By John Porter, Life Member
Editor’s Note: The Eastern Test Range was run from Patrick Air Force Base in Florida in the 1960s. Today, it’s known as the Patrick Space Force Base and it continues to launch the most advanced rockets.
Time: About 1964
Place: Patrick Air Force Base, Cocoa Beach, Florida
In 1963, a young lieutenant, newly commissioned into the United States Air Force (USAF) from the Reserve Officer Training Corps. (ROTC) program at the University of Maryland (U of MD) was given a choice assignment and was ordered to the Program Support Office (PSO) of the HQ, Air Force Eastern Test Range (AFETR). The test range HQ was at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida on highway A1A within a stone’s throw of the Atlantic Ocean. He was a recent B.S.E.E. graduate and was assigned as a program support officer for the Ballistic Missile Program Support Office.
So, in March of that year, he and his wife of six months loaded up their 1960 Corvair and launched it south from Baltimore on I-95 to start their new joint venture: life as an Air Force family in Florida. Life was simpler back then, but very exciting for them as she made new friends and went to the many cookouts and TGIFs, became involved in volunteer work at the hospital and they sampled the Cocoa Beach nightlife. Their leisure time activities included driving trips to explore Florida in the daytime and watching wayward missiles blow up over the Atlantic Ocean at night. Occasionally they would go night fishing from a nearby bridge on Merritt Island.
Meanwhile the lieutenant immersed himself in learning about monopulse tracking radars (TPS-16/FPQ-6), continuous wave tracking systems MISTRAM and UDOP, transponders, beacons, orbital mechanics, computers, inertial guidance, the range’s real-time tracking data system and range safety. He soon enrolled in the graduate school of the Brevard Engineering College (BEC, now known as the Florida Institute of Technology).
After a year or so, their first child was born at the base hospital and he had settled into his job as a program support officer for the Minuteman, Titan II and the Pershing missile programs. The lieutenant made an effort to address an old problem that continued to raise its ugly head from time to time; the tracking data from the mainland sites, when plotted alongside the data from the down range station on Grand Bahama Island (GBI), had an offset, evidenced by the portion of data where there was simultaneous data from both locations. This problem had long been investigated, analyzed and reanalyzed with no good explanation to be found. But it was obvious to all that the missile could not be in two different locations at the same time. There appeared to be either a bug in the data processing software, an error in the tracking systems or an error in the specified location of the down range tracking system.
Being new to the problem and with youthful enthusiasm, the lieutenant called a meeting with the appropriate Range Contractor (Pan Am and RCA) managers and engineers to try to solve this problem. After listening to the history of the problem solving effort and seeing that the engineers had done a thorough job of quantifying system errors and testing the software, the group arrived at a consensus that the most suspect part of the equation was the accuracy and precision of the location survey of the down range tracking instruments on GBI. This had been questioned in the past and there was documentation in the form of letters and reports from Coast and Geodetic Survey (C&GS) people who stood by their specified accuracy and tolerances for the location of the island.
What methods the C&GS used was not known by the Test Range personnel, but the C&GS was a government agency, staffed with respected scientists and their word carried appropriate weight and authority. So, the Test Range was in the middle of a catch-22-like situation so that all parties (Range User and Range Contractor and C&GS) denied the existence in their realm of any known cause of the discrepancy. But nevertheless, the discrepancy did exist.
The group, focusing on the least understood parameter in the equation, sought an independent means to verify the location of the GBI. The range technical people had previously done some work on a computer program called Best Estimate of Trajectory (BET). The BET would take all the tracking data from all the various tracking systems, RF, optical etc. and statistically weight them according to the specified errors for each system. Then it would compute the most probable location vs time plot for the vehicle under test. (The test vehicle was affectionately referred to as “the bird.”) The group decided that they could lever from the work previously done with BET and by tracking orbiting bodies, with all of the ranges’ tracking stations, worldwide they could apply some reverse engineering and do their own survey of GBI.
The contractor was tasked with delivering a proposal and a quote, which the lieutenant would propose to the Range commander, General Davis, and request finding. US$100,000 was approved, and the project was turned ON. Shortly thereafter, the lieutenant was transferred from the PSO to the Satellite Operations Center and lost contact with the BET project and the people.
So the mystery of GBI is this: What happened to the project? Did it produce any usable results? Did the people involved in that project also contribute to refining the D.O.D. world model (survey)? It might have been; but maybe not. Does anybody out there know?
The lieutenant earned an M.S.E.E. degree at BEC, finished his four-year active duty tour, and then took his wife and daughter back to their home in Baltimore, where he accepted a job with the Westinghouse Corporation where he remained until retirement.
He is currently living in Florida, where he is typing this story.
