A Mars Odyssey

The Global Positioning System, through the use of its 24 satellites that are orbiting the earth, has been paid for by the United States government but is for the world to use for free. Originally developed for the Department of Defense, Navigadget.com in their article, “SA-Selective Availability”, writes that the GPS has introduced intentional errors of up to a hundred meters into the publicly available navigation signals, which of course makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to use for guiding long-range missiles to an exact and precise target. Encrypted forms were available to the United States Military only, the allies, and only a few others, in order to ensure available additional accuracy.

There had been a shortage of military GPS units, the Gulf War as one very good example, with a wide availability of civilian units among personnel—this has helped to result in disabling the Selective Availability. In the 1990s, the FAA to save millions of dollars every year in maintaining their own GPS units began pressuring the military to turn off the SA for good. The FAA had less accurate satellites, along with less accurate radio navigation systems, so to have the government maintain the GPS would be doing them a favor in many ways.

But the United States military did not cave under the FAA’s pressure for the duration of the 1990s, and as stated previously, eventually President Clinton turned it off in the year 2000. But then it was also turned off again “temporarily” in 2004 by President Bush to keep our enemies from using it. And now we are turning it off again in 2007 by President Bush. To keep turning it off means we are turning it on again at some point in time—unnoticed by the media and uninformed to the public—only letting the cat out of the bag when it is turned off, with cream on the whiskers, I would say to make them look like the good-guys. I wonder if the GPS is turned on more than it is turned off–I mean, how would we know? I suppose, the same way to obtain information from terrorists President Bush does not feel the military has to cater to our court system in order to “answer” to what is right or wrong? We won’t.

In 2004, MSNBC wrote an article entitled, “White House wants plans for GPS shutdown” which said “The military increasingly uses GPS technology to move troops across large areas and direct bombs and missiles. Any government-ordered shutdown or jamming of the GPS satellites would be done in ways to limit disruptions to navigation and related systems outside the affected area, the White House said.

“This is not something you would do lightly,” said James A. Lewis, director of technology policy for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s clearly a big deal. You have to give them credit for being so open about what they’re going to do.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Mars News, Public Relations, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.