NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Astronomy and Celestial Navigation
From: hellos
Date: 2006 Jun 4, 13:49 -0400
From: hellos
Date: 2006 Jun 4, 13:49 -0400
> BTW, does the US military still own the GPS satellites, or the > system has been "privatised", as it happened to the Internet > in the middle 1990-s? The US still owns one system. Russia owns a second, and the EU is in the process of deploying a third. I doubt any will ever be privatized because they are still military assets, even if the public is generously allowed substantial (but not complete) access to them. "It is hard for me to imagine a scenario when the GPS system will be targeted. It has to be a war of two superpowers..." I find it easy to imagine. Satellites can be knocked out very easily once you have launch capability, and all sorts of small players and commercial companies now either HAVE that, or shortly will. I can easily imagine someone with a grudge hiring a private launch of an ostensibly innocent satellite, which in turns releases or becomes a debris field that does massive damages. (The GPS satellites are armored, but how extensive the armor is, is classified.) If China ever decides to take Taiwan, they would be a prime suspect to do this, in order to cripple US Pacific Fleet assets and responses. And they can do it in-house.