“People often say, oh, it's triangulation, where the satellites are. But it's not about angles at all. It's all based on taking the time that a radio signal leaves a satellite versus the time that it arrives at a receiver and calculating the distance that way… When you want to understand Einstein's theories of relativity, one of the best ways to explain how they work in practice is the GPS system.”
sputnikintelligence.com
The host asked about the founding of the GPS program in 1973 and its scientific hurdles. Dunn corrects the common picture of how GPS works: it is a timing system that depends on a known speed of light.
…book, but it's really, really kind of fundamental to understanding the dizzying complexity of this and also the fact that she was trying to teach high schoolers. Like everybody else in this book is basically a physicist or an engineer or a drone pilot. And she's kind of the only teacher, I think.
…because of gender or in other cases, other demographic factors. So towards the end of the Vietnam War, in 1973, the U.S. government officially stands up the GPS program. So tell us about that moment and all of the scientific hurdles that are awaiting the many people who are working on that effort.
Yeah, so the Vietnam War ends. And I think the important thing to understand here is that it's clearly understood that the American people are pretty fed up with this insane cost of this war, both in lives lost and in money spent, and you could say very little gained. And you still have that system that I mentioned coming out of World War II, where you have the different radio navigation systems kind of battling each other. By this point, you have one called Transit, which is the little known predecessor to GPS, which is all based around submarines in the high Arctic. So you have this sense that this order kind of comes down saying that there's going to be one system to rule them all, or there's going to be no system, right? Like we can't be wasting untold sums anymore. You're going to have to work together. There's still to this day a lot of internal controversy in the GPS world about who should get the ultimate credit. I kind of talked to everybody. My perhaps splitting the difference take when I talk to a lot of people involved in this is GPS was really a combination of several existing ideas, mainly from the Navy and the Air Force. They combine them together and, you know, so…
Well, we're going to come back to that because that certainly is an interesting point. And obviously, as you note later in the book, an area of concern for some folks. So we'll get in a second to the aha moments when some of the initial capabilities are ready to go. But right before we do that…
Yeah, so the downing of KE-007 is this really a huge moment in kind of Cold War history where this plane is going from JFK to Seoul in South Korea. And on the way it goes via Anchorage. So at the time that's the route. The plane takes off from Anchorage. They fly west and something goes wrong with…
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