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European Space Agency Developing GPS Rival
nbrimhall writes "The International Herald Tribune has a story here about the European Space Agency's plans to create a alternative to the U.S. controlled GPS. It includes some interesting information regarding the cost and possible contributors (including Canada and Russia)."
I guess for the same reason monopolies make people antsy: the Europeans probably don't like their increasing dependence on a system administered by a single nation, especially one which, from time to time, trumpets "unilateralism".
There might be some concern, too, that the system would be suspectible to terrorist or other hostile action. Two systems might provide the redundancy to salvage a disaster.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The GPS system is controlled by the military (especially its precision) : until recently, the service was provided for free for civilian purposes with a low precision (I think it was 5 meters, or something like that). Today, the resolution is maximum, but they could decided to turn it back down, or stop civilian service altogether.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Hint: "US-controlled GPS". If you were a sovereign nation would you want to trust that the US would continue providing reasonable accurate signals globally, or would you want to have a multinational system that couldn't be turned off, or be switched to provide misleading information.
-a.e.mossberg
even after buying the military reciver youare tired to a U.S. 'owned' service.
Insightful but Overrated Troll
Who is going to pay that subscription fee while there is a free one in the sky? It's like web sites. Who is going to pay for content when there is more than you can read in a lifetime free?
I have a feeling that if the Europeans build a fee based GPS, nobody will come. What a waste of Euro taxpayer dollars.
(GPS+WAAS is good enough for accuracy in inches, even if they turn SA back on. WAAS will only work in the US though.)
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
./s here seem to forget the biggest benefit of a Euro-GPS -- redundacy.
You can't even fathom how dependant we are on GPS already. It's amazing.
* Ships use it as a replacement for LORAN (with LORAN being the redundancy).
*The whole telco industry uses it . Rather then sending a sync signal for long-distance serial lines (aka some T-1s, etc) they use GPS (with wire-sync being the redundancy).
* A good hunk of the computer industry uses it. GPS receivers are used for many NTP servers.
* The FAA is looking into using it (as a replacement for thier ground-based radar set up to allow pilots to autonomously plot thier poin-to-point flight plans).
* The military uses it in many ways including the self-guided smart bombs, etc.
We all know that a lot of people and companies do not build in redundancy until the sh*t hits the fan andsomthing goes down. If we loose a few GPS satellites the results for those that were not careful would be catastrophic. Having a second system in place, even at a subscription cost, is VERY valuable.
BTW I highly doubt the miltary would ever shut down civilian access to GPS in anything less then a world war. The US economy is WAY too dependant on it.
The problem with the 'just trust us' approach is that it is difficult to place great trust in a democratic country that no longer bothers to count the votes and is planing to do away with trials, replacing them by tribunals. Meanwhile the Bush admin. has declared that it will unilaterally withdraw from any agreements it finds to be inconvenient - including biggies like the ABM treaty.
The cost is not a major issue, $1Bn is not a huge amount in the EU budget, however it is not a negligible issue. The Brits would certainly not get bothered enough about the risks of a US monopoly, the French on the other hand can be relied upon to get into a galic stew over the issue.
The concern for the EU would be that a future US president might use the GPS selective availability system as a bargaining chip in future trade negotiations. The US has from time to time gone through protectionist cycles and a President Buchannan might well have tried to get his way through various types of blackmail. Or imagine Senator Jessie Helms putting a ridder on an appropriations bill ordering the Admin. to turn off GPS service to any country that does not toe the line on whatever idea the supporter of segregation happened to have that week.
Given the vagaries of the US political process it is not surprising that the dependence on the GPS system is being raised as an issue. It is very unlikely that the EU will go ahead and build a rival system, however it is very likely that the US will respond to the proposals with a set of diplomatic assurances over the use made of selective availabilty. And just as GWB has discovered that the ABM treaty matters after all a future president Buchanan would find that diplomatic assurances are kind of harder to renege on than US unilateralists tend to believe.
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Something like this was mooted a couple of years back. The main annoyance was the extra work in tying the two (somewhat different) methods together, I suspect that the integration isn't as neat as it could have been. I can't help thinking that it would be more productive to have an open standard for positioning information (including things like pseudo satellites) rather than gluing together different stuff.
:o)
And spheroids are calculable. Anyone doing surveying will be reading into a PDA or something anyway so they can transform coords into any space they want.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
The article mentioned that the U.S. Military was now capable of Jamming GPS signals so that is the reason they turned off Selective Availability
This is a good point to justify an alternative EU GPS system: the US can jam or make "selectively available" their own system, but doing something like that on someone else's system would be an outright act of war.
Of course this boils down to some leverage in commercial talks, after all; and I don't see the US and the EU engaged in more than "heated talks" in the next 10-15 years.
-- No sig today