This Sunday morning at 5:30 AM, the Chinese government launched a rocket into space that was carrying a navigation satellite system. This satellite is the fifth of over 30 Beidou orbiters that Beijing hopes will soon rival America’s Global Positioning System (GPS).
For many years, the U.S. Air Force has owned and operated the system that the rest of the world uses for navigation, which has given The United States a huge military advantage. Our Global Positioning System enables our bombs to be guided with unbelievable precision, which makes other countries nervous. With America in control of all GPS satellites, what if the Pentagon decided to mess with the GPS signal in the midst of a war?
The Chinese have now invented a new rival to the GPS system called Beidou, which in Chinese means “compass”. It will allow China to be self-reliant when it comes to global tracking technology.
This Sunday’s satellite launch makes the 5th orbiter out of a total of 30 in the Beidou constellation. Another eight to ten are scheduled to be launched into orbit by 2012, and by 2020, Beidou is supposed to become fully operational. This means China will soon be able to use its own satellite-guided weapons, ones that hit within feet of their target, and stay on track no matter what the weather is like.
Beidou is only one of 3 potential competitors of GPS currently under construction. The European Union’s Galileo project was supposed to have been up and running by the year 2008, but has only been able to launch a few of testing satellites.
Russia had its satellite system consisting of 24 different satellites, which they call GLONASS. It was supposed to up and running by 1995, but 6 years later, only 6 of the satellites were still working, and system was disabled. Russia has launched an effort to rebuild GLONASS that is just about finished. According to the Russian government, twenty-one of their satellites are operational.
With the satellite navigation “arms race” at an all time high, the other countries might give America’s GPS system a run for its money.
