ZitZot: Air Force warning, GPS can crash next year
Thanks in part to a lack of oversight, a government agency Wednesday warned that unless the U.S. Air Force is able to acquire new satellites soon, the Global Positioning Systen may crash by next year, wreaking havoc with the public and military operations.
According to a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), an overhaul of the 20-year-old system has been delayed until November, putting it three years behind schedule. The project is also over budget by $870 million from the original cost estimate of $729 million, for a total of approximately $1.6 billion.
Full article at ZitZot.com
Comments(41)
so… should we all learn how to properly fold a road map anytime soon?
Is this just for the US or the rest of the world too (namely Europe)?
phew, this is for everybody i guess, cause the man satellites are use by other companies too, anyway. this should teach us, how vulnerable we are to technology.
CONSCIOUSNESS
meh this won't really affect us… do you really think the Governments NATO will let Garmin go out of business?
GPS which is run by the US Department of Defense is the only only fully functional system right now
Here is a list of the other systems proposed or in development
Beidou – China's regional system that China has proposed to expand into a global system named COMPASS.
Galileo – a proposed global system being developed by the European Union, joined by China, Israel, India, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Ukraine, planned to be operational by 2013.
GLONASS – Russia's global system which is being restored to full availability in partnership with India.
Indian Regional Navigational Satellite System (IRNSS) – India's proposed regional system.
Japan QZSS – Japanese proposed regional system covering Japan only.
ZitZot = Fail
Copying and pasting other sites articles is pointless, just post the original source.
Actually, since I don't visit ZitZot(or don't really know what the hell it is) cross-possting articles like these are very informative.
Thereby, Daz = Fail
This is stupid.. even if a dozen sats fell out of orbit, there'd be no issue w/ GPS.
The sky is falling!
skynet.
Actually, it's been common knowledge that since GPS first became public, there's been a military kill-switch (since it is, after all, a primarily military network) – this is generally intended for times of war or national emergency when its use needs to be prioritised, much like the way the emergency services can override traffic lights on whim. That means that the network won't fall over, but rather the military can throttle the amount of bandwidth available to non-priveleged sources. So worst comes to worst, they'll simply de-prioritise civilian use of the network until they get more satellites up. I'm sure that by now, with the commercial GPS market so huge, there are dozens of companies who would willingly pay to put more networks in orbit if the need arose. Simple market logic.
@ 2
US only the satellites only hover over US airspace or any country that allows the US to use its airspace. Dont you remember china shoot down a USA satellite because it was to close to there airspace. so if you live in some areas of europe, all of middle east, or all of asia you should be OK.
Lol, thank god our military never trained with GPS because we would have to use US Satelites
Hmmm, come to think of it a lot of stuff that is forbidden in the military makes sense (not everything but a more then I thought^^)
Cool I want this to happen! NOOBS
i don't see why they made and maintained a free navigation system for the whole worlds and all the expenses come out of our pocket something for and used bye the whole world should be maintained and paid for bye the whole world in an international effort if not we should limit the range of the devices to north,south America and Canada besides there making there own the question is will they be as kindly sharing with us as we where with them
zeppo1 you clearly don't understand. Martin could post this same information from the original source but instead he keeps posting it from a site that just copy & pastes the story…
@11 China shot down a weather satellite and even though it was deemed "aggressive" it was still just a ballistics test. And GPS satellites ORBIT the EARTH. They don't hover over anything.
First, the system isn't going to "crash" because of overload or overuse, the fact is that several satellites are way too old and are either dying (too much damage or age, loss of power, etc) or in a decaying orbit.
Second, the system GLOBALLY, is owned by the US and open freely to ANYONE for commercial, governmental, or private usage. As far as WE know, there is no other functioning Positioning System though the Russians DID have one at one point, but it is currently non-functioning in areas, and it was NEVER GLOBAL, only REGIONAL. Cooperating with India, they are re-launching the system with hopes to take it global.
Third, the satellites are in a medium-range geosynchronous orbit and cover large distances of Earth's surface in an interconnecting network (meaning one satellite and another nearby satellite have overlapping coverage areas). At any one time, there have been between 24 and 32 satellites in the network.
Fourth, can anyone here actually believe that the US government would allow the system to crash? More likely, the news of the over budget program was LEAKED by someone within the US government to help "soften the ground" for an unexpected increase to the US Air Force's budget, as the Air Force's 50th Space Wing manages the NAVSTAR GPS.
@http://www.rlslog.net/zitzot-air-force-warning-gps-can-crash-next-year/#comment-752376
lmao
@11
Totally incorrect…
@6,15 Daz, why does this bother you so much ? When you run your own release site you can post the original source to your articles.
@ Voice of Reason
Because its B/S and obvious advertisement which gets Martin money and none of the other hard working staff members that actually make this site popular get any of.
Just look at this website now without Firefox + Adblock Plus and its a mess, its filled with so many adverts and has the highest rate of fake links posted in comments. It wouldn't even cost much to host a basic website such as this so wheres all that money going? Thats right, in his own pocket.
Martin is and always will be, a massive flaming hom0sexual.
What advertisements? I *never* see ANY ads/banners/popups from this site!
"Is this just for the US or the rest of the world too (namely Europe)?"
That would be all over the planet where alternatives aren't available.
"do you really think the Governments NATO will let Garmin go out of business"
NATO and Garmin are irrelevant, the USAF wouldn't be able to point bombs at places, most civil and military aviation would stop and a whole bunch of other stuff would die.
Put another way, lets not pretend they won't sort it.
"i don't see why they made and maintained a free navigation system for the whole worlds and all the expenses come out of our pocket something for and used bye the whole world should be maintained and paid for bye the whole world in an international effort if not we should limit the range of the devices to north,south America and Canada besides there making there own the question is will they be as kindly sharing with us as we where with them"
Because they never had a commercial model for the system and now too many US companies rely on it (globally) for them to be shut out.
As for cost, the US military needs the system so they're already paying for it, civilian usage is just a nice, no extra cost to the US taxpayer side-benefit.
The ESA system has a commercial model AND has military and civilian (free) use built into it, but it's easy to plan that with the benefit of hindsight.
@11
Totally true, once the sat's lose their hovering power they will crash into the Nevada desert. Google earth will be nothing but pictures of sand…
@ Encoder
You obviously use Firefox + Adblock or similar, just take a peak in IE.
I usually don't post any comments but this time I could not resist to set all the idiots out there straigt….
1. Each GPS satellite sends a simple time stamp and orbital information down to earth which any receiver can pick up so much like a radio station there's no bandwidth issues if a 1000 more radios tune in.
2. GPS sattelites don't take Google Earth pictures u dumbass.
3. Even if you could switch the satellites off when passing over Europe that would mean that the US military would have severely crippled strike capability over Europe so that will never ever happen.
4. The military can probably either encrypt the signals or tweak the time and orbit information rendering your Garmin either useless or causing it to be off by a mile. Only military receivers will then have a usable signal and accuracy needed for strike capability
5. There is no friction in space u nitwits so the satellites won't drop on your empty head anytime soon.
6. The war efforts in Irak and Afghanistan probably cost more money per day than an entire new GPS system would cost.
Little thanks is ever given to the US for this great sometimes life saving system that has really revolutionized so many things.
Because America is the great Satan, of course. /sarcasm
The military use different frequencies for their GPS systems; to stop civilian use they just switch off those frequencies and keep their own going.
Revolutionized what? It's a useless toy for 90 something percent of the people
Thanks for the Internet though
U rely on it (GPS) to much, we need another 2-3 systems. Lets hope that the EU and Russia succeed in their projects. That would benefit us all (non-military consumers). It would take out the monopoly from US that has already too much in different areas.
"ZitZot was built as a side project of Releaselog, which focuses mostly on scene releases, but occasionally informs about Tech news as well. You can expect a tight cooperation between ZitZot and RLSLOG."
Get your facts straight, daz!
Does On*Star use the same Sats, or do they have their own?
@23 LOL – if I turn off the banner ad blocker on Kaspersky it is almost impossible to navigate this site without getting re-directed or an audio ad coming on. I don't know what to do with all the Xbox 360s I just won.
@ 33
How about no d1ck for brains. Its still advertisement of another website and ripping news sources from other websites when it could simply post the original source!
There are loads of adverts on here and there are adverts on ZitZot too so my point remains valid, sorry sir but you fail the internets.
Thanks, Interesting article. Whats with all the flaming?
If you don't like ZITZOT postings… skip them and shut the hell up.
#27 (4)
GPS Satellites send TWO signals – one for Public use, one encrypted for Military use and enhanced accuracy. Public signal accuracy can be enhanced to about one inch by using differential gps.
#To all others:
The 24 satellites rotate around earth in concentric circles taking about 24 hours for one rotation.
The height in which thay move is about 20.000 Kilometers. Both facts show how ridiculus is is that china shoots down satellites…
3 of 24 satellites are needed for positioning, 4 are usual standard.
For usage in mobile devices, every satellite also send almanach-data (taking about 12 Minutes) which holds information about all other satellites, and where the are and will be – therefore you should get sat-lock or similar feature in mobile phones for about 15 minutes so that the device can respond faster and with more accuracy / switch to the next satellite.
Nice that means its gonna be Judgement day, lol
no device "responds" to a GPS satellite: the receivers just process GPS signals to estimate a position on earth surface. The almanach can be used to better estimate the position for other satellites and therefore improve the positioning precision.
@34 Well said, LOL