Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

availability,” which degraded GPS’s accuracy by adding signal errors for civilian users—normally about ten meters horizontally and thirty meters vertically. Only the U.S. military and selected allies received the unadulterated data. The air force also retained the ability to switch off GPS on a regional basis and to jam receivers in a war zone. Needless to say, this dependency on the “goodwill” of the United States irritated a lot of people, who began to devise ways to get around selective availability.

One rather expensive solution came to be known as “differential GPS,” useful primarily for geographic imaging, weather forecasting, mining, agriculture, and high-altitude surveying. Differential GPS involves setting up one GPS receiver—the base station—at a precisely known location. The base station then calculates its position based on GPS satellite signals and compares this location to its known location. The difference is applied to GPS data recorded by roving GPS receivers, thereby correcting the selective availability errors.⁷² But the more definitive answer to selective availability was, of course, a GPS system not run as a U.S. Air Force monopoly.

The Russians already had a primitive version of GPS called Glonas (global navigation system), which as of 2004 had only twelve active satellites and was uncompetitive. On May 1, 2000, the United States unilaterally ended selective availability, magnanimously declaring it to be an American humanitarian gesture: “As part of his ongoing effort to bring the benefits of government investments in science and technology to the civilian and commercial sectors, President Clinton ordered that the intentional degrading of the civilian Global Positioning System (GPS) be discontinued at midnight tonight.”⁷³ Nonetheless, the air force retained all its capabilities to limit service, to turn off GPS regionally, and to jam receivers. Slowly and fitfully, the European Union decided to build an alternative, which it named “Galileo.” This satellite navigation system, when operational, will be more accurate and not subject to shutdown for military purposes. When completed it will be available to all world users, civilian and military, and at its full capacity will require only a Galileo receiver. As Rene Oosterlinck, head of the European Space Agency’s Navigation Department, summed matters up, “Europe cannot accept reliance on a military system which has the possibility of being cut off.”⁷⁴

European nations at first were reluctant to put up the money for Galileo and, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the project almost died. The United States has always recognized that Galileo was intended to break its stranglehold on the use of satellites for navigational purposes, but it did not know what to do about it. The terrorism of 9/11 gave it an opportunity to act. The Bush administration wrote directly to the European Union arguing that Galileo, by ending America’s ability to shut down GPS in times of military operations, would threaten the success of the war on terror. This ploy backfired badly. By mid-2002, virtually all European Union states were on board and had overfunded the project.

Galileo will be a system of thirty spacecraft in orbit—twenty-seven active and three spares—14,514 miles above the Earth. Each satellite has a projected lifetime of twelve years. The system aims at an accuracy of less than a meter, with greater penetration into urban centers, inside buildings, and under trees, a faster fix, and atomic clocks that are ten times better than those on board the GPS satellites. The European Space Agency plans to launch the required thirty satellites between 2006 and 2010, and the system is planned to be up and running under civilian control by 2010.

On December 28, 2005, a Russian Soyuz rocket fired from the old Soviet Cosmodrome at Baikonur, Kazakhstan, carried the first Galileo satellite into orbit—a launch received ecstatically in France, given a hearty “w^rell done” in Britain, and greeted with poorly disguised sour grapes in the United States. As far as the air force is concerned, Galileo has truly slipped the American leash. In September 2003, China joined the project, promising to invest 230 million euros in it. In July 2004, Israel signed on; India joined in September 2005; Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea all affiliated with Galileo during the winter of 2005-6, each of them paying for the privilege. There was speculation that Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Russia also were considering becoming involved.⁷⁵

The air force itself would be wise to start planning a transition to Galileo instead of becoming paranoid over the prospect that many countries around the world may soon meet or exceed American space-based navigational and guidance capabilities. For example, the U.S. military’s precision-guided Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) GBU-31 bomb, which has wreaked so much nonprecision carnage in Iraq, depends on the GPS. Whether it will work with Galileo or whether the European Space Agency will allow such a militaristic use of its satellites is not known. According to the RAND Corporation, “A particularly glaring U.S. space vulnerability is the constellation of Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, thanks to our extraordinary dependence on that system.”⁷⁶

Unfortunately for the United States and the prospects for peace, the Air Force Space Command takes this dependency to mean that we must actively defend the GPS and other military satellites by using antisatellite (ASAT) weapons and other space-war devices. There are ways to prepare for and protect against the inevitability of satellite sabotage or failure, but the use of active military measures surely should not be among them. About the only thing ASATs could do is create so much lethal debris in orbital space as to make it useless for all nations for a very long time, perhaps permanently.

As of December 2005, there were approximately 800 active satellites of every sort in operation—exact numbers are not available since military secrecy hides a significant portion of the total American fleet. According to an estimate by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based private watchdog organization, 413 of these satellites belong to American companies or the United States government. The Russians operate 87, the European Space Agency about 50, and the Chinese 34.⁷⁷ According to the Satellite Industry Association, revenue from both governmental and commercial customers for manufacturers and operators of satellites was $85.1 billion in 2000 and $97.2 billion in 2004, with the United States accounting for more than three-quarters of all spending.⁷⁸ Since 1998, there have been more commercial satellites in orbit than military ones, and the number of commercial launches each year has exceeded military launches. According to the Center for Defense Information, the U.S. military now uses privately owned commercial satellites for about 60 percent of its communications and that “dependence is growing.”⁷⁹

These commercial satellites do many useful things, most of them taken for granted and rarely thought of as related to satellites. Low Earth orbit, just 200 to 500 miles above the Earth’s surface, is crowded with satellites reporting weather conditions, mapping the Earth’s surface (“remote sensing”), sustaining the U.S. Space Shuttle, the International Space Station, and the Hubble Telescope, studying the size of the ozone hole in the atmosphere over Chile, photographing the damage done by the Southeast Asian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina, and transmitting financial and economic news around the world in real time. Satellites in low Earth orbit are so close to the planet, they must travel at very high speeds, usually about 17,000 miles per hour, so that gravity will not pull them back into the Earth’s atmosphere.

Much farther out in space, the world’s major television networks broadcast to their markets from large communications satellites in geosynchronous or geostationary orbits—abbreviated GEO—over the equator. These satellites orbit at the high altitude of 22,237 miles above sea level, where they are far enough from the Earth’s gravitational pull to approximate the speed of Earth itself as it rotates on its own axis in each twenty-four-hour cycle (just over 1,000 miles per hour). This speed is, of course, much slower than the speed at which the Earth travels around the Sun (67,062 miles per hour). Flying at approximately the same speed that the Earth is turning on its axis, the satellite remains in the same position in relation to the Earth even though both are in constant motion.

In 1945, just as World War II was coming to an end but while London was still under attack from Nazi V-2 rockets fired from the Netherlands, the future science-fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke calculated the height and speed required of a satellite to remain in the same place over the Earth. He published his findings in the magazine Wireless World. No one took his idea seriously at the time, but twenty years later, on