I assume in the context, he means "GPS" to mean radio based position and velocity fixing, since it's opposed to dead reckoning.
You're talking about NAVSTAR GPS, which is what most people refer to as simply "GPS". However other radio based US military nav sats date back to the 50s with the Navy's TRANSIT system, and Timation 1 was launched in '67, which was probably the first sat with a signal helpful for real-time, fast moving calculations, but was almost certainly too big to fit in a space ship at the time. Usable LORAN dates back to ~1940, if you don't limit it to sat based systems.
I'm not familiar with what the Soviets were capable of at the time in terms of either their independent nav systems, or ability to take advantage of the US ones, but it's reasonable to think they were putting as much military effort into it as the US was. Hell, a lot of info on the US history has only been ~recently declassified.
Point being, the space race happened specifically to develop this type of nuke delivery technology. At the time, this thinking definitely included manned space capsules (think nuclear bombers, but flying in space), as well as ICBMs, both of which would require precise navigation.
That said, the IMP merely calculated and displayed updated position based on manually input orbit parameters, which were calculated on the ground and radioed up.
Those, in turn, were based on location/velocity observations using both radio and radar range-finding, but all ground-based.
You're talking about NAVSTAR GPS, which is what most people refer to as simply "GPS". However other radio based US military nav sats date back to the 50s with the Navy's TRANSIT system, and Timation 1 was launched in '67, which was probably the first sat with a signal helpful for real-time, fast moving calculations, but was almost certainly too big to fit in a space ship at the time. Usable LORAN dates back to ~1940, if you don't limit it to sat based systems.
I'm not familiar with what the Soviets were capable of at the time in terms of either their independent nav systems, or ability to take advantage of the US ones, but it's reasonable to think they were putting as much military effort into it as the US was. Hell, a lot of info on the US history has only been ~recently declassified.
Point being, the space race happened specifically to develop this type of nuke delivery technology. At the time, this thinking definitely included manned space capsules (think nuclear bombers, but flying in space), as well as ICBMs, both of which would require precise navigation.
That said, the IMP merely calculated and displayed updated position based on manually input orbit parameters, which were calculated on the ground and radioed up.
Those, in turn, were based on location/velocity observations using both radio and radar range-finding, but all ground-based.