Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

by Ozan Varol

Frank McClure was also thunderstruck by Sputnik, but for a different reason. McClure was then the deputy director at the Applied Physics Laboratory. He called Guier and Weiffenbach into his office and asked them a simple question: “Can you guys do the reverse?” If the two men could calculate the unknown trajectory of a satellite from a known location on Earth, could they find an unknown location on Earth using the known location of a satellite? This question may sound like a theoretical riddle, but McClure had a very practical application in mind. At the time, the military was developing nuclear missiles capable of being launched from submarines. But there was a problem. To strike a precise location with a nuclear missile, the military had to know the precise location of the launch site. In the case of nuclear submarines swimming through the Pacific Ocean, their precise location was unknown. Hence the question: Can you discover the unknown location of our submarines through the known location of a satellite we’ll launch into space? The answer was a resounding yes. It took only three years after the launch of Sputnik for the United States to implement this thought experiment and launch five satellites into orbit to guide its nuclear submarines. Although it was called the Transit system at the time, its name was changed in the 1980s to something that has become an everyday term: the global positioning system, or GPS.