Tony Stark to Vanity Fair reporter Christine Everhart in the Marvel movie Iron Man:

“Do you plan to report on the millions we’ve saved by advancing medical technology or kept from starvation with our intellacrops? All those breakthroughs, military funding, honey!”

While outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the world of the growing military-industrial complex in his final speech as president on January 17, 1961, there is no doubt that the world has greatly benefitted from most of the technology developed by the military-industrial complex.

One of the advances many people today take for granted is GPS – the Global Positioning System. From telling time on your cell phone or computer or getting from point A to point B in your Tesla, GPS has become so integrated into people’s lives that most of us don’t even notice it.

The first global positioning system called Transit was created in 1958 by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. The first satellite for Transit was developed by the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and was launched in 1960 providing navigation for military and commercial users. The U.S. Navy was one of the first to use Transit for programming their submarine-launched missiles. By 1968, the Navy had 36 fully operational satellites orbiting around the planet.

Throughout the 1960s, the development of GPS was assisted by the technological advancements of solid-state microprocessors, computers, and bandwidth utilization techniques. The development of atomic clocks led to advances in a satellite-based navigation system called Timation, short for Time Navigation. A satellite equipped with an atomic clock was launched into space in 1974, which improved the accuracy of GPS and provided three-dimensional location coverage. Also that year, the U.S. Air Force developed  Navstar satellites, their ground control system, and a variety of types of military user equipment.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan authorized the use of Navstar (or GPS as it became known) by civilian commercial airlines in an attempt to improve navigation and safety for air travel. The authorization to provide free access to GPS data to industries outside the U.S. military became the first step towards authorized civilian usage. By 1989, commercially available hand-held GPS units hit the market, including the Magellan Corporation’s Magellan NAV 1000, which weighed 1.5 pounds, offered only a few hours of battery life, and cost $3,000. [1]

GPS technology continued to improve through the 1980s and 1990s with the production and development of the GPS Block II satellite which was launched into orbit in 1989 on a Delta II rocket. Concern also grew within the government that U.S. adversaries could utilize the GPS system, and its information, against the U.S. In response, the Defense Department decided to adjust the system to be less accurate in non-military applications (known as “selective availability”) in order to deter any usage by enemies. [2]