Galileo Sends Its First Signals 789
VVrath writes "Galileo, the European answer to the US Military-owned GPS has sent it's first signals to ground stations in the UK and Belgium. The first satellite in the Galileo system, Giove-A was launched on December 28th 2005, and is set to be followed by a further 29 satellites by 2010. At a cost of over $4 Billion, is this system really going to offer any major advantages over GPS, or is it merely a politicised 'anything you can do we can do better' by the European Space Agency?"
Re:jamming (Score:5, Interesting)
The closest thing I could find was this: http://www.useu.be/Galileo/June1902NATOBellGalile
If the Galileo signal directly overlays the GPS M-code signal, he warned, "jamming one would also jam the other, resulting in a negative impact on NATO's military effectiveness in the area of operations, potentially risking fratricide on friendly forces and civil populations."
So I don't think that NATO/US is asking for the ability to jam the signal, just stating that the frequencys are close enough that interference/jamming on Galileo could negatively affect GPS.
Sorry if this post isn't fully coherent. I have a pretty bad headache right now.
A new low for /. (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesn't anybody remember... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Better than US GPS? (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a more accurate "workaround" for civilian use called differential GPS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GPS [wikipedia.org]
Re:Short answer: "YES" (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:USA Leads, Rest of World Follows (Score:1, Interesting)
The Jamming Issues (Score:4, Interesting)
The originally proposed Galileo design was such that the frequency range used by Galileo's equivalent to the US civilian signal overlapped the GPS military one. Thus, if the US wanted to jam or block Galileo's civilian signal, it would also have to jam the GPS military one -- which (to the US military) is a Bad Thing.
I don't know if/how this situation was resolved. Anyone?
Oh please (Score:5, Interesting)
"At a cost of over $4 Billion, is this system really going to offer any major advantages over GPS, or is it merely a politicised 'anything you can do we can do better' by the European Space Agency?"
Yeah the system will offer major advantages and they are the following:
It will work when the the US decides to turn off, or disrupt the GPS. The US has never promised that it will always keep the GPS working, and why should they -- we paid for it with our tax money and the US government will always turn it off or disrupt its operation when suitable for American interests.
For example, the civilian GPS has signal has an intentionally added error in order to prevent it from being used for military purposes. Also, the civilian GPS signal gets further disrupted over war zones (such as iraq) to make it especially useless for anyone that is not the US military. Apparently, the military uses another GPS signal which is not useable by other parties.
And thats the reason why Russia already has their own alternative GPS system in place and the Europeans are building their own. It seems pretty reasonable to me.
Re:Better than US GPS? (Score:3, Interesting)
And we know this how, exactly? The EU has "assured" us that they won't be as petty, vindictive, and politically motivated as the US, even if the US does something the EU doesn't approve of?
Will they cheerfully sell centimeter-accurate receivers to all buyers, even Iran and North Korea?
It should be noted... (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, while Galileo receivers in general may be more accurate than, say, the GPS receiver in your PDA, high-grade GPS receivers used in military and commerical research applications can get centimeter or finer resolution - and that's with the current generation of GPS sats. There are two new, next-generation GPS sats in orbit now, with the entire constellation to be replaced over the next few years. These new sats promised even better performance. Plus, the signal of GPS that was previously military-only was recently (past two or three years) opened for civilian use, so given time to produce new receivers, I don't think you'll see great accuracy differences between GPS and Galileo (unless of course the DoD decides we can't have GPS, but I think that's more the point here anyhow).
Re:Staying Competitive: Europe vs. USA (Score:3, Interesting)
"we believe in freedom and peace yet also we must also spend 4 times as much as china on our military per citizen"
Re:Better than US GPS? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:jamming (Score:3, Interesting)
You can't easily touch the satellites, but you don't have to.... you just have to broadcast louder than they do.
Re:Staying Competitive: Europe vs. USA (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm living in the South, a transplant from California... and let me tell you, the OP's assertion is pretty darn good.
question for GPS geeks (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Staying Competitive: Europe vs. USA (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:USA Leads, Rest of World Follows (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Better than US GPS? (Score:2, Interesting)
The Chinese military will be in favour of starting offensive actions, this is to be expected from the military of course. But what will the communist party do? Who will be in control?
Catastrophe looms, but before this escalates into a Third world war....
Escalation can only occur if western governments decide that Taiwan is worth a good fight, which can debated. The pro's of going to war is that it is a nice thing for the military to show of their muscle, but the drawback is most certainly huge losses of lives (that dwarf Iraq / Afghanistan), cost, economic downturn.
China is changing really rapidly and the Chinese government is on some aspects quite a lot weaker then say 20 years ago.
The last 20 years have shown the Chinese continously and aggressively developing their economy, a single war could destroy all that.
About France's international policy: people pay too much attention, really.
I find it really strange (ridiculous) that people in the USA, a country multiple times the size and much more powerful than France, are offended when the French don't support their Iraq war plans.
I mean come on, the French sometimes appear to be arrogant, but that is nothing.
Here in Holland we are used to it, a couple of years ago we had a conflict with the French over our (soft) drugs policy. The French really did their best to end our liberal soft drugs policy... we didn't listen, nothing changed in our policy.
The French sometimes appear very arrogant, I don't know why that is, but you can safely ignore it. They seem nationalistic, and tend to rationalize according to their own logic, but that is more of a cultural thing. I don't think they have really that much power on the level of international politics.
Traditionally when France and Germany agree then the other European countries will comply and support E.U.'s policy.
Now with the larger E.U. and a more involved Britain the Franco-German axis is less powerful.
Re:Staying Competitive: Europe vs. USA (Score:3, Interesting)
20-and-some million people disagrees with you and it doesn't avoid New York, hell, they live there.
Do you really feel impotent witout a gun? In the rest of the world we have dicks, we don't need guns to avoid feeling impotent.
And you can believe me. If people don't have a gun, you don't need it either. Problem starts when people own a gun, not before. Actualy, psychologicaly the one with a gun is sooner to be scared than one without (but the other side is armed too as you pointed out), which often causes sensles shooting. Hey, that sounds like US description.
Take car as some kind of natural selection. There are accidents in US too, or do you avoid roads as well as NY.
Ballistics... (Score:4, Interesting)
MIRV systems, multiple warheads delivered by one missile, do deviate from a purely ballistic course during the midcourse phase (sub-orbital flight between liftoff and re-entry). This is to help deploy the multiple warheads on different targets. The warhead bus uses small rocket engines to follow its pre-programmed course. Navigation was originally via inertial guidance or celestial tracking, but newer warhead buses use GPS.
Even single-warhead weapons need some sort of guidance in order to compensate for the effects of local gravity anomalies. Again, military-grade GPS is the preferred method.
Tactical ballistic missiles need guidance packages, too. The Scud, considered crude by modern standards, uses intertial guidance to control moveable surfaces on its fins during boost phase. Once its motor shuts off, however, gravity is in charge, as you have noted. Still, more recent tactical weapons have terminal phase guidance systems, so even these deviate from a purely ballistic mode of operation.
k.
Re:Staying Competitive: Europe vs. USA (Score:1, Interesting)
A friend of mine had two native american friends visit her in a 20k people town in western Austria. She noted they were wearing subglasses outside, even when the weather was overcast. They explained this was so they didn't get into fights with people who mind being looked at. Baffled, she remarked that she'd never heard of anyone wearing sunglasses for that reason, least of all in her town. "So", they asked "what's your murder and homicide rate here?" At first, she didn't even grasp the idea there could be an average number of killings per year in a given town. The last murder in this one had been when she was a small child, over 30 years ago.
Re:Staying Competitive: Europe vs. USA (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:In preperation for WWIII... (Score:5, Interesting)
Secondly, global politics isn't about good and bad, it's about the exercise of military and economic power and control of information, to pursue the interests of the groups you represent.
To cut straight to the chase: I promise you that Washington's invasion of Iraq had nothing at all to do with liberating anyone and everything to do with gaining control of significant oil supplies in order to forestall an imminent and rapid worsening of the ongoing energy crisis.
To the extent that forestalling the effects of "peak oil" will keep everyone in the US comfortable for a couple of years longer than would have been the case without the Iraq invasion, you could say that the US govt's actions were beneficial for the US public. But because it is only a temporary fix, this is a policy that doesn't lead anywhere other than to further wars, both military and economic. It only buys time. But time for what?
If the US government were interested in the long term future of the US economy there would already be two crash programs in effect: one to reduce the nation's debt, and another to reduce dependence on oil, the latter starting with both a significant increase in tax on gas station pump prices right now (with much of the increase being spent on development of renewable energy sources - wind, wave, geothermal, solar, nuclear) and an aggressive program of public education aimed at decreasing domestic fuel consumption. These are the only actions that could make a positive difference.
I am talking about massive investment here, not the peanuts that is currently being spent or even considered. It is just not happening though. Instead the actions that *have* been taken, in toto, contribute to one goal only - to prevent the public at large, for as long as possible, from cottoning on to what will happen when either one of the following two scenarions hits:
(1) the growing disparity between global demand and global supply of oil pushes the price up (slowly at first, then over 5-10 years up to the $200-$400 a barrel range);
(2) one or more of the world's larger economies decides to divest their national reserves of hundreds of billions of dollars, in favour of something more stable and less inflationary - massively devaluing the dollar overnight and precipitating a complete collapse of the US banking system within days.
Both of these scenarios are on our doorstep right now. The Iraq adventure was intended to address both. But it will not solve either problem for long.
While the US very probably intended an expanded military presence in the Middle East to make OPEC think twice about redenominating oil sales in Euros (coming as it did right after Saddam Hussein did the very same thing), it hasn't made much difference to Iran who intend to open their own petrochemicals trading exchange on March 26, just ten weeks away. They are expected to offer at least some contracts denominated in Euros, and possibly all. Russia has also been making noises about moving their own oil and gas sales onto the Euro. And China already unpegged their currency from the dollar last summer.
I raise the question of what the US government thought they were buying time for, with their current economic, energy and foreign policies. Now the longer they manage to prolong the current situation the worse it will get for the unknowing public at large when these crises do finally emerge. As far as the economy is concerned it will be like falling off a cliff ed
Re:Better than US GPS? (Score:1, Interesting)
Who? You mean the UK and Australia? Both of whom copped significant flak when it was revealed that their intelligence services had been 'bullied' by US intelligence services/political leaders into 'steering' their reports in this direction?
enough time to move tons of the stuff out of the country or bury it in the middle of the desert. Who knows, we might find it yet, in Syria
Give it up. It's pretty commonly accepted that the stuff doesn't exist, that it was used up years ago, and the stuff they had years ago the *US* gave them. how much public officials and business leaders in those three countries profited
As opposed to how much Halliburton and Bechtel are profiting now? You reference being blasted by the world for not invading Haiti, and quote the China Daily? I watch BBC World, CNN, and most Australian news services. America /didn't/ get blasted by the world. But CNN did pick up on the rhetoric of China and use it to martyr the cause.
Re:Staying Competitive: Europe vs. USA (Score:5, Interesting)
"Each other, for starters. You Europeans were a goddamn bloody bunch, with major wars going back every decade for as long as history has been recorded. This ended when the US came along and cut your balls off by crushing the Axis powers and parking our military all across Europe."
1: In 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland (Sept. 1st), America was working out how it was going to manage a relationship with a Nazi controlled Europe as it only expected Britain to hold out for 3 weeks after the "inevitable" defeat of the RAF in the Battle of Britain. Hitler's biggest mistake, if anything, was to turn and attack the Soviet Union (22nd June 1941) splitting his forces across another front on top of the Western and North African wars that were already in progress. If Britain had fallen in 1939, Europe would have been fucked anyway so the phrase "This ended when the US came along and cut your balls off by crushing the Axis powers and parking our military all across Europe" which negates the contributions of all the other allied powers is an insult to the millions of non-Americans who died in that war as well as being an expression of an obscene level of arrogance.
Your tone also suggest America's involvement was a totally selfless act despite the fact that America entered the war wholesale after it had been attacked by Japan and Germany had made a declaration of War against it. You also neglect to mention the arrangements from which America benefited, i.e. technology transfers including Radar, the jet engine, the cavity magnetron, Azdic, etc. and, post-war, faster than sound technology (developed by Miles Aircraft Corp and used by Bell to build the X-1, sideways looking terrain following all weather radar (developed for the BAC TSR 2 Nuclear strike aircraft - used in the cruise missile) and more that I can't be arsed to list. On top of this, America gained access to a global span of British territory for military use as part of Lease Lend as well being in a position to isolate itself from Communist Russia by transferring any fighting with the USSR away from Alaska which would be a bitch because no-one wants to fight a war at -40 in an environment where everything that moves leaves a trail that can be spotted from the air and into region that could form a handy missile launching platform close to the intended target.
"This made engaging the US a prerequisite to starting any European war, and defeating the US military was too high a bar for anyone to really consider trying."
Er, Nope.
The world's leaders understanding that there were enough thermonuclear warheads on both sides to blow the entire planet up stopped another war from starting.
"As a consequence, most of Europe has allowed its military to degrade into near-uselessness."
The ex-Axis forces were deliberately prevented from having an army large enough to cause any trouble while what was left of allied Europe had been so bombed to shit that it was bankrupt and couldn't have supported the kind of Army needed to fight a war. One country is notable as having actually come out of WW2 richer than when it went in primarily through selling arms to it's allies under the guise of Lease Lend opening up potential lines of argument as to whether it was an alliance or a business arrangement.
"Muslims are usually looking for wars"
What the fuck are you on? That is just the sort of statement made from a position of such supreme ignorance that it borders on being not worth answering.
Muslims and Christians have existing next door to each other for several thousand years. In fact, when the christian crusaders commissioned to fight a "holy" war in the middle east arrived, the cities they found under Muslim control contained mixed populations of Christian, Muslim and Jews and the laws enacted within the cities prevented anyone from attacking a holy building of any denomination. The rulers of the Muslim lands also endorsed the crusaders activities as a holy war and offered them food and shelter within the hous
You can't turn off the stars... (Score:3, Interesting)
"The US government may be able to turn off the GPS system, but they still can't turn off the stars".
They were serious. This pretty much illustrated to me that most countries don't trust the GPS system for critical purposes.
GrpA
Re:Submitters stop with the editorials (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:God, where did you learn history? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yep, hanging back was exactly what the USA did in World War II. You say there were 250,000 American casualties in the war? The Russians lost 17 million people; the U.S.'s mere quarter million is chicken feed in comparison.
In fact, it has been argued that the U.S. stayed out of WW II until it became obvious, a year and a half after the destruction of much of the Wehrmacht in the Battle of Stalingrad, that the Soviet Union was about to win. And then the U.S. finally invaded Normandy on June 6, 1944 -- to stop the Soviets from taking over Europe, not to defeat the already stumbling Nazis.
Pro-Nazi sentiment was actually pretty strong in the U.S. in those days, believe it or not. IBM was a noted collaborator. So was George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, who was convicted for helping to finance Hitler's rise to power [guardian.co.uk].
So American triumphalism about WW II really grates on those of us who know the truth.
Re:Better than US GPS? (Score:0, Interesting)
This is a basic description - for more, you should look it up.
There are two signals - the Localiser, which the autopilot on-board the aircraft uses to line the aircraft up with the runway; and the Glidescope, which the autopilot uses to descend at a rate of 500 feet per minute (8.3 ft/s).
A full autopilot (with autolanding facility) will make the aircraft flare out (basically, raise the nose), slowing the rate of descent to about 3 ft/s. The autopilot will then engage the wheel brakes and bring the aircraft to taxi speeds.
Most light aircraft do not have an autoland-capable autopilot. Your average GA aircraft, for arguments' sake, a Cessna 172 Skyhawk, will have an "Approach Hold" function, which will intercept the ILS, and will guide the aircraft to a steady 500 ft/min descent. The pilot must disengage the autopilot at Decision Height (200 ft above the runway) and flare out and land manually.
There have been successful tests of fully-automated GPS-based landings, but I haven't read too much about them yet.
Re:Better than US GPS? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes. The US knows this, and China knows this.
> It's possible that they could back down after a few ships are sunk, but I wouldn't bet on it.
I don't view that as a possibility. Political pressures in China are weird and quite different from in a Western nation. I don't just mean that the political pressures are for or against different things, but that they *work* differently. Also they come from different sources; most political pressure in the US and Europe comes from the mass media, from allies, from vocal citizens, and from public opinion (both locally and internationally). China has some of that sort of thing going on, but not to the same degree, and the strongest political pressures there are internal to the government itself or come from tradition. In a situation wherein the US has been forced to sink Chinese ships (something that, believe me, would not be done lightly), I am not convinced that the Chinese government would be *capable* of backing down. Even suggesting it would be (at minimum) political death for any government official. Remember that the thinking in China is Eastern thinking, much like Japan in WWII -- a nation whose government believed, among other things, that surprise-bombing the US was the best way to keep us *out* of the war (a mistake that will not be repeated by China, because Easterners have since come to the understanding that Westerners think differently). They believed this because in an Eastern culture an outmatched power will avoid conflict at all costs, because engaging in some conflict and then backing down is unthinkable. Japan in WWII did not back down even after their borders had been pushed back and pushed back and pushed back (thousands upon thousands of their men dying) to the extent that they had seen a US plane fly over Tokyo. Backing down was unthinkable, and it took something equally unthinkable (repeated atomic bombings and the threat of more of the same) to convince them to back down and step up to the negotiation table.
China will not attack the US. China will not attack Taiwan, militarily, as long as the US is backing Taiwan. They will posture and threaten and froth at the mouth if Taiwan makes declarations they cannot stand, but they will not attack with military force, because if they did, it would be the end not just of their government but of their civilization, and they *know* this.
The US is capable of backing down under some circumstances, but in that scenario we would be protecting a (relatively, militarily) helpless ally from a big bully, and furthermore we would (as things stand at this time) have the upper hand, so that raises serious questions about whether we could, in that scenario, back down, especially since most Americans would naively expect China to be capable of backing down and would expect to be able to call their "bluff". I am almost sure, however, that the US leadership understands, or at least has advisors that understand, the differences between Eastern and Western mindsets. (I don't mean just the current administration, but US leadership in general; this has been generally understood for decades now among people who study world politics.) The US government knows not to push China too hard or in the wrong ways. I do not believe there will be war between the US and China any time soon. Non-military conflict of the competitive sort, sure, and the usual "We won't support your UN resolutions" type of political opposition, and posturing, and press releases, and all that sort of thing, yeah. But I don't see actual war in our future, and China is not a nation I am worried about, from a military perspective.
Actually, of all the nations currently believed to currently _have_ nuclear power (as opposed to merely being in the process of attempting to develop it), the only one that scares me even a little bit is Pakistan. All the others I'm pretty much certain are too sane to start a nuclear w