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

[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

[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: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.

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).