Dr. Ivan Getting, Founding President of
The Aerospace Corporation and Co-Inventor of GPS, Dies

Dr. Ivan Getting, 1997.

EL SEGUNDO, California (10/16/03) -- Dr. Ivan A. Getting, president-emeritus of The Aerospace Corporation and the company's founding president, died Saturday night, Oct. 11, at his home in Coronado, California.

Getting, who was 91, served as president of The Aerospace Corporation from 1960 through 1977. During most of his professional career, which spanned more than 60 years, Getting focused his formidable scientific, technical, and organizational energies on support of the United States defense effort.

Under Getting's direction, The Aerospace Corporation developed into one of the nation's principal technical resources, working as an independent partner of the Air Force in the research, planning, and systems engineering of military space and ballistic missile reentry systems.

Among the many complex projects undertaken at Aerospace under Getting's direction were planning for new ballistic missile systems, oversight of space launch systems with major contributions to NASA's Mercury and Gemini space programs, the development of high-power chemical lasers, and the creation of the worldwide Navstar Global Positioning System (GPS), the most significant advance in navigation in the 20th century.

Getting (left) with astronaut Alan Shepard at The Aerospace Corporation in 1962.

Getting was recognized earlier this year, along with Dr. Bradford W. Parkinson of Stanford University, by the National Academy of Engineering for inventing the Global Positioning System, which has become a ubiquitous utility benefiting military, civilian and commercial users worldwide. Getting and Parkinson, chair of the board of trustees at Aerospace, were awarded the prestigious Charles Stark Draper Prize for their achievement.

Getting was cited for envisioning a system that would use satellite transmitters to pinpoint with extreme accuracy locations anywhere on Earth, then becoming a tireless advocate for making sure the complex system was built after it was shown it would work.

In 2002, Getting was inducted into the San Diego Aerospace Museum's International Aerospace Hall of Fame for his contributions to the conception and development of GPS.

Over his career, Getting served on numerous high-level government committees, including the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, the Signal Corps Advisory Council, the Undersea Warfare Committee, the Navy Studies Board of the National Research Council, and the Defense Department's Research and Engineering Advisory Panel on Electronics. He also served as chair of the Limited Warfare Panel of the President's Science Advisory Committee from 1961 to 1964, and from 1966 to 1971 was a member of that committee's Naval Warfare Panel, which he chaired from 1971 to 1973.

During the nine years before he came to The Aerospace Corporation, Getting was vice president for research and engineering at Raytheon Company. He played a major role in converting Raytheon into a modern company, strengthening research and advancing its position commercially.

Edison, Rhodes Scholar

Born in New York City, January 18, 1912, Getting attended grade and high school in Pittsburgh. He was an Edison scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1929 to 1933. He attended Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar and earned his D. Phil. degree in astrophysics from Oxford in 1935. During the following five years he conducted research on nuclear instrumentation and cosmic rays as a junior fellow at Harvard University and developed the first high-speed flip-flop circuit, a fundamental component of the original digital computers developed in the 1940s.

Combating V-1s in World War II

Getting was director of the Division of Fire Control and Army Radar at MIT's Radiation Laboratory from 1940 through 1945. His group developed the first automatic microwave tracking gunfire control radar, the SCR-584. This radar was credited with destroying 95 percent of the V-1 bombs flown against England during World War II and represented the largest radar procurement of the war.

His group also developed an automatic antiaircraft radar gun-direction system for the Navy, the MK-56, which was the most efficient system of its kind at that time, and remained in use decades later as the Navy's primary gun control system. Concurrently, he was head of the Naval Fire Control Section of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and a member of the Combined Chiefs of Staff panel on Searchlight and Fire Control. Getting was a special consultant on the use of radar by the Army to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson during the war.

From 1945 to 1950, he was a professor in MIT's Electrical Engineering Department where he headed a group that developed and built a 350-million electron volt synchrotron. From 1950 to 1951, during the Korean War, he served as assistant for development planning of the Air Force. In this capacity, he was responsible for long-range research and development planning in such areas as tactical air warfare (Project Vista), civil defense (Project East River), and air defense (Project Charles), an effort preliminary to the establishment of Project Lincoln at MIT. Following this assignment he joined Raytheon. During his tenure, Raytheon became the first company to produce transistors commercially and he was responsible for the development of the Sparrow III and Hawk missile systems.

Polaris Missile

In 1956, while a member of the Undersea Warfare Committee of the National Research Council, Getting was asked to serve as associate director of a special three-month study (Project Nobska) sponsored by the U.S. Navy and concerning submarine warfare weapons. Among the recommendations of the study group was a submarine-based, solid-propellant intermediate-range ballistic missile that formed the basis for what became the Polaris missile. Two years later, when the Subcommittee on Military Applications of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy undertook an investigation of the development progress of the Polaris weapon system, Getting served as a member of a specially formed subcommittee advisory panel.

Affiliations, Awards

Getting was a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE president in 1978) and an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

His numerous awards include the President's Medal of Merit (1948), the Naval Ordnance Development Award (1945), the Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Award (1960), the IEEE Pioneer Award (1975), the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce Kitty Hawk Award (1975) and the Brandeis University Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Technology Award (1977). Other awards include the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service (1997), the John Fritz Medal (1998), the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Award (1998), the Albert A. Michelson Award of the Navy League of the United States for contributions to the strength of our maritime forces and to the enhancement of the nation's industrial technology base (1999), and the Navy Superior Public Service Award (1999) "for his outstanding record of lifetime support to the Navy's science and technology program" and for leadership on projects such as the development of submarine-based strategic missile systems and GPS.

Getting was awarded honorary D.Sc. degrees in 1956 by Northeastern University and in 1986 by the University of Southern California. He served as a Trustee of the Universities Research Association and was a member of visiting committees at Harvard, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the California Institute of Technology. He was a director of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.

Following his retirement from The Aerospace Corporation, Getting served as a member of various boards including Northrop Corporation, Verac, and ERIM (Environmental Research Institute of Michigan).

Dr. Getting is survived by his wife, Helen, and three children: his daughter, Nancy G. Secker of Greenbay, Wisconsin, and sons, Ivan C. Getting of Boulder, Colorado, and Peter A. Getting of Iowa City, Iowa.

A memorial service was held in Coronado on Oct. 19.

Contact Dave Jonta, 310-336-5041, david.l.jonta@aero.org