NAVSTAR: In Rememberance

30 years ago today saw the launch of NAVSTAR 2 (following closely on the heels of NAVSTAR 1, launched 22 February 1978). Both NAVSTAR 1 and 2 have since been incorporated into the vast constellation of satellites that give us GPS.

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“With satellite broadcasting a few months off, we move, scientist and humanist alike, into the world of instant and inexpensive access to anything and anybody on the globe. The divorce in our world is not now, nor will it be, between the scientist and the humanist but between the mechanist and the electrician. Our scientists as much as our humanists are caught in the old forms of the depart­ing mechanical culture which all have contributed to for centu­ries. We now live electrically, but we continue to think in the older modes of mechanism. Even the wheel itself, which we abstracted from animal form, is being reabsorbed into the organic in the jet age. In the Polaris missile the fuel and the engine are one. Both cease to exist at the same moment. Yet the mark of obsolescence is now, as always, hypertrophy.” McLuhan, “The Humanities in the Electronic Age,” Humanities Association Bulletin 34, 1 (Fall 1961).