tained in the field and challenged by the Air Force and Navy, the capability they created made possible the string of achievements which culminated in guidance for Apollo, which was ironically neither Schuler-tuned nor "pure" inertial, perhaps to Doc's chagrin.

A very simple guidance law which stated that when the quantity "velocity to be gained" equals zero, thrust must terminate, devised by Dr. Hal Laning at the Instrumentation Laboratory, served as the control function for all of the early missile systems. John Kirk, building on basic ideas of Laning and Phil Lapp with the Instrumentation Lab team members and a contingent of knowledgeable engineers from the AC Spark Plug Division of General Motors, created the basic system based on Laning's unique law, by then termed "Q" matrix guidance. When the Air Force reacted to the strong words emanating from the Soviets and quickly established a program for an Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile, Thor was the result. The MIT work was converted to the Thor program. AC division of GMC took over and twenty-two months after program initiation the first Thor flew.

General Ben Schriever had been appointed to conduct the USAF ballistic missile program when the emergency situation was first perceived in 1954. He wisely disengaged from the normal bureaucracy and the technical conservatism it seems always to exhibit. In hiring the Ramo-Wooldridge corporation as his technical partner he did not quite make all of the severance from conservatism he had hoped. Inertial technology being new and closely held was neither widely known nor well understood. Draper found he was isolated by what he called the "electronischers," from realizing for the ICBM program the benefits of inertial navigation and guidance systems. Atlas and the early TITANs were fielded using the better understood radio guidance schemes General Electric and the Bell Laboratories had invented. When