parkinson had just been turned down in August, and the session later became known as the “Lonely Halls Meeting.”
He walked out with a reworked design for a satellite navigation system. By December he had approval and a budget for a live demonstration with four satellites. That demonstration grew into the Global Positioning System.
Selling an idea nobody believed
Parkinson, born February 16, 1935, is best known as lead architect, advocate and developer of the Air Force’s NAVSTAR program, with early contributions from Ivan Getting and Roger Easton. In 1973 Lt. Gen. Kenneth Schultz handed him a floundering effort called Project 621B, which had been trying to win approval for a satellite-based navigation concept. Parkinson’s mentor, Gen. William W. Dunn, helped put him there.
He recruited a small group of Air Force officer-engineers with master’s degrees and doctorates. Pentagon officials were skeptical. Earlier satellite systems, including the Navy’s Transit, gave only two-dimensional fixes every few hours, accurate to roughly a tenth to a quarter of a mile, and rival programs barely collaborated because of secrecy and budget competition. Officials doubted the promised accuracy was credible, and did not think the usefulness would justify the cost. Parkinson met what the record calls extreme resistance and won people over with small prototypes.
Once approved, he took direct control of the demonstration system: satellites, a global ground control network, nine types of user receivers and a large land, sea and air test program. He also testified before Congress that a signal would be available from the start to support civilian precision positioning.
In 1978 he was launch commander for the first prototype GPS satellite, 44 months after the go-ahead. The test program that year verified every performance claim he had made. The Air Force offered him a job as aide to the Secretary of Defense. He chose to retire instead, as a full colonel.
The road to the Pentagon
Parkinson graduated from the Breck School in 1952 and from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1957 with a bachelor’s in engineering. An electrical engineering professor who was an Air Force officer pushed him toward that service. The Air Force sent him to MIT, where he worked in Charles Stark Draper’s lab and earned a master’s in aeronautics and astronautics in 1961. Stanford awarded his doctorate in the same field in 1966.
In between came inertial guidance testing at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, and later a stint at the Air Force Test Pilot School, where he taught a class of astronaut candidates. He also led final development of the digital fire-control system on a new AC-130 gunship. In Vietnam he flew 26 combat missions and logged more than 170 hours, earning the Bronze Star, the Meritorious Service Medal, two Air Medals and a Presidential Unit Citation.
After the Air Force
Parkinson taught for a year at Colorado State University, then joined Rockwell International in space systems planning. From 1980 to 1984 he ran the Boston software firm Intermetrics, maker of the HAL/S language used on NASA’s Space Shuttle. He moved to Stanford in 1984 and held the Edward C. Wells Chair of Aeronautics and Astronautics. In 1999 he took a year’s leave to serve as CEO of Trimble Navigation.
He was also co-principal investigator and program manager on Gravity Probe B, a NASA and Stanford mission that launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on April 20, 2004. On May 4, 2011, the team announced that its data confirmed two predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
His awards include the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the IEEE Medal of Honor. In 2019 he shared the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering with fellow GPS pioneers James Spilker, Hugo FrueHauf and Richard Schwartz.
In 1983, after the Soviet downing of a Korean airliner, President Reagan said GPS would be guaranteed to the world. A recent study for the U.S. government put the system’s yearly benefit at 37 to 74 billion dollars, leaving out uses such as saving lives that were hard to quantify.
