The World Economy Runs on GPS. It Needs a Backup Plan

[Darren]

GPS has brought is immeasurable benefits, we rely on its services for our navigation on land, at sea and in the air. But we also now rely on the precise timing signals for banking, global computing and a myriad of other critical applications and the system. And it's shockingly vulnerable to all kinds of interference.

Bugs in the code can cause issues but there are lots of other things can scramble the data, solar flares, space debris and hostile foreign powers. The Pentagon started to regard the satellites themselves as a potential target in 2007, when China obliterated one of its own aging weather satellites using a missile. North Korea, Iran, and Russia are also said to have developed satellite-busting weaponry.

Source: www.bloomberg.com

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Darren Griffin - Editor

[druck]

The back up plan of multiple independent constellations (controlled by the US, Russian, Chinese and EU), each with in orbit spares?

Any disasters large enough to knock all of these out, such as a massive solar flare, is going to cause more immediately concerning problems such as the catastrophic failure of electricity grids.

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