GPS vs. Galileo; Where Are They Headed?

ben_ writes "This keynote speech from the recent European Navigation Conference talks about the history between the US military's GPS and the proposed EU Galileo system, as well as where they're both going. Interested in how you know where you are and what's going to happen to those satellites?"

Comments

Essential to Ending US Dominance

[Jameth]

As long as GPS is the only game in town, the US has a stranglehold on the superpower market. The US can regulate the GPS satellites and could cut off anyone else at any time. Seeing as GPS has revolutionized warfare, this means the US gets an automatic bonus in any war.

Until the EU has an alternative, it's military (should it form one) will be at a severe disadvantage in a theoretical conflict, and potential power in a theoretical conflict is a major bargaining chip. (It's a chip that's not talked about, but people pay attention to it on their own.)

Re:Essential to Ending US Dominance

[CodeMonkey4Hire]

But if the US cut off the GPS, then they couldn't use it either, right?
There would also be a lot of uproar from businesses/individuals unless there were very good reasons for the war. Otherwise, the PR would be very damaging to the government, which they would try to avoid unless there was a 2nd-term president or something.

On reflection, I suppose that the US could turn off just a few of the satellites, disrupting service in a more or less contained region.
I have also heard of GPS jammers, but anyone could use those, so that would effectively negate the US's GPS advantage.

Re:Essential to Ending US Dominance

[mpost4]

if any side in any confict starts lobbing nukes, we all can kiss their asses good bye. if the US sends up what we got, that it humanity is dead. We have way to many nukes on earth.

Re:Essential to Ending US Dominance

[Rhubarb Crumble]

1. Someone more intelligent than Putin takes over Russia and uses Putin's communist-like infrastructure to once again impose a military state.

Vlad Putin is a VERY smart guy. At the moment he's busy wresting control of the country back from the cowboy capitalists that Yeltsin and the IMF sold its natural resources to (as in 100 people own 1/4th of the country's wealth). This needs to happen before re-establishing the military's dominance can take place. The symbolism is already pointing that way, what with the red star being restored as the symbol of the Red Army, and the national anthem reverting to the Soviet one (but with new words). This is why eastern europe is so keen to join NATO, as they know very well that Russia the superpower is just taking a timeout...

2. China decides that they have the most people in the world and that someone else should give up some land to support them.

Ummm, China is very far away from Europe. If they want land from someone it'll be Russia....

Re:Essential to Ending US Dominance

[pubjames]

You should also bare in mind that the USA does not want anyone else to have a good military, so it is for instance trying to stifle a pan-European military force. So it's not a case of the Euros not wanting a strong military, it's a case of the USA preventing the Euros from having one.

Re:Essential to Ending US Dominance

[SpyPlane]

The satellites are NOT in a Geo-stationary orbit, so they would have to constantly be turning satellites on and off, and to top it all off, they could only command the updates while the satellites were in line of site to the ground station in US, so pretty much impossible without seriously effecting the US's use of GPS.

Re:Essential to Ending US Dominance

[Dun Malg]

The US isn't all that worried about the EU having the capability, they're worried about an ICBM w/ New York City's name on it

Actually, They're worried about cruise missiles, not ICBMs. ICBMs don't use GPS, they use ballistics.

Re:Essential to Ending US Dominance

[pe1rxq]

The US has bases all over the world that could do the switching....
And maybe...just maybe... those satelites have a little clock on board and a microcontroller that can be programmed....

Jeroen

Re:Essential to Ending US Dominance

[meringuoid]

1: An EU-US war is madness plain and simple. It's not going to happen. Both sides are very happy to play the game of trade tariff arm-wrestling, but actually fight? Leave it out... Short of a fascist dictator coming to power in the US (no, Bush does not constitute one of these) this is absurd. It's just not a profitable business model.

2: The Russians storming west is more likely than (1), which isn't saying much. The Russian conventional army is really not what it used to be, after years of underfunding. A hypothetical Russian dictator would need to rearm a whole lot to make an invasion of Europe a practical proposition, and that would take a long time. Time enough for the Europeans to get their act together - note that most of Russia's former Warsaw Pact allies are now in NATO and the EU. In any case Russia is turning into a capitalist state like no other; they're more likely to see the EU as a huge, rich market on their doorstep, rather than as an opportunity for a scrap.

3) is just nuts. China decides to invade the EU for extra space? Picking out just about the only place on the planet more crowded than China itself? Entirely barmy. The only place China could realistically look for lebensraum is Siberia, and, er... well, I said the Russian conventional forces were not what they were, but that was an outlandish proposition when Tom Clancy tried it out, and it's no saner now.

If I was a European military planner I'd be worried about the dodgy nations on the doorstep, rather than the three other big players. Belarus, for instance, is ruled by a complete and utter fruitcake dictator. And as we expand we'll have more neighbours like that - if Turkey joins up we'll have Iraq right on the EU frontier. That's the sort of thing we'll need to be thinking about.

And as the expanding EU bumps up against such difficulties, we may need to conduct our own military operations, probably without American support - and sometimes, I would imagine, with outright opposition from Washington. That's why we need our own GPS-equivalent. It would be, at the very least, a diplomatic embarrassment to launch a war of which America disapproved, while relying on America's satellites to guide our missiles ;-)

Re:Essential to Ending US Dominance

[meringuoid]

That's what it's really about. The US has a nice little global hegemony going on, and it would prefer not to have any rivals.

Suppose that once the oil starts to run a little short, a dictator who has contracts to supply oil to America invades the country of a dictator who has contracts to supply oil to Europe. The Americans would greatly prefer that dictator A could liberate country B from the tyranny of dictator C, without the brave freedom-loving people of country B having access to British tanks and German guns with which to defend themselves from the expansionist aggressive armies of dictator A. The Americans would very much prefer that the Europeans not have the military capability to directly assist country B.

It's all about influence on third-parties, really, rather than about fighting each other. War for profit.

Re:Essential to Ending US Dominance

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, not quite right.

SA can be turned on for specific geographic areas, so for example, Iraq and the general area around it had SA turned on in the recent conflict.

The satellites have synthetic aperture antennae, so could quite easily be programmed to drop all signal to specific areas. It is fairly 'crude' in the sense that the areas of no signal do not map to exactly a country's border. The technique is quite fancy in that you have to change the beam footprint of all the satellites continuously as they orbit to drop a particular area, or to turn on selective availaibility in a particular area.

There are other tricks up the GPS satellites' sleeves, which the military obviously don't publicise.

Re:Essential to Ending US Dominance

[joib]

Russia's had a military force, but the only thing holding it up was the desire of the people to reap the rewards of becoming communists party members. Obviously there was some patriotism, but it was far from a deciding factor in anything but defense.


That's a question of motivation. Of course any soldier, conscript or professional, fights harder when he's defending his homeland than when he's on some empire building mission. Do you think that morale in the EU armies would be high if we would embark on some "follow in Napoleons and Hitlers footsteps and storm the gates of Moscow"-project? This being the third time, perhaps we'd remember to bring winter clothing this time, though. ;-)

But the question of motivation regarding attack vs. defense won't make such a huge impact in the feasibility of any plan. Until the early 80:s, the Soviets had hardware that was about equivalent to the west, and they had overwhelming numerical superiority in Europe. I think they could have succeeded (discounting that any such attack would have provoked a nuclear exhange between the US and the USSR).


There military is not much different than it was previously, except that it is lacking in willing manpower.


Yes it is different. They have downsized a lot, and still a large part of their "active" arsenal is nothing but scrap metal. The few things that work are still 1970 level technology.


If Russia were to revert to a military state, it's quite likely that you'd find that they have a rather fearsome military again.


Not with their current economy. Spending 30% of GDP on the military is not a usable long term scenario, as it will crash the economy. Given that the GDP of Russia is currently about equal to Sweden, the EU is more than able to counter any increase in military spending by Russia, if the EU feels there is a need. By the time the economy of Russia is able to provide a military threat to the EU, we can only hope that the people of Russia will choose prosperity (via tight economic integration with the EU and the rest of the world) instead of yet another world domination scheme. Given the horrors the Russian populace has gone through during the past few centuries, they certainly deserve peace and prosperity as much as anyone else, if not more.


No, my point is that the decisions by EU countries to cut back on their militaries means that they will have no resources to fight any war that lands on their doorstep.


Even after these cutbacks, the EU is more than able to fight any neighborhood war. As I explained above, the Russian military is but a shadow of its former self, they won't be any threat until the Russian economy is on par with the EU countries (which at the very least will take decades). Ukraine, or any other small-scale dictatorship, is small and poor, so they are even less of a threat. The mongolian hordes from China will only reach europe after wading through a hailstorm of Russian nukes, so that's not a really realistic scenario either.

The EU doesn't have any imperial ambitions, as opposed to the current US administration, so there is no need for a expeditionary force capable of conquering some banana republic on the other side of the world either.

With no realistic major military threat in sight, it makes sense to spend less on the military and more on say, growing the economy. E.g. if military spending is reduced from 3 % to 2 % of GDP and the 1 % left over is used for growing the economy, it doesn't take long until the 2 % spending matches the former 3 %.


The US has tremendous experience with Guerilla warfare and at least has semi-effective countermeasures.


No. There is no effective military countermeasure against guerilla warfare. What you can do is try to win the support of the populace, thus enabling your police to work more efficiently, and using armored convoys to give some defense against ambushes. OTOH, while burning supply trucks look bad on TV, they don't really pose a major military threat either. Besides, as the EU isn't planning on conquering other countries, there is little chance of having to deal with guerilla warfare in the first place.

Re:Essential to Ending US Dominance

[Tyler_L]

if anyone ever thought that a military system would not have the ability to be disabled for all but military use they are horribly mistaken. the lives of the service men on the ground and the sucess of a mission is much more important than some businesses using it for navigation.

If anyone ever thought that the US can ever afford to turn off GPS, they are horribly mistaken.

"Businesses using it for navigation" isn't as trivial a thing as it sounds. Those "businesses" are airlines an other air carriers, and "navigation" is actually "getting on the ground without crashing."

GPS systems are already approved for flight in instrument conditions (i.e. zero visibility), including approaches to land. Furthermore, the FAA has announced that it is slowly phasing out its ground-based navigation systems (VORs and NDBs) and replacing it with GPS. While the ground-based systems will probably never be completely gone, GPS is becoming increasingly important for keeping planes on course and out of the trees.

Disabling (or even rendering less effective) civilian GPS systems would mean potentially crashing US civilian aircraft. It'd be like 9/11 all over again, except this time the government would be directly (and verifiably) responsible. No US president would dare authorize such a course of action without some serious advance notice to the nation to avoid disaster.

And if the US is faced with a crisis of such magnitude that that it would put such an operation into effect, it could just as easily add "shoot down N of the Galileo satellites" to the TODO list.

Competition vs monopoly

[magarity]

Most of the time competition is good: software, hardware, cola. Sometimes monopolies are more acceptable: stringing up electric transmission cables, streets to my (your) house, large constellations of bright satellites that interfere with astronomic studies and general enjoyment of the night sky. Sure, GPS is very handy but more than one system seems a little redundant.

Re:Competition vs monopoly

[Hamhock]

Well, it only seems redundant if you're the one controlling it. If you're not the U.S., then you might be concerned that the U.S.'s GPS system may not always be available to you.

Re:Competition vs monopoly

[supersnail]

Given the recent US history of treating any country that doesnt 100% agree with its current policy as an enemy.

The history of abusing international trade agreements for the benefit of US based corperations.

And the general unwillingness to agree with any other goverment about anything. I would say that depending on a US government controlled system would be pretty dumb.

Re:Maybe I missed something

[zenrandom]

this available to terrorists thing is such a farce. A GPS receiver is available for as little as $90. And one with WAAS one can achieve accuracy of about 3ft 95% of the time if they are in an area served by the ground based error correction stations (which is pretty much all of the USA). This is currently available to terrorists if they want it anyhow. And anyone can set up their own Differential beacon... to improve accuracy even more. Hell they used to do it when the fuzz factor was still on with GPS.

Re:Where ever they are going...

[Dun Malg]

I think that they will need to develop a system in the next 5-10 years that can be used through buildings and underground, otherwise it might be useless. I would think GPS devices would be useful for people like cave explorers, but maybe that's unreasonable or would be too dangerous to the rest of the population.

Forget it, man. You can't get EM radiation through solid rock from orbit. At least not without a lot of power, and then you're frying everything on the surfac. Wishing for an underground-capable GPS is like wishing for a lighthouse you can see through the hull of your boat. It's asking too much.

This could also be a benefit

[TimmyDee]

So long as the US and the EU are on good terms, we should be able to access both systems with the correct receiver. I can see a great benefit to a receiver that can read position from both systems and cross-check on the fly, reducing your PDOP and increasing your resolution of position far more quickly than before. Imagine having upwards of 10 satellites providing you with position data! I'd be in heaven!

redundancy

[curator_thew]

This is also about global redundancy. The world increasingly depends upon navigational technologies like this. It's a little dangerous that there's only _one_ point of failure (whether technical, economic, political, etc).

Re:Where ever they are going...

[kpansky]

Umm. This is like one of the most inane posts I have ever read. GPS is a passively transmitted system from space. Giving your kid a GPS receiver will do nothing except let the kid know exactly where he is being kidnapped.

Now, maybe if you equipped your son with a set of orbiting satellites and got a receiver to pick up the signals you would be in business.

Re:Here's the big question:

[Dun Malg]

Will the ESA Galileo satellite navigation system be sufficiently different that you'll need all-new receivers to pick up Galileo navigation information? That could get VERY expensive as manufacturers of satellite navigation receivers will have to accommodate both systems for airplanes, automobiles, trucks, boats, etc.

The basic GPS components are already ridiculously cheap. Most of what you're paying for with a GPS unit is the mapping/tracking software. The "GPS" portion of it is just an antenna and a few chips that spit out lat/lon/altitude data at regular intervals. Adding Galileo support will likely be a simple matter of adding a couple more chips, initially, and I predict that within a year all the major manufacturers of GPS OEM parts will have Galileo support rolled into their products.

Re:More 'open source'?

[ZackSchil]

GPS is already an open standard. It is also a one-way system that cannot be restricted in any way except by satellite coverage. As much as everyone would like to believe that the US is evil incarnate, it is not. We have bad presidents (hint: his name starts with a 'G' and ends in 'eorge W. Bush') from time to time and a lot of uneducated, easily manipulated people (middle America), but they are not inherently evil. The nation is still a republic (well, the 2000 election excluded) and I hope the rest of the world realizes this.

Control over GPS is not a power grab by the US. It is not a strategic tool for way that we will eventually lock our enemies out of. It is simply a service the military created for its self and is now sharing with everyone. The only reason the US controls GPS is because we invented it, we rely on it more than anyone else, and we want to make sure it keeps working and improving as time goes on. THAT'S IT! NO EVIL! NONE! Not in this story at least. As for Europe's new system, it looks as if they want to create a system that cooperates with GPS to expand coverage but does not depend on it. More power to them, though I'm curious about some of the features they're adding...

Thomas Jefferson and Our Cultural Differences

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a great article and I'm encouraged that the US and EU are working together to ensure we'll eventually be able to get inexpensive GPS receivers that'll use both systems.

But alas there is this remark:

And, since US policy was to "limit availability of their radionavigation systems in the event of a real or potential threat of war or impairment to national security", Europe saw that its access to this vital new utility depended on the decisions of a single nation, with which it might well disagree on matters of national security. Recent event have given examples of just such disagreements. Europe's response was Galileo.

Alas, this cultural difference has been with us at least since the days of Thomas Jefferson and those earlier terrorists, the Barbary Pirates. European nations paid off the pirates rather than fight. Under Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. had a policy, "Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute." It seems someone has posted more about that history at:

Barbary Pirates

Then as now, Europe thinks being nice to nasty folk is a better than getting tough, sending out the frigates, and making them behave. Hence their policy of leaning toward the Arabs. In contrast, the U.S. supports feisty little Israel, perhaps the only nation in history to fight four major wars in one lifetime with foes that outnumber them twenty to one and win every one. We back a democracy and a winner. They (particularly the French), back repressive dictatorships and losers.

In that context, it helps to remember what Churchill warned in 1939 after the Munich Agreement, "Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonor. They chose dishonor. They will have war."

In the end, every people gets the government they deserve. If the Europeans have so little sense of 'honor,' that they cannot defend their free and democratic societies from an ideology driven by hatred and revenge, then perhaps they deserve to drop into history's dustbin, always knowing precisely where they are thanks to a Galileo that will never be turned off to fight terrorism. And in their obsession with not fighting a few brush wars, they may lose a far greater and more critical cultural war. Europe may become Eurabia. In a generation, European women may only leave their homes clad in a sack from head to toe.

Am I the only one to catch the madness of all this? For perhaps two decades we've been told that there was a 'religious right' or 'fundamentalism' spanning from Jew and Christian to Arab that is a threat to free and democratic societies. But when push comes to shove, when religiously sanctioned terrorism and repression must be fought, it is the secular left who apologizes for religious repression and who wants little or nothing done to open up brutally repressive Arab societies. The left of western democracies is defending Saddam with all the zeal they once had for cruel Stalin.

All this brings to mind the Chinese proverb about the curse of living in "interesting times."

Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

Re:Thomas Jefferson and Our Cultural Differences

[d_strand]

Or maybe another example: World War II.

The US did just as much to stop the Nazis as europe. That is to say, nothing until they where attacked themselves. The only people who deserve any credit for actually joining the war even though they didn't really have to (at that point in time) are the Britts (of course it was inevitable that they'd have to join eventualy since Hitler was a fruitcake).

All i want to know is..

[t_allardyce]

if the US gets a say in galileo (ie when and where its turned off and its accuracy during war etc etc) does europe get the same say in the US system?

Re:Where are they going?

[B'Trey]

While nothing you said is incorrect, where did I say anything that implied anything different? A geostationary satellite is in an orbit that keeps it stationary over one geographic location.

Re:More NAVSTAR GPS information

[AllTheGoodNamesWereT]

This posting implies something that is worth making explicit. Until now, there has been only one satellite-based Global Positioning System, the U.S.-operated Navstar system, and the term "GPS" has been used to describe both the general concept and the specific implementation.

Now that the world is on the verge of having more than one GPS system, shouldn't we refer to the first system as Navstar, and use the term "GPS" generically to refer to all such systems?

Re:makes me wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not a french peculiarity. Most of the world, bar Israel, shares this view.