The processing section, composed of one or more CPUs, integrates this data and determines what actions, if any, are necessary to maintain or achieve a proper heading.
One driven out of Caltech and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the other from the German scientists that developed the early V2 rocket guidance and MIT.
Hence, beginning in 1958, NASA JPL and the Caltech crew became focused primarily on unmanned flight and shifted away from military applications with a few exceptions.
The community surrounding JPL drove tremendous innovation in telecommunication, interplanetary exploration and earth monitoring (among other areas).
The technical monitor for the MIT task was a young engineer named Jim Fletcher who later served as the NASA Administrator.
Dr. J. Halcombe Laning, with the help of Phil Hankins and Charlie Werner, initiated work on MAC, an algebraic programming language for the IBM 650, which was completed by early spring of 1958.
Today's Space Shuttle (STS) language called HAL, (developed by Intermetrics, Inc.) is a direct offshoot of MAC.
Other key figures at Convair were Charlie Bossart, the Chief Engineer, and Walter Schweidetzky, head of the guidance group.
The mathematics of this approach were fundamentally valid, but dropped because of the challenges in accurate inertial navigation (e.g. IMU Accuracy) and analog computing power.
A key feature of this approach allowed for the components of the vector cross product (v, xdv,/dt) to be used as the basic autopilot rate signals-a technique that became known as "cross-product steering."
The Q-system was presented at the first Technical Symposium on Ballistic Missiles held at the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation in Los Angeles on June 21 and 22, 1956.
On August 10 of 1961 NASA awarded MIT a contract for preliminary design study of a guidance and navigation system for Apollo program.
[9] (see Apollo on-board guidance, navigation, and control system, Dave Hoag, International Space Hall of Fame Dedication Conference in Alamogordo, N.M., October 1976 [10]).
So while the core mathematical construct of guidance has remained fairly constant, the facilities surrounding GN&C continue to evolve to support new vehicles, new missions and new hardware.
The center of excellence for the manned guidance remains at MIT (CSDL) as well as the former McDonnell Douglas Space Systems (in Houston).