04 April 2007
They're Back
I had a rental car in New York last month, and the nice lady at Hertz did not have the stripped-down model I reserved in accordance with company policy. She kindly gave me one equipped with a GPS receiver mounted on a stalk that protruded like an alien from the console in the front seat.
I have never had much luck with the things. When you do not know precisely where you are going, it is hard to program; the buttons are clunky and there is an interlock that does not permit the driver to fiddle with the system while the vehicle is in motion. I support that proposition, generally, as I do the ban on using a cell phone without a hands-free headset. You know how many idiots there are out there.
I could not figure out quickly how to program my destination, and had to deal with two bridges, a tunnel and the Bronx the old-fashioned way, white knuckled and bold. Returning, though, I discovered that every previous rental trip had returned to exactly the same place, and it was simple to activate the device, and it helpfully gave me precise directions to the wrong side of the fence at the airport.
It was fantastic, to that point, anyway, since I was in weekday traffic on the way back. It made me appreciate the fact that there are much more important drivers headed for much more vital meetings over roads that have been crumbling longer than the ones in DC.
The experience led me to the brink of accepting the Global Positioning Systems, or GPS, as part of my life. It is just about to the point where it is ubiquitous anyway. My next phone is probably going to have some sort of GPS display; the back-office system already uses the system for precision billing information.
In fact, almost everything is hooked up to GPS in the big infrastructure. It is just a question of making the final leap to precision locating of everything, cars, cargo, kids and pets.
GPS started as a military system, using a constellation of low-earth orbiting satellites to provide precision locational information to support navigation and targeting applications.
It came out of the closet after KAL-007 got whacked by the Russians over Kamchatka, spilling passengers and food carts into the chill Sea of Okhotsk, southwest of the sensitive submarine base at Petropavlosk.
I was working in the back room at the Watch Center in Pearl Harbor when the word first began to spread. We had both the front channel and back channel stuff. My pal Joe was the operations officer, and the first to read the information that all those people were dead, the result of being mistaken for an American spy plane, though it was clear enough to the pilots who shot it down what it was.
He looked up, and said there did not appear to be a whole lot we could do about it, but it would probably be a big deal.
“Shoot,” I said. “I was on that flight last year, going to Seoul.” I imagined what it might be like to fall thirty-thousand feet to the dark water and shivered.
Joe was right. In addition to accusations and conspiracy theories, there was a massive hunt for the wreckage and much international grandstanding. President Reagan even offered to permit everyone to have access to GPS to prevent such unfortunate incidents in the future.
That was really the beginning of the commercial explosion of devices to take advantage of what had been an exclusively military system. It might have been one of the last times that the Government actually had the lead on technology, one of those tipping points.
Now, the military is always playing catch-up to the private sector, which I suppose is a good thing. But relying on an American military system was not something the Soviet War Machine could reasonably do.
Everything we did, they had to do, too. The Soviet answer was the Global Navigation Satellite System, or GLONASS. They were very serious about it, and launched transponder satellites on rockets to start to populate their own system.
If I was a little brighter, I might have made a lot of money on betting the Soviet Union was going to fall. The GLONASS system was the canary in the coalmine of global Communism. They almost got a constellation on orbit robust enough to work, but they never did. The money ran out, and if only I had invested in Russian oil futures I might have been an Oligarch myself by now, and in jail.
One by one, the transponders on the satellites began to fail, and then they fell out of orbit.
There were never enough mission birds in the right position to constitute a working system, and never enough spares on orbit. There was one system for global positioning, and it was America's. Whether it was navigational data for the stealth bomber, or finding Fido, the information was derived from GPS.
The dark suspicion always existed that the Americans would use the monopoly to their advantage. The Russians muttered that the Air Force could always disenable the transmissions, or de-tune its information to preclude it being used by opponents in a conflict.
They might be right. I would certainly hate to rely on my enemy to navigate for me. The suspicion has resulted in the impetus for the Europeans and Chinese to design their own navigational systems, and for the Russians to resume deployment of GLONASS.
The Times this morning says the Russian space agency will launch eight navigation satellites late this year to populate most of their own constellation. It will begin operating over Russian territory and parts of adjacent Europe and Asia, and then go global in 2009.
China is flush with cash, and the satellite technology that Motorola transferred to them. Their system is well along, which they call “Baidu,” after the Mandarin term for the Big Dipper. Not to be left out, the European Union has a concept of its own, called “Galileo.”
It has a major French component, and thus is over cost and budget. The problems could be resolved after lunch, which is expected to be a long one with plenty of red wine, and the system will probably will be deferred until it is irrelevant.
GLONASS is the system that will be operational, and it will be soon. It is the clearest indication of the impact of the oil revenues to the Kremlin's coffers. Mr. Putin is quite proud of the system, and talks about it all the time.
The system is a symbol of Russia's return to greatness. It permits the precise delivery of all sorts of things, from rockets to pets.
They say the problem at the moment is the GLONASS receiver, which is rugged and dependable. It has a lot in common with the old Soviet technology, resembling a cinder block.
I'm sure they can solve that, and there is the real possibility that future Hertz rental cars will have a dual-capability chip installed that will permit us to return rental cars, or deliver weapons, even if the Air Force de-tunes the system.
That is progress.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com