The History Hack podcast recently interviewed Richard, who spoke about his father’s role in the early space race and the creation of GPS. The discussion also touches on the controversy that remains over the so-called “Lonely Halls Meeting” in 1973, the year the Pentagon merged Navy and Air Force satellite navigation programs to create the dual-use system that today functions as a global public utility. Listen to the podcast here.
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Cold War Conversations, a podcast series focused on the cold war era, recently interviewed Richard Easton about the early days of the U.S. space program and the origin of GPS. Listen to Episode 76 to hear Richard recall details of growing up with a father doing space projects at the Naval Research Laboratory and share details of his research into the military programs that led to GPS.
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Richard Easton recently contributed a guest post for the Lidar News “In the Scan” blog. In his post, Richard reviews the history of GPS and highlights several common myths surrounding the technology, as well as widespread misinformation about its origin. Richard continues to pursue documentary evidence that will shed additional light on the early days of GPS.
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SPY Historian Vince Houghton sat down with Richard Easton, co-author of GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones, to discuss the development of GPS and its role in the military, intelligence, and civilian domains. Easton’s father, Roger, led the Space Applications Branch of the Naval Research Laboratory from the Vanguard Satellite era to the early days of GPS development. Listen to the entire podcast.
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“There are abundant technical details about the design and operation of the system, but the book is entirely accessible to the intelligent layman….This book is an essential history of how this technology came to be, how it works, and where it may be going in the future.”
— John Walker, founder of Autodesk, Inc. and co-author of AutoCAD
Read the full review at the Fourmilab website
A recent article, “Launching the Brick Moon: GPS’ Path from the Space Race to Smartphone,” by Aaron Lovell in the Wilson Quarterly, references GPS Declassified and quotes coauthors Richard Easton and Eric Frazier. Lovell summarizes GPS history, starting with the earliest concept for an artificial satellite conceived by Edward Everett Hale in 1870, and follows the story all the way to present issues raised the app economy, made possible by smartphones.
Wilson Quarterly is produced by the Communications Department of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.
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On June 30, 2015, Richard joined a panel discussion on the Milt Rosenberg Show to talk about the history and future of space exploration.
Other guests were Bill Melberg, a former aviation executive and now editor of AmericasUncommonsense.com, professional speaker and frequent writer on aerospace topics, and Dr. Paul Spudis, an astrogeologist and moon expert who is senior staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas.
Milt Rosenberg welcomes Bill Melberg and Richard Easton to the WCGO studio. On the desk in front of them sits a prototype model of the camera used on Surveyor I, the first unmanned lunar soft-lander.
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“… A solid basic history of the subject. As an introduction it is quite useful. It also seeks, in the authors’ minds, to correct what they view as errors and omissions in the GPS origins story. Finally, it tells quite a number of stories about the uses of GPS and how the technology has changed our lives, and then they go on to project possibilities for uses yet to be realized. This is a useful work about a complex topic.”
–Roger D. Launius, Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly, vol 22, no 1
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Listen as longtime Chicago radio host Milt Rosenberg talks with Richard in a wide-ranging interview that spans the early days of GPS, the role that his father, Roger Easton, played in its development, and the future of the technology.
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Following the death of Roger L. Easton on May 8, the Naval Research Laboratory and numerous media outlets have published tributes to his life as a scientist and inventor. Follow the links below to read a selection of these stories:
Roger L. Easton, former head of the Space Applications Branch at the Naval Research Laboratory, a few years before he retired in 1980.
(Naval Research Laboratory)
Tech Crunch – Roger Easton, Father of GPS, Dies at 93
Bloomberg – Roger Easton, GPS Developer for Satellite Navigation, Dies at 93
Valley News – A Life: Roger Lee Easton Sr., 1921 — 2014; ‘Most of All, He Was a Solver of Problems’
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