Taking Technology Higher: The Naval Center for Space Technology and the Making of the Space Age
Abstract
In the summer of 1923, on a bucolic plot of land along the Potomac River where it cuts southward through the bottom of the District of Columbia, a few of the 20 founding radio researchers of the newly opened Naval Research Laboratory already were craning their necks toward space. This first generation of NRLers, who commuted to the laboratory on dirt roads and by boat from Virginia just across the Potomac, could not have known it then, but their militarily significant interest in the upper atmospheres effects on long-distance radio communication would set the lab on a path to becoming one the most consequential players in the gestation, birth, and maturation of the Space Age. From these personal and institutional roots in the 1940s and 1950s would emerge a culture of innovation that for the rest of the 20th century, and into the 21st, would lead to some of the highest of high technologies. Among these are space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities, the Global Positioning System (GPS) for planet-wide navigation and time synchronization (without which Internet and cell phone communication would be shadows of what they are), and battlefield technologies that sometimes played world-changing roles as they were deployed in the Cold War and in every phase of war and peace since.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 2022
- Accession Number
- AD1170262
Entities
People
- Christopher T. Dwyer
- Ivan Amato
Organizations
- United States Naval Research Laboratory