GPS upgrade aims to see more, do more

LOS ANGELES – Without it, ATMs would stop spitting out cash, Wall Street could blunder billions of dollars in stock trades and clueless drivers would get lost.

Most people may associate the Global Positioning System with the navigation devices that are becoming standard equipment on new cars. But GPS has become a nerve center for the 21st century rivaling the Internet – enabling cargo companies to track shipments, guiding firefighters to hot spots and even helping people find lost dogs.

“It’s a ubiquitous utility that everybody takes for granted now,” said Bradford W. Parkinson.

He should know. Three decades ago, as a baby-faced Air Force colonel just out of the Vietnam War, Parkinson led the Pentagon team that developed GPS at a military base in El Segundo, Calif.

Now, scientists and engineers – including those at a sprawling satellite-making factory in El Segundo – are developing an $8 billion GPS upgrade that will make the system more reliable, more widespread and much more accurate.

The new system is designed to pinpoint a location within an arm’s length, compared with a margin of error of 20 feet or more today. With that kind of precision, a GPS-enabled mobile phone could guide you right to the front steps of Starbucks, rather than somewhere on the block.

The 24 satellites that make up the GPS constellation – will be replaced one by one. The first replacement was scheduled to be launched from Cape Canaveral this weekend. The overhaul will take a decade and is being overseen by engineers at Los Angeles Air Force Base in El Segundo, where Parkinson and his team developed the current system.

The upgrade will increase the number of signals beamed to Earth from satellites orbiting 12,000 miles above. By triangulating the signals from four satellites, GPS receivers – and there are now more than a billion of them – can pinpoint your exact location on the ground.

Before GPS, explorers and seafarers figured out where they were by looking at the sun and the stars. Even with the advent of gyroscopes and radios, navigation was still imprecise, with an average margin of error of a mile or two.

The Cold War sparked the need for something better.

When the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, scientists at Johns Hopkins University scrambled to track it. They soon realized they could determine Sputnik’s position by monitoring the radio waves it emitted.

That led to a breakthrough concept. If radio waves could be used to track a satellite from Earth, radio waves from a satellite could also be used to determine the position of an object on the ground.

The Pentagon jumped at the idea. The Navy in particular needed help guiding its nuclear-armed submarines. Because the submarines spent months under water, surfacing only sporadically, they did not have a precise way of knowing where they were, which diminished the accuracy of the missiles.

In the 1960s the Pentagon launched more than a dozen satellites under a program called Transit in which submarines received satellite positioning signals when they surfaced.

But the system was accurate only to within 100 feet – and only when a submarine wasn’t moving. The government needed something better.

That’s where Parkinson came in. In 1972 the Pentagon tapped him to develop a satellite-based navigation system that had attracted more naysayers than supporters. Parkinson recalled frequent trips to Washington to deflect criticism from politicians and even some Pentagon brass that decried the project as a waste of taxpayers’ money.

“I was told that the system was useless and that it had no future,” said Parkinson, 75, who is now professor emeritus at Stanford University. “I guess we proved them wrong.”

The first satellite was launched in 1978 and the system began partially operating with 21 satellites in 1993.

The military seized on the technology quickly, using GPS to guide troops through sandstorms during the first Gulf War. GPS has revolutionized warfare. GPS is used to direct the drones seeking out insurgents in Afghanistan and has made “smart bombs” so accurate that they can be dropped from 40,000 feet and still land within 10 feet of their target.

The Pentagon operates and controls the GPS satellite system used in every country around the world. Until 2000 it deliberately degraded the signals that could be read by civilian devices.

Commercial applications soared in 2000, when President Bill Clinton ordered the Pentagon to stop manipulating the signals.

Worried that the U.S. could flip the switch and shut off GPS capability to the rest of the world, several countries are developing their own satellites. The European Union, China and Russia are spending billions of dollars on their versions.

Commercial applications, meanwhile, continue to multiply, and the number of subscribers to such services is expected to balloon to at least 15 million this year, up from 100,000 six years ago, according to Frost & Sullivan, a San Antonio research firm.

“GPS has truly become the lighthouse of the world,” Parkinson said. “It’s just remarkable how the system has evolved over the past 30 years. It’ll be just as interesting to see what will come in the next 30.”