Navstar, the official U.S. Air Force program moniker for the constellation of satellites most of us refer to simply as GPS, has undergone a multitude of technical changes and upgrades in the nearly 30 years since a group of military and civil engineers first sat down in the Pentagon to talk about the far-reaching precision navigation concept. Now, in the wake of numerous schedule slippages and a budget crunch related to more pressing security needs, the USAF has delayed by at least six months green lighting the next major series of improvements to GPS designed to boost satellite signals, make them harder to jam and provide new-generation GPS service to civil and military users for the next 30 years.
Sometime early next year it is anticipated that the USAF will release a request for proposals for the GPS III program, after an original schedule that called for submittal of the RFP in August. This follows several program slippages and comes on the heels of the recent completion of a study by Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Spectrum Astro to pin down the new architecture for the future GPS network.
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