wow! what a hidden gem... there is so much fluff and filler in the internet, great to watch a simple but interesting documentary, especially the pictures painted of the people who made it happen.... great bunch of guys and, as the introduction lady said, nobody knows their names despite the impact they have had on all our lives.
As a sailor I absolutely love GPS, but there is something so romantic about celestial that even though I use GPS, I decided to learn and taught myself celestial with a cheap Davis plastic compass. The first time I worked out a fix on celestial, with paper and pencil, and almanac I felt like I had the keys to the back door of God's mind.
Talk about a blast from the past. It was such a pleasure seeing all the giants of GPS that I had the pleasure of working with in the user equipment source selection, test and integration in support of the GPS JPO. Only thing I might have missed in this excellent documentary was the involvement of the NATO engineers who participated in the success of the development and test of GPS across the board. By the time of my retirement in 2010 I saw GPS and peripheral equipment put into so many systems that provide 24 hour, world wide protection of our great country.
As a professional Mariner, I cannot express how important of an impact gps based navigation has had on my life. I’m old enough to have worked in the days before we had it and to what it has developed into now. It’s the single most important invention to impact navigation since the compass itself. In fact, I would much rather have modern electronic gps based navigation over a compass, no comparison.
One of the best videos on GPS I've seen out of many. I have a bit of a bias towards the ones that focus more on the rockets, but it was interesting to hear about the politics and sides of the program most videos I've seen don't focus on.
As a space age military brat whose Dad worked in intelligence, what I kept thinking over and over again is how you could not do a project like this with today's government, because you could not keep the politics out of it. The part where they said they made all the government people not talk or ask any questions during the meetings really caught my ear. Today you couldn't do that. The politicians would all be in there posting video of the meeting to Twitter and mouthing off to their political base That's why not much gets accomplished these days by politicians. Serving the people is no longer important. What's important is how many Twitter followers they have and how many interactions their posts generate. And people wonder why the country just can't do great things like this anymore.
Absolutely EXCELLENT!!!!! A must watch! BUT.... with all our enemies-- foreign and domestic-- we MUST continue to teach the fundamentals of celestial navigation. ALL of these satellites could disppear in the blink of an eye. Thanks you to the folks who producted this top notch program and ALL the patriots who made the GPS system work. Maybe it could be said GPS is America's final gift to the civilized world.
As I already said, I am firmly with groups who moved world forward wherever they might be from, today GPS has made life so easy for normal consumer also and this very system would be base of creating new id’s worldwide human head count and data bases to be formed to monitor safety, wellbeing, financial well-being who needs help immediately, and it shall cut all monetary frauds and help reaching to those who need it most along with cutting of population going beyond resources, thus squalor poverty grime not going away from world, this very system is going to help in finally getting rid of most important social civil evil still in world.
Very interesting getting the true story about GPS design and build from those on the coal face. These are the kinda engineers i like to work with... Unfortunately the "warm and fuzzy" (not so) back ground music is just cringe-worthy and very distracting...
The Air Force should put something up in the Pentagon where the Lonely Halls meeting took place on the 5th floor to commemorate this humankind altering invention.
How much does the earth wobble on it's axis under the GPS constellation at any given time during it's 24 hour revolution or it's 365.25 day orbit? A millimeter accuracy depends on a ground based correction to the values calculated at a base station to the known values of a fixed control point monument? Yes? Earths rotation is Dynamic not Static? Yes?? the Skipper
