An interesting item by Nicholas Thompson over at Wired magazine’s Epicenter blog:
There’s news bubbling up about a potential crisis in our GPS systems. According to a new GAO report, a bunch of the satellites up there guiding our cars, geo-shagging applications, and soldiers might go kaput soon. If they fall, the report implies, the sky falls.
For starters, how big a crisis is this? Not so bad. We really only need 24 satellites working in order to have assured accuracy, and there are 31 operational in the current constellation, with more launches planned. The odds of seven or more failing before replacements get into orbit is rather low. The satellites may be reaching the end of their expected lifespans, but military equipment often lasts much longer than its expected lifespan.
But in any case here’s one thought-experiment for our budget-constrained times: what if the federal government taxed all civilian providers of GPS gear? If you build a device that pulls information from these satellites that Uncle Sam put up, you pay money to Uncle Sam. (Monitoring use would be hard, which is why it would be better to tax devices.)
Revenues could then be dumped into programs to build replacements or to keep funding for Loran, the ground-based system that backs up GPS that Obama has considered cutting. Right now, GPS information beemed down from our satellites is a massive government giveaway. In a time of massive deficits, is it crazy to consider changing that?
Comments from the marine navigation community?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Well, it was our tax revenues to the DOD that put them up there and kept them running all this time… and if devices were further taxed, unless the whole stream were encrypted (breaking all current receivers), there would be nothing to stop a massive exodus of GPS receiver production… further eroding our manufacturing base.
+1 the tax would create a max exodus of GPS receiver production
-1 futher erode our manufacturing base. Our manufacturing base eroding is a MYTH. Our manufacturing base measured in % and in $ (both inflation or not inflation adjusted) is increasing! Our % market share of manufacturing in the world continues to grow despite the lose of entire industries (textile, light manufacturing) . The entire $ increase in manufacturing in China last year was less than the $ increase in USA. What is decreasing is the number of people employed in manufacturing as american industry finds ways to manufacture more with few people.
I believe the boating community would be pretty well served if even more sat’s are lost than the implied worst case (they don’t actually provide a worst case) of the GAO. After all, we know our altitude is zero (0) and a loss of some accuracy is still better than the accuracy of the charts we have.
Now putting that aside. Raising more money isn’t actually going to help as much as good management. The GAO report slams the management of the program and rightly so. They swapped vendors to save a few billion and screwed up in some combination of swapping vendors, the normal course of managing technology innovation, and if the GAO report is right … having no centralized management of the program. This dosn’t sound like an issue that taxes would fix … heads need to role.