Chinese GPS System To Be Offered Free

MattSparkes writes, "The Chinese GPS system, Beidou, is apparently to be opened up for free access within China, worrying European investors on the €2.5 billion competing project, Galileo. Initially, China had declared that access to their system would be restricted to the military, and Europe had planned to recoup some of the cost of their system by selling licenses to China. Michael Shaw, from the US government's National Space-based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Coordination Office in Washington DC, said, 'Frankly, China's behavior towards Europe is not so different to how Europe behaved with us when GPS was the only game in town a decade ago.'"

Comments

Re:Chinese opposite to the West

[garcia]

The Chinese are taking away power from the people and giving it to the Communist leadership, and thus making their people nearly prisoners/slaves. That is almost the opposite of what happens in the West.

How many do we need?

[Kadin2048]

Seriously, how many different navigation systems do we need?

Let's see, the U.S. has GPS. And the Europeans don't trust Americans, so they want Galileo. And the Russians don't want to admit that the Europeans could be better than them at anything, so they're keeping GLONASS around. The Chinese don't trust anybody, and nobody trusts the Chinese, so they have Beidou. The only thing we're missing is one by India (to compete with the Chinese), or maybe one just by France that's purposely incompatible with the rest of Europe's (is "SENAV" taken?).

How soon until the satellites start running into each other? (Yes, I know they won't really; it'll probably be radio spectrum that we run out of first.)

At least as it looks right now, the only system that's even going to be an improvement over GPS is Galileo, and even then it won't be by much. Seems like it would be a whole lot more productive to build systems that augment the signal already available from GPS, and then can call back to providing position itself if GPS goes out; then you'd be able to get higher precision. With higher precision signals, a whole lot of interesting things become possible: you can have automatic self-driving farm equipment (like John Deere's ground-based StarFire augmentation system), lower-cost aircraft navigation, all sorts of cool remote-sensing applications. If you thought that GPS in itself was cool, there are far more opportunities to use it, when you start talking about inch-accurate systems.

The duplication of effort seems mostly like a penis-length contest, and while I think competition in all things is generally good, I'm not sure that this is really happening for any rational reason. There are better uses that the investment and satellite space could be put towards, than simply overlapping each other's navigation systems.

Re:How many do we need?

[__aagctu1952]

The duplication of effort seems mostly like a penis-length contest, and while I think competition in all things is generally good, I'm not sure that this is really happening for any rational reason. There are better uses that the investment and satellite space could be put towards, than simply overlapping each other's navigation systems.

Actually, even though quite a lot of the aerospace industry is solely about countries comparing their orbital penises, this isn't one of those occasions - those are valid concerns. It's not about precision, it's reliability. We're seeing more and more critical systems switch over to satellite navigation (planes, boats, trucks, goods delivery systems in general, personal cars, even, as you say, tractors). You do not want your country's entire infrastructure in the hands of a single, potentially hostile, foreign power. Thus, every nation or block of nations with the resources to do so launches their own network.
A world-wide cooperative effort, that won't be jammed/shut down in case of war/diplomatic catfights, would of course be optimal - but that's Just Not Going to Happen (TM). It ranks up there with the "if we just sit down and talk, we can all get along!" theory of conflict solution.

Re:How many do we need?

[houghi]

Let's see, the U.S. has GPS. And the Europeans don't trust Americans, so they want Galileo.

Well, GPS failure is said to be the cause of a European power outage

So what if the US suddenly decides it takes away GPS in certain parts of the world? look at it the other way around. What if Japan would have been had GPS and controlled it. Don't you think the US would want one for themselves? And rightfully so.

It isn't different for any other country.

Re:Chinese opposite to the West

[Aim Here]

The Chinese have taken away power from the people and given it to the state for the benefit of the ruling political elite and a number of friendly corporations, exploiting the people while spying on them and taking away their freedoms. That is just a more extreme case of what is currently happening in the West.