Curiouser and curiouser.
Just as the UK announces it is pulling funds for UK companies to work on a LEO GPS design - the US announces it has started one. I wonder what is going on in the background.......
https://www.technologyreview.com/202...le-navigation/
SpaceX has already launched more than 700 Starlink satellites, with
thousands more due to come online in the years ahead. Their prime mission is to provide high-speed internet virtually worldwide, extending it to many remote locations that have lacked reliable service to date.
Now, research funded by the US Army has concluded that the growing
mega-constellation could have a secondary purpose: doubling as a low-cost, highly accurate, and almost unjammable alternative to GPS. The new method would use existing Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) to provide near-global navigation services.
In a non-peer-reviewed
paper, Todd Humphreys and Peter Iannucci of the
Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin claim to have devised a system that uses the same satellites, piggybacking on traditional GPS signals, to deliver location precision up to 10 times as good as GPS, in a system much less prone to interference.......
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-s...place-galileo/
UK scraps Brexit alternative to EU’s Galileo satellite system
LONDON — The U.K. is set to scrap former Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan to replace access to the EU’s satellite navigation system Galileo after Brexit with a home-grown equivalent.
The UK Space Agency is expected to announce that contracts awarded to U.K. space companies to build the British Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) will not be extended beyond their expiration date at the end of this month........
The government will instead ask companies to put forward “innovative” solutions that give the U.K. additional resilience to that of Galileo and GPS, the U.S. satellite navigation system.
“The general principle is looking at alternative ways of providing resilient position, navigation and timing systems in a way that is different to GPS and Galileo. Because if GPS and Galileo fail, it may well be for the same reason, the same disruption. The idea is to come up with something different and by doing that you’ve got more chance of having one system up and running when perhaps one of the others has failed,” the executive said.......