Avionics
U.S. warms to idea of GPS competition
How times change.

How times change. In the 1990s, the Departments of State and Commerce, backed by the Department of Defense and the GPS industry, were busy persuading foreign nations that with GPS available to everyone worldwide, they shouldn’t waste their money launching their own satnav systems. But the genie got out of the bottle anyway.

Addressing the U.S. Institute of Navigation’s recent GNSS-2008 Conference in Savannah, Ga., the State Department’s Alice Wong stated that within the next decade five individual nations, plus the European Union (EU), will have among them 110 global satellites, 10 regional satellites and 13 WAAS-type augmentation satellites in orbit. The U.S. and Russia have GPS-like systems in place; the EU will launch its own by 2010, and China, India and Japan are planning their own.