Government Good: GPS

Monday, September 26 2011

Government Good: GPS

In late 1983 the Soviet Union shot down a Korean Airlines 747 over the North Pacific Ocean. Through a series of errors both human and machine, compounding one another, commercial jetliner had strayed off its course while flying from Anchorage, Alaska to Seoul, South Korea. This was at the height of the cold war, and the Soviet Union shot down the jet, claiming that the jet, so obviously in Soviet airspace, must have been on a reconnaissance mission. Two hundred and sixty nine people were killed.

Not long after, in early 1994, Ronald Reagan publicly announced, with great media attention, that a forthcoming US Government funded navigation and timing system, known as NAVSTAR-GPS would be available to not only the US Government, and not only to Americans, but to the entire world, for free. The first satellite in the system was launched five years later, in 1989, and was declared fully operational by 1993. Originally the US Government had slightly limited the public GPS use, introducing an error of ± 100 yards. However, by the year 1996 president Bill Clinton signed an executive order mandating that the introduced error, known as Selective Availability, be eliminated from the system. And so, in the year 2000, at the dawn of the 21st century, exact location (and time) was available via GPS to anyone on the planet who needed it.

Today, GPS exists in millions of smart phones and dedicated GPS units. It’s used by millions of consumers to find their way to their aunt’s house on Thanksgiving, avoiding thousands of “do you know where your going” arguments every day. This benefit, alone, is astronomical. Additionally, GPS guides our ships into our harbors. It helps our airplanes navigate. It has made us all familiar with robotoized female voices who tell you to “turn right in one hundred yards.” It has allowed people to find the best place in LA to see the Hollywood sign navigating the labyrinthine streets of the neighborhood below. It has spawned new sports, such as Geotagging, and new products such as Foursquare. It helps you find your car when you can’t remember where you parked it at Bonnaroo. By 2013, over 900 million GPS units will be shipped annually including your iPhone, your iPad, your Tom Tom, Garmin, and Droid.* It’s how Twitter knows where you are when you Tweet. It’s how digital pictures get geotagged with location. It’s how those doggie collars that keep your dog on your lawn work. It’s a technology at the core of the iPhone app COLOR. And you know how we couldn’t live without COLOR. It’s heavily used in mapmaking, surveying and earthquake detection.

Additionally, the GPS system tells time. Like insanely accurate time. Each of the 60 satellites in the GPS system (with 46 more planned or in preparation as we move to the GPS-III system) contains an atomic clock accurate to 14 nanoseconds.^† There are a wide array of GPS applications that just make use of this insanely accurate time, including scientific experiments that require precise time measurement. Almost any device that sets its time automatically does so via the GPS system. The GPS system’s ultra-accurate clock assists in the synchronization of cell phone towers, allowing you to argue with your mother in Topeka at 70 miles per hour without missing a beat.

It has saved countless human lives in its applications in disaster relief (it is used extensively to map earthquake and tsunami-ravaged landscapes after roads and other landmarks have been destroyed), search and rescue, mining disasters, and even prostate cancer treatment (prostates move around during radiation treatments).^‡

When Ronald Reagan announced the GPS system was to be free to the public, he explicitly declared it a “public good.” The system is maintained, operated and paid for by the United States Government. It was born of over 40 years of publicly funded research and development. Since then, several countries — including Russia, China, and the European Union — have announced plans for their own GPS-like systems. None are online yet. No private company has announced anything like it, anywhere in the world, before or after. The government built GPS because no one else at the time had an incentive to do so. The earliest scheduled operational date of any of GPS’s future “competitors,” assumed they are not scrapped, is 2020. By then, the US Government would have been providing precise location and time information to anyone on the planet who so needs it, for free, for over twenty five years.

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