GPS Accuracy Could Start Dropping In 2010 210
adamengst writes "A US Government Accountability Office report raises concerns about the Air Force's ability to modernize and maintain the constellation of satellites necessary to provide GPS services to military and civilian users. TidBITS looks at the situation and possible solutions."
Surveyors are going to start having problems... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is like the Millenium Bug (Score:5, Interesting)
Plenty of people anticipated this, but nobody has given a shit enough about it to do anything substantial. I was first hearing warnings about this years ago. As a programmer, I anticipated the Millenium Bug almost 20 years beforehand, and refused to take those shortcuts that everyone else thought were wise. Back on the GPS Ranch, meanwhile, the EU is busy putting its own superior system in place, in part because they don't want to be dependent upon our system, esp. if and when we fuck up and fail to keep it operational.
Just one more reason to move to Europe.
what would you pay for gps? (Score:1, Interesting)
People pay for satellite radio. If we were not all so accustomed to free GPS, I wonder how many of us would pay a monthly fee for it.
Personally, I don't use GPS enough to even pay $1 a month for it. But I might not mind paying an extra sales tax when I buy a GPS enabled device - something that goes to maintaining the satellites.
Re:This is like the Millenium Bug (Score:3, Interesting)
I was first hearing warnings about this years ago.
Hmm... years ago, Boeing wasn't 3 years behind on launch schedule, and we wouldn't have this issue. If the AirForce had known 3 years ago, they would've exercised some option to build more IIMR builds. Boeing kept on pushing the launch date back, 3 months at a time, and here we are.
You can't touch military spending. (Score:5, Interesting)
They defend "freedom."
I'm all for opening up completely the books of any government subcontractor. If you don't like transparency, then don't take government contracts. It may be tough to police, with companies trying to cheat with subsidiaries, but I think the payoff would be enormous.
On 9/10/2001, Rumsfeld gave a speech about wasteful military spending. Check it out in print [defenselink.mil], or a small piece on CBS [youtube.com]. There was a link to his whole speech years ago - I don't know where that went. In it he states that up to 2.3 trillion dollars is "unaccounted" for, whatever that means. If you read between the lines, he is pushing for privatization of the military. We all know how well that worked out.
Re:Europe to the rescue! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Best not one system... LORAN, Fuller, Cold War (Score:5, Interesting)
Moral of the story was that using static ground stations like LORAN, this would not have occurred. Anyhow, now ground stations have been dismantled and vessel's receivers scrapped and there is nothing groundbased to replace GPS with should GPS fail. High altitude communications aircraft seem viable; however, there again is a reliance on something that is not physically bolted down and easily fixable.
An interesting footnote is mentioned by Buckminster Fuller [bfi.org] in his 50 year summation masterwork "Critical Path": [easystorecreator.com] on pages 186-7. [amazon.ca] The Americans started their radio-accurate mapping from Compass Island in Penobscot Bay in Maine, and proceeded by radio triangulation to work their way down to South America, across the Atlantic and up Africa to Europe. This was needed for accurately guiding bombers above the clouds, as the ground survey maps were often 10's of miles incorrect.
The Germans had done this as well for Europe and perhaps Russia, so when Berlin fell, the Russians went in early and took the German mapping data. Russia had radio-accurate maps of all of Europe and published data from the US, while the US did not have maps of Russia. This lead to the importance in the cold war of US spy planes and satellites for basic mapping for targeting ICBM's, including as suggested by Fuller a US presence in Iran and Afghanistan as radio triangulation bases. Russia performed massive deceptions of fake cities and so on to perpetuate this information gradient.
Will software defined receivers be common? (Score:4, Interesting)
Are the 3 different GPS systems being proposed (U.S., Galileo, a possibly Russian system) be broadcasting on frequencies close enough to each other that receivers that use all 3 systems will be common and fit into cell phones?
That would be the best outcome : software defined receivers that can pick up a signal from any satellite positioning signal in the sky : GPS, wide area differential GPS, Galileo, everything. Massive redundancy would mean that if you were to go between buildings or even inside buildings, there would be a greater chance that at least some of the satellites were still visible.
Everything that depends on global positioning would work better : from airline navigation systems to X prize landers.
Not a normal event, but an exceptional one (Score:5, Interesting)
A normal event, sure. But a repeat of the 1859 solar flare [wikipedia.org] would likely damage many satellites not in the Earth's shadow at the height of the impact. Is the whole GPS constellation set up to handle that type of event? Or would more than half the satellites go down in a hour?
Re:You can't touch military spending. (Score:5, Interesting)
Rumsfeld did have ideas which would have lowered overall spending had they succeeded. However, they flew in the face of thousands of years of military history, and are seen as having been instrumental in what was eventually a rather unceremonious exit. He essentially wanted to go to an all-Special Forces military, with only a few legacy systems for those cases when a couple of massive non-nuclear punches were required. I don't know if he watched Navy Seals one too many times, but nothing replaces boots on the ground when you want to hold ground -- something that Special Forces are not intended to do.
Re:You can't touch military spending. (Score:3, Interesting)
It hasn't been totally privatized yet. But if a private contractor pays a truck driver $300,000 a year to drive a route that the US Army also runs, but only pays their driver $40,000, it doesn't take too much math to figure out who's getting fucked over.
Additionally, authorizing private mercenaries to kill outside of the chain of American military command is totally immoral. It's already led to major conflicts with the Iraqi government, who are understandably upset when non-uniformed men shoot up a public square for no reason, killing women and children, and then speed off without concern.