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Comment by ForHackernews | Hacker News Reader

Why are so many countries/regions building their own positioning systems? Is it just national pride? Paranoia about being denied military use of GPS?

It seems like a massively redundant waste of resources reinventing the wheel.

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Since the USA owns GPS they could turn it off whenever they feel the need to sanction Russia, therefore they have created their own infrastructure.

And yes, this is also relevant for the military, Russia needs the ability to strike any adversary if they have to, as does the US and China.

No block is going to lower their guard (I'm not so sure, that the US wouldn't strike Russia right now if they could without being punished), so everyone is going to race to a first strike potential where they can't be punished by an adversary.

Once that point is reached by any side, nobody knows what will happen, which is obviously the reason, why Russia resisted the US missile defense in Poland.

We couldn't even tell what would happen, if all sides had friendly relations to each other. Someone will have the upper hand, therefore someone could be submitted. And I'm sure that none of those countries mentioned would accept submission.

> Paranoia

I really don't think it's misplaced paranoia. Assume, hypothetically, that the Ukraine becomes a NATO member (they applied I heard) and that an attack on one triggers an attack on all and that it triggers world war three (I said hypothetical, right?), then I don't think America is going to let the Russians use GPS anymore.

And if it so happened that Europe decided that the Iraq and other middle east wars were kind of pointless and that Iran has not been developing nukes like America said they were over and over, and it ends up in war, I really doubt that we (Europeans) will get to share either the American's system.

World wars are maybe not that likely, I'm no expert, but in the case of some big war anywhere, I think the Americans would not hesitate to disable the public signal (there is already an encrypted GPS signal which is much more accurate) for a month or two and win the war because nobody can orient themselves anymore. Having a couple of system kind of makes sense.

Paranoia about being denied any use of GPS. The US could arbitrarily shut down GPS over any territory they want, pretty much fucking up the everyday life there, given how more and more things depend on GPS signals nowdays. They did this before, and though they say they won't do this again [0], the fact remains that they can, and that's good enough reason for others to deploy a system of their own.

[0] - http://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/modernization/sa/

Japan is covered by a single orbit and there system provides significantly higher accuracy (cm vs meter) than GPS so for the fairly low price tag for seven satilites it's probably worth it.

QZSS (the Japanese GPS) is not autonomous. It uses GPS and use the additional satellite to improve precision. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-Zenith_Satellite_System and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNSS_augmentation)

Self-reliance I guess. You don't want to be depending on a third party if things get serious.

Great question. Maybe it just became (relatively) so easy that it's a good large-scale project space agencies around the world can use to get funding?

Military use makes sense for Russians. China is also building one.

I don't know what's the rationale for the European Space Agency. It's supposed to be a little better at higher latitudes.

I believe GPS was designed such that the US had the ability disable it over arbitrary areas to prevent its use by hostile forces in a conflict.

That is absolutely correct. The US already did this during the Iraq war.

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