Good news on the Euro GPS (or whatever)

Getting there....

afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jal17X8yNcasOXVvdlr4BITsEjjQ

JMP

Yes, good news, although the entire project looks like a total waste of money given that there is a perfectly good GPS system in service already. This seems to be about our taxes being used to massage the egos of politicians rather than doing something genuinely useful.

What ESA needs is an idea - IMHO of course.

Yes, good news, although the entire project looks like a total waste of money given that there is a perfectly good GPS system in service already.

Having a civilian internationally controlled system rather than a system maintained by the Superpower is a good enough reason to keep working on it.

I understand that view, and I wouldn't be the biggest fan of US foreign policy either, but it smacks of trying to invent Betamax after VHS had already won, or building a European Internet using something other than TCP/IP just so we can say it's ours. Actually I'd better stop now in case a man from the EU is reading and takes this idea seriously

The US government can turn off GPS whenever and wherever they want, I'd go for a European GPS system any day of the week.

In times of war or other strategically sensitive times, the american military dramatically reduces the accuracy of the GPS signal available to civilian GPS receivers - the military signal remains unchanged, and significantly more accurate than the civilian signal.

This was demonstrated dramatically to me and my hang gliding buddies at the beginning of the Gulf War. We use GPS to record our flight track-logs and to assist in retrieving pilots who have flown cross-country and landed out in the sticks. During this period, however, there was an approximate 2km difference between where our GPS units said we had landed and where we actually landed (verified by OS maps)! This made finding pilots very difficult, and I would imagine it might even endanger lives of hill-walkers in an emergency search & rescue situation.

I'm all for having an independant / European GPS equivalent that is not under the control of the military.

Phil.