Global Positioning Systems, Inertial Navigation, and Integration

Chapter 9.2.1: INERTIAL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGIES: Early Requirements

9.2 INERTIAL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGIES

9.2.1 Early Requirements

The development of inertial navigation in the United States started around 1950, during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Cold War weapons projects in the United States that would need inertial navigation included the following:

  1. Long-range bombers could not rely on radionavigation technologies of World War II for missions into the Soviet Union, because they could easily be jammed. Efforts started around 1950 and led by Charles Stark Draper in the Servomechanisms Laboratory at MIT (now the C. S. Draper Laboratory) were focused on developing airborne inertial navigation systems. The first successful flights with INS5 across the United States had terminal errors in the order of a few kilometers.
  2. Hymnan Rickover began studying and promoting nuclear propulsion for the U.S. Navy immediately after World War II, leading to the development of the first nuclear submarine, Nautilus, launched in 1954. Nuclear submarines would be able to remain submerged for months, and needed an accurate navigation method that did not require exposing the submarine to airborne radar detection.
  3. The Navaho Project started in the early 1950s to develop a long-range airbreathing supersonic cruise missile to carry a 15,000-lb payload (the atomic bomb of that period) 5500 miles with a terminal navigation accuracy of about one nautical mile (1.85 km). The prime contractor, North American Aviation, developed an INS for this system. The project was canceled in 1957, when nuclear weaponry and rocketry had improved to the point that thermonuclear devices could be carried on rockets. However, a derivative of the Navaho INS survived, and the nuclear submarine Nautilus used it to successfully navigate under the arctic ice cap in 1958.
  4. The intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that replaced Navaho would not have been practical without an INS to guide them. The INS made each missile self-contained and able to control itself from liftoff without any external aiding. Their accuracy requirements were not far from those for Navaho.

The accuracy requirements of many of these systems was determined by the radius of destruction of nuclear weapons.

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