splashed into the Atlantic 300 miles off shore. It was in between these two tests that the inertial guidance system was developed and implemented for testing. July 1, 1959: AX-11 at Cape Canaveral from a launch pad: this launch was successful, but pieces of the missile detached causing failure. It did show that the new guidance systems worked. Guidance At the time that the Polaris project went live, submarine navigation systems accuracy was adequate for existing weapons systems. Initially, developers of Polaris were set to utilize the existing 'Stable Platform' configuration of the inertial guidance system. Created at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, this Ships Inertial Navigation System (SINS) was supplied to the Navy in 1954. The developers of Polaris encountered many issues from the birth of the project, however, perhaps the most unsettling for them was the outdated technology of the gyroscopes they would be implementing. This 'Stable Platform' configuration did not account for the change in gravitational fields that the submarine would experience while it was in motion, nor did it account for the ever-altering position of the Earth. This problem raised many concerns, as this would make it nearly impossible for navigational read outs to remain accurate and reliable. A submarine equipped with Ballistic Missiles was of little to no use if operators had no way to direct them. Polaris was thus forced to seek elsewhere and quickly found hope in a guidance system that had been abandoned by the U.S. Air Force. The Autonetics Division of North American Aviation had previously been faced with the task of developing a guidance system for the U.S. Air Force Navaho known as the XN6 Autonavigator. The XN6 was a system designed for air-breathing Cruise missiles, but by 1958 had proved useful for installment on submarines. A predecessor to the GPS satellite navigation system, the Transit system (later called NAVSAT), was developed because the submarines needed to know their position at launch in order for the missiles to hit their targets. Two American physicists, William Guier and George Weiffenbach, at Johns Hopkins's Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), began this work in 1958. A computer small enough to fit through a submarine hatch was developed in 1958, the AN/UYK-1. It was used to interpret the Transit satellite data and send guidance information to the Polaris, which had its own guidance computer made with ultra miniaturized electronics, very advanced for its time, because there