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Lockheed Martin Awarded GPS III
D Ninja writes "Yesterday, Lockheed Martin was awarded the $1.4 billion Air Force contract to build the next-generation global positioning satellite system. This occurred after a series of delays as the Air Force decided between Lockheed and the competing bidding contractor, Boeing Co. 'GPS III, will give new navigation warfare (NAVWAR) capabilities to shut off GPS service to a limited geographical location while providing GPS to US and allied forces. GPS III will offer significant improvements in navigation capabilities by improving interoperability and jam resistance. The procurement of the GPS III system is planned for multiple blocks, with the GPS IIIA portion currently underway. GPS IIIA includes all of the GPS IIF capability plus up to a ten-fold increase in signal power, a new civil signal compatible with the European Union's Galileo system, and a new spacecraft bus that will allow a growth path to future blocks.'"
I thought that they were moving away from this. They're launching new satellites for the current system with this turned off.
What's the word on this?
Seriously - lost the in air refueler contract to Airbus (or NVS or whoever)- lost this contract to Lockhead - What is the deal?
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Why didn't they have NASA build it? They're not for profit and always want more money to do stuff. Any company is obviously making money off it while NASA wouldn't be. Plus, they kinda know a bit about space and satellites.
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Used in the search for GPSIV!
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
I think that translates to "ability to override the European Union's Galileo".
Do these sattelites have defences? Are their locations unknown by the enemy? No!
Day 1, 0900: War Declared
Day 1, 0915: All GPS satellites blasted out of the sky
Day 1, 0930: US surrenders due to lack of any ability to locate their troops and organise them
GPS in a military situation has always seemed to me kind of a bad idea to rely on too much. You put all this technology in your air crafts, your tanks, all your hummers, but when these precious badly defended satellites get knocked out the planes cant fly and tanks, ships and other operations are seriously impared. How secret can you keep a satellite and how do you defend them (short of shooting anything that comes near them)
Boeing has a surplus of Commercial and Military Contracts. In fact, if we could have a few more prominent startups for Defense Contracting the better.
The reason Europe decided to build Galileo as a direct civilian alternative to US' GPS was to prevent the US from shutting down all navigation in case of a conflict. TFA says that the new (US military) GPS now will have 500x transmit power, and also transmit a new civilian signal (L1C) to be fully compatible and interoperable with EU's Galileo.
I wonder if the capability to "interoperate" with the Galileo system also includes "Jamming". Seems like the satellite could produce a good military GPs signal while at the same time transmit a corrupt L1C signal to "interoperate" with the Galileo system.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
GPS outages that can be targeted to small geographic areas sure makes me reach for my tinfoil hat.
People not just in the U.S. but around the world have come to rely on it like it's public infrastructure.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
I remember that from "The Harlem Globetrotters in Outer Space"!!!!
500x more power - essentially that requires a tremendously larger amount of power. Even with the best phased array bad ass military style antennas you arent going to get this sort of a power increase - you gotta put more out of the antenna at the source - which means you are lifting honking huge freaking batteries up into space and you are gonna have to stick some mad solar panels on the sucka too.
PS. I completely agree with the sentiment in your last sentence. - with that money you could probably mount a significant effort toward eliminating malaria in subtropical/tropical areas of the world, saving millions of children. Or you could provide an absurd amount of aid to prevent water born diseases in the 3rd world - or you could mount a tremendous anti-hunger campaign. Bottom line - bigger batteries on a satellite are more important to the people in charge.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
I happen to have done some engineering work on GPS, and I can say that these additions are extremely non-trivial and cannot be done with existing hardware. The way the signals are transmitted must be changed entirely. The good news is that this system will allow for real-time ionospheric distortion mitigation (a problem for any non-DGPS receivers with the current system) and provide enough signal strength that even super-cheap receivers will be very accurate.
:-)
Also, this cost would likely have occurred anyway - the current satellite constellation won't live forever. The satellites will run out of orbital maintenance fuel, or their clocks will begin to drift erratically, and at some point in the foreseeable future, the constellation will lose enough satellites that it will be mostly unusable. So if we'll be launching new ones anyway, why not make them better?
I also understand your humanitarian question, however, the support that GPS provides in science and education (even though it was and is a military project in the USA) truly does humankind a great service. Oh, and it lets me find good pizza no matter where I am in the city, which is truly humanitarian
The same way it coses $400 million to drive a remote-controlled car across a red desert?
Because the 1.4bn is used for more than what you trivialize it to be for. The 1.4bn is for the entire contract but the initial goal is to only have 2 satellites launched with the option for 10 more. They will be integrating with the existing EU Galileo system and provides who knows what else in additional features. As one guy in the article said "'You are guaranteed a lot of business for the next 20 years. It may be enough to drive the losing competitor out of this market.'" In addition to the materials, you also have labor which, in many cases, can exceed the cost of the materials especially with contracts lasting as long as this one can. The article doesn't go into details but the contract sounds like it also includes operations and maintenance once the satellites have been launched which is icing on the cake for Lockheed.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Mmmh. I'd better start selling counterfeit GPS satellites on E-bay then...
Disclaimer: I'm not anti-military.
Turning off GPS doesn't give us any more ability to kill people. Simple keeps the enemy from killing us.
Don't underestimate the potential impact it could have on saving lives. Sure perhaps it's selfish to want to save our own lives, but hey I'm only human. If the enemy uses GPS technology to launch an attack on us we only have ourselves to blame.
If you mean actual signal jamming then sure. They will be interoperable because they work in the same frequency range. That also means, of course, the same kind of jamming equipment work on them. However that isn't really a concern as that is a local phenomena.
What you are probably thinking about is actually turning it off for certain areas. That's the concern with GPS. It's a military project from start to finish, so the US military runs it. While they are pleased to let civilians use it, they do retain ultimate control and thus could shut down part or all of it if they wanted.
Galileo will, of course, not be subject to that. It will be subject to shutdown by whoever it's controlling body is. So while the US could ask that it be turned off somewhere, they wouldn't just be able to do it themselves.
Name a country that has any sort of real ASAT defenses, other than maybe Russia (I say maybe because who knows what their readiness is anymore). Right now, the US doesn't really have to worry about anyone being able to shoot down their satellites. I'm sure that'll change in time as China seems to be working on ASAT technology, but at the present time other than (possibly) Russia, there just isn't anywhere that has the systems it takes to shoot down the GPS network. Remember that to be an effective target, you'd have to be able to take out most-all of it. If you only have enough to take out a few satellites, some communication or recon sats would better targets, because GPS would still be largely functional, even with a few sats down.
I think it's an interesting problem to create a satellite that emits a radio signal that can only be used by some people, but not others, as in the "military" and "civilian" signals from these satellites.
I daresay at some point it would be considered a war crime to disrupt GPS signals, in any case, when civilization is much more dependent on them, as I think it is reasonable to expect in the future.
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Will this affect my driving in the future? If I'm in my car using my car's GPSIII nav and suddenly get zero signal, should I pull over immediately to 'duck and cover'? :)
Exactly. It seems silly for a military to spend all this money to gain a tactical advantage, and then leave it wide open for the enemy to use. This is the modern equivalent of blowing up your own bridges so the bad guys can't cross 'em.
Sorry - S1C was Boeing, Chrysler subcontracted for the tanks.
Brett
I am a little more concerned with my car being driven off a cliff by an automated traffic control system because some asshat decides to invade some other asshat, and to hell with the civilians using the system.
The insistence on a NAVWAR backdoor is rather stupid. In the last three wars in which it has been involved, the U.S. has pretty much had its rear kicked by enemies using what amounts to 1940s technology. The danger to US troops is not from WMDs, it's from IEDs made in peoples kitchens using easily obtained ordinance, generally with U.S. serial numbers on it.
If they want to blow me up, they're going to do it by setting up a bomb that reacts to the RFID in my "Real ID" card, U.S. Passport, or the pressure sensors in my tires, all of which are government mandated, and all of which go where I go, and so are really useful for targeting me both generally ("look, and American!") or personally. Or they'll use my IMEI on my cell phone, which on differs in that I'm not required to carry it, but probably will anyway.
If someone can build a missile that can get to me from where they are, then unless I am sitting in a bunker, a few hundred feet for going inertial or using airport beacons instead of GPS isn't going to matter much one way or another.
-- Terry
I bet GPSIII will be operational way before Galileo is. The way we handle big projects here in Europe is appalling.
-- Cheers!
Can you please define "very accurate"? I think we can now reliably get 3 meter accuracy if WAAS is available, right? Apparently these new satellites should be better than that, if the Wikipedia article I read on them is any indication, but I haven't heard a number saying how much better.
I think they can turn off the unencrypted channel but leave on the encrypted channel; so we can just turn it off for the other guys... but I'm no expert.
.plan!! what plan?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
"launch launch launch pop pop pop" could mean the following :
1) the EU possibly starts (possibly collaboration with the Chinese) to destroy all US satellite, including KH and GPS one.
2) all intellectual property of the US are forfeited
3) the US lose ANY support whatsoever. For a VERY long time. And it find itself isolated politically, and as much isolated economically as the world can bear (I doubt there is anything the US physically produce which could not be produced/built over a few month/years in another part of the world)
4) escalation of conflict in nuclear war. Remember, some country in EU still have the same nasty nuke that you have. Then we have 2 sets of loser (EU/US) and one winner : the rest of the world.
Anybody which think that the US can kill any satellite of the EU or China because they dislike it, should have its head examinated, because there would be pretty hefty consequence.
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See, this is the problem with the US. I was in Locatient 2007 where a representative of the US government for navigation gave a boat load of crap about how GPS 3 will be totally open and it will interoperate with all other navigation systems. He also emphasized that unlike GPS 2, it will not have the feature to be switched off by the US military. He was pushing for more hardware and software developers to use the GPS platform. This story is exactly the opposite of what he claimed. This switch and bait tactic is old and it is really taking whatever remains of the credibility of the US down the gutter.
And indeed antenna directionality is exactly what GPS III is doing. The intent, AFAIK, is to provide a high-power jam-resistant signal in a given theater of operations, not to provide global jam-resistance.
A single launch (i.e. the rocket, plus the expense of launch operations) can cost around $150-200M. The satellite itself is probably on the order of $100-150M to build and operate. These are not GPS-specific figures. They're probably about right most commercial commsats too. So the two satellites mentioned in the article will potentially get you close to 1/2 of the total figure. Throw in some NRE to account for what you trivialize as "access control and an amplifier" (the jam-resistant high-power signal alone is far more complex than just adding an amplifier, and GPS III involves a lot of other system upgrades as well), and you'll quickly reach the $1.4B mark.
Er, you do realize that the civilian uses of GPS probably far outweigh the military uses these days, don't you? Most camping stores stock GPS units. Many cars come with them. Some cellphones. GPS receivers are being integrated into all sorts of products that require location or precise time information. Future FAA "free flight" rules for civil aviation are (IIRC) reliant on GPS. Indeed, several of the changes to GPS that are being made as part of GPS III are specifically intended to help civilian users.
I wonder why the Bus is being built to add future modules. I can't see them upgrading the satellites post-launch, and why over-build a bus to give capabilities that are not immediately needed when every ounce counts ?
Maybe I have the wrong idea, but I'm picturing an orbiting 19" rack with lots of blank panels and an over-sized power supply.
Nullius in verba
I would assume that the accuracy will be at least on par with Galileo:
(from Wikipedia)
"[Open Service] Receivers will achieve an accuracy of 4 m horizontally and 8 m vertically if they use both OS bands."
"The encrypted Commercial Service (CS) will be available for a fee and will offer an accuracy of better than 1 m. The CS can also be complemented by ground stations to bring the accuracy down to less than 10 cm"
Eat the rich.
The US military could not possibly rule out jamming alternatives and can't allow somebody to have a bigger dick. GPS has to be about as good or better and that is part of the motivation (other than the usual reason; giving money to contractors.)
WHO can seriously believe for a second that they'd selectively block public GPS and allow alternative systems to function? They will be able to jam the others.
The USA can't break other satellites without risking retaliation. Space Flak is far far FAR more damaging than the antiaircraft kind.
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So what if the GPSIII sats transmit a Galileo signal that is just slightly off? Or even better have this happen for some of the time on some of the sats (so that errors are not reliably replicated)?
Well, the receiver gives a slightly worse result than the US based systems, because it uses good and bad data. Galileo gets a bad reputation. US firms capture most of the GPS market.
If you are sufficiently paranoid having a war is totally unnecessary.
Unless of course Galileo designers become just as paranoid and add digital signatures to their signals. Then receivers can implement a "use only Galileo satellites" option if necessary. It's really a case of paranoid vs paranoid.