Profile: GPS Architect, Bradford W. Parkinson
 Bradford W. Parkinson, GPS architect. |
Building Consensus from the Ground Up
by Donna J. Born
As the first program director of Navstar/Global Positioning System, Bradford W. Parkinson led a group of military officers and a team of engineers to design GPS, the most revolutionary navigation tool since the invention of the chronometer.
Three concepts for navigation using space satellites had been developed by the early 1970s, the Navy's Transit and Timation systems and the Air Force's Program 621B. The Department of Defense wanted just one concept for a second-generation navigation system and formed a joint program office in 1973 to facilitate cooperation among the services toward that goal. Bradford Parkinson, an Air Force colonel in charge of Program 621B in the Air Force Space Division in El Segundo, was named the program office's first director and charged with the job of pulling together the three concepts into a new design.
A major part of Parkinson's task was gaining consensus from the various services, who wanted to improve the concepts they had developed. After studying the competing concepts, he met with a group of military officers from the various services at the Pentagon during the Labor Day weekend in 1973 to come up with a design. What emerged from that four-day meeting was the blueprint for Navstar/Global Positioning System, which has since revolutionized navigation, bringing precise positioning capability to anyone anywhere for just the modest cost of a receiver (as low as $100).
"GPS has been a godsend to the military," Parkinson, who is today the chair of The Aerospace Corporation board of trustees, said at a recent interview. "It allows you to precisely do in all weather, day and night, what the military is supposed to be doing for the country. It made possible precision weapon delivery—the bomb hits what you think it's going to hit, and you don't have all this collateral damage. So I feel good about that. But it doesn't end there, you've got aircraft landings, ships at sea, farm tractors, automobiles, mining equipment, hikers …."
Parkinson said he is proud of leading the effort that brought about GPS, but he credits the work of many others: "a band of people who really believed in it. I led the synthesis, the definition of what GPS is, but the whole story includes the important work done by many persons from The Aerospace Corporation, the Air Force, the Naval Research Laboratory, and the Naval Surface Weapons Center. It's the culmination of a lot of technologies and support done by a lot of people."
For all his years of experience with GPS while it grew into a ubiquitous positioning tool, Parkinson still marvels at its capabilities. "This little beauty accesses all satellites in view," he said, holding up a small cellphone-size GPS receiver. "It gives you a baro-altimeter to a precision of a foot, gives you a magnetic compass, and allows you to wander around. I go out in the woods, looking for old hiking trails that have overgrown. As you move past a way point, the little compass comes up and gives you a black arrow that says the next point on the trail is a quarter mile that way. That's the culmination of GPS."
Parkinson has continued to be involved in some way with "the GPS adventure," as he fondly refers to it, throughout his career. He has written many papers on the topic, advised GPS doctoral students, worked on numerous national projects, and for a year was CEO and president of Trimble Navigation in San Jose, California, a company specializing in GPS technology. He said he's "right now in the middle of intense interaction on GPS." He considers GPS his greatest challenge, his most significant achievement, and the source of his work's most lasting influence. "Certainly GPS has been the highlight," Parkinson said.
His assignment to head the GPS joint effort was a logical confluence of Parkinson's background in navigation, demonstrated leadership, and experience in two branches of the military. At the U.S. Naval Academy, Parkinson majored in control engineering and learned about navigation and piloting. Just before graduation in 1957, he was selected from Naval Academy and West Point volunteers to become an officer in the newly formed "third service," and he graduated from the Naval Academy as a Second Lieutenant in the Air Force. In 1961 he earned an M.S. degree in aeronautics and astronautics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 1966, a Ph.D. in guidance, control, and navigation from Stanford University. He graduated with distinction from both the U.S.A.F. Air Command and Staff College and the Naval War College.
His first Air Force assignment after graduating from Stanford was as an instructor of astronauts and pilots at the Air Force Test Pilot School. By 1969 he had become chair of the astronautics and computer science department at the Air Force Academy, when a former classmate from the Naval Academy and MIT asked him to help develop a new form of a gunship, the AC/H130 or "Spectre," for use in Vietnam. The task sounded interesting and challenging to Parkinson, who said he was also drawn to the chance for new achievement. He was granted a leave from his teaching duties, and for the next year, he worked on the airplane and logged 170 hours of night combat in Vietnam, generally as the fire control officer, but twice as the mission commander. "It was the only weapon system that was effective in stopping infiltration through Laos of supplies for the North Vietnamese," Parkinson said. "I'm very proud of that ship. I love the C130." A photo of the "tough old four-engine airplane" has a prominent place on his office wall.
Parkinson was director of the GPS Joint Program Office for six years. When by 1978, GPS had met its major goals, he decided to retire from the Air Force rather than move to an administrative position at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. He returned to teaching, but after one year as professor of mechanical engineering at Colorado State University, his career took another turn—this time into the commercial business world. He became vice president of the Space Systems Group at Rockwell International, Inc., involved with the space shuttle, and a year later, vice president at Intermetrics, a software-development company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1984, he accepted a research professorship at Stanford University, where he was later appointed a tenured professor and named to the endowed "Edward C. Wells" Chair of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He eventually became head of Stanford's GPS program and co-principal investigator for the NASA and Stanford Gravity Probe B gyroscope experiment to test two unverified predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.
Chair of the Aerospace board of trustees since December 2000, Parkinson first joined the board in March 1997, bringing a technical background and experience that related well to the mission of the corporation. "I didn't hesitate to accept the appointment, in particular because Aerospace has a noble mission." The board's job, as Parkinson sees it, in addition to its important fiducial responsibility, is to give guidance to the company's president, William Ballhaus, while providing him the freedom to run the company. "I think you have a very, very competent president," Parkinson said. "And I'm a little proud of him because I led the search committee that found him."
 Brad Parkinson (center) with Frank Butterfield of The Aerospace Corporation and Cdr. Bill Huston of the U.S. Navy in discussions about GPS in the early 1970s. A model of a phase-one GPS satellite is on the table at the far right. |
Parkinson has served on the boards of several companies, is a fellow of many professional societies, and has been inducted into the NASA Hall of Fame. Numerous awards for his work include 1990 membership in the National Academy of Engineering, which carried the citation: "For technical leadership and innovative engineering management especially in gyroscopy and the global positioning system and for significant contribution to guidance and navigation." He is a fellow of England's Royal Institute of Navigation—Prince Philip presented him with the Gold Medal in 1983. "My dad came from England … so that tickled me and it tickled my dad." He considers his honorary degree from the University of Calgary to be quite an accolade.
Parkinson's vitality extends naturally into his private life. Among his many interests are sailing, skiing, snowshoeing, backpacking, and hiking in the woods, for all of which, not surprisingly, he relies on his GPS receiver. He is a history buff (President Lincoln and Admiral Nelson are two of his heroes) and delights in telling stories, which often reveal his sense of humor. For as long as he can remember, he wanted to be an engineer and is pleased with his achievements, yet humble before them. His wife, Ginny ("the joy of my life"), helps on that score. Driving with her one day recently, he was excited to show off "the wonderful things" he could do when he plugged a PC card with a GPS receiver into his laptop. "So," he recounts, "I'm getting ecstatic and I say: 'Look, it's got us right here on Los Altos Avenue.' She looks over at me with some disdain and says, 'Well, anyone can look out the window and see that.'" But she really does appreciate the GPS installed in her car, Parkinson continued, "You punch in the street, the address, and it takes you right there."
Although having "retired" from Stanford this year, Parkinson still carries an 80-percent research load. In addition to his board responsibilities at Aerospace, he contributes to many national efforts, most related to GPS, among them committees associated with GPS, NASA's Gravity Probe B, and the Federal Aviation Administration's Wide-Area Augmentation System—a GPS-based navigation and landing system that will provide precision guidance to aircraft. As to the future of GPS, Parkinson estimates today's 15 million users will grow to 50 million in 10 years. For that to happen, he said, GPS needs to be made more robust by increasing the current one civil signal to three, another achievement toward which he is working.
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