Bradford Parkinson (born February 16, 1935) is an American engineer and inventor, retired United States Air Force Colonel and Emeritus Professor at Stanford University.
He is best known as the lead architect, advocate and developer, with early contributions from Ivan Getting and Roger Easton, of the Air Force NAVSTAR program, better known as Global Positioning System.
[2][6][7][8] In 2019, Bradford Parkinson shared the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering with three other GPS pioneers (James Spilker, Hugo Freuhauf, and Richard Schwartz).
Parkinson has credited his experiences at the Breck School for inspiring in him an early love of math and science, an interest which eventually became his life's calling.
[1][5][4] After being commissioned in the Air Force, he was trained in electronics maintenance and supervised large ground radar installations in Washington state.
[13] At MIT, he received a Master of Science in Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1961 and was elected to the Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi honor Societies.
[14][1] Parkinson was then assigned to work at the Central Inertial Guidance Test Facility at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
There he developed tests and was a Chief Analyst for the evaluation of the Air Force’s inertial guidance systems and continued work on electrical and controls engineering.
After successful testing at Eglin Air Force Base, he deployed to South East Asia during the Vietnam War and flew 26 combat missions to continue evaluation and refinement of the weapons system.
[3][1] He next was a student at the Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island, for a year where he graduated with distinction and was followed by a brief assignment as the Chief Engineer of the Advanced Ballistic Re-Entry System (ABRES) project, at Los Angeles Air Force Station.
[3][1] In 1973, thanks in part to the influence of his mentor, General William W. Dunn, the Commander, Lt-Gen Kenneth Schultz, assigned Parkinson to a floundering Air Force program called Project 621B.
Parkinson quickly recruited a small cadre of highly competent Air Force Officer-Engineers, with Masters and PhDs from top universities.
This included the concept of flying Atomic clocks in high orbits that had been advocated by both the Naval Research Laboratory and an earlier USAF Aerospace study by J.
[1] After retiring from the Air Force in 1978, Parkinson spent one year as a professor of Mechanical Engineering at Colorado State University, Fort Collins.
He taught Astrodynamics, Control Theory, and developed a special course on “Managing Innovation.”[3] In 1999, he took a leave of absence for a year and served as the CEO of the Sunnyvale based company, Trimble Navigation, a producer of advanced positioning systems.
A Stanford-based analysis group and NASA announced on 4 May 2011 that the data from GP-B indeed confirms the two predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.
[17][18][19] He has been on many corporate and governmental boards and recently stepped down as Chairman of Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Advisory Council after thirteen years in the position, long past the usual two-year tenure.
Beginning with the landmark launch of Sputnik in 1957, the first man-made satellite, members of the aeronautical and military spheres realized that satellite-based positioning was technically feasible, perhaps likely.
[3] The United States Navy experimented with the technology in 1960, launching the Transit positioning satellites which was mainly used for submarine navigation, in particular for initializing their on-board ballistic missiles.
[21] A recent study for the US government estimated the yearly benefit of GPS to be 37 to 74 billion dollars, excluding many of the applications, such as saving lives, that were difficult to quantify.