Galileo is intended as an EU version of the US Global Positioning System (GPS), but with significant improvements.
Its more advanced technology should give users quicker, more reliable fixes, and enable them to locate their positions with an error of one metre compared with the current GPS error of several metres.
A real threat to the United States! Wish Obama read this!
What should have cost European taxpayers no more than 1.8bn euros will now probably cost them in excess of 5bn euros.
The Galileo service is now expected to begin offering some service as of “early 2014”. However the date for full, reliable global coverage - which would require a minimum of 24 operating spacecraft - has yet to be confirmed.
*An intercontinental nuclear missile warhead forced to rely on its own inertial navigation and star sights is noticeably less accurate than one which can call on a modern sat-nav service. Such a warhead can still hit close enough to its target coordinates to eliminate a city, but not a hardened target like an underground bunker or missile silo. This was the primary reason for the construction of GPS.
Blighty, procuring its missiles from America rather than making its own like France, has so far been happy enough to rely on GPS-military should it want to make a precise counter-force ICBM strike rather than simply unleashing armageddon on an enemy nation. France has chafed rather more at not having a satnav option free of US involvement. However British missiles too could easily be set up to use Galileo “public regulated” instead of, or together with, GPS.
Russia for its part is building up its GLONASS constellation, once a rival to GPS but fallen into disrepair in the post-Soviet era. China has stated ambitions towards a satnav service, too
Its more advanced technology should give users quicker, more reliable fixes, and enable them to locate their positions with an error of one metre compared with the current GPS error of several metres.
Unless you’re trying to hit the hair on lincoln’s head on the top of a penny from the other side of the world with a nuclear missile or something, I doubt that “several meters” makes much of a difference.
Only a matter of time before others have GPS capabilities.
The communist Chinese nation’s military runs its manned space program, employs an estimated 200,000 workers and has set a goal of putting an astronaut on the moon by 2017.
Think!
200,000 workers! That is awesome! This is a great threat!
By contrast, the NASA has a civilian government program with a limited budget that directly employs fewer than 20,000 civil servants and has lost the commanding lead it once held over the rest of the world in human space exploration.
200,000 workers versus 20,000
China’s new Shenzou spaceships are capable of supporting a crew on a round-trip mission to the moon.
But their Long March rockets are not powerful enough to get them there
The United States has neither a crew vehicle nor a rocket capable of making a moon run.
“The American people have no idea how massive the China space program is,”
With goals ranging from new launch vehicles to establishing bases on the Moon and Mars, cash-strapped NASA is resorting to selling off space hardware and historic artifacts in order to make ends meet.
The artifacts range from satellites that were never launched, to old space suits, to hundreds of pounds of Moon rocks.
