Time of the season for GNSS?

GPS World, Sept, 2004 by Glen Gibbons

Though we grow ever further from our agrarian roots, the sentiments of Ecclesiastes--or Pete Seeger and The Byrds, if your memory travels no further back than the Sixties--still resonate in the collective consciousness: "For everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven."

Summer surrenders its heat and light to autumn. Infants turn into daughters going off to college. Dinosaurs grow large and then small again before perhaps disappearing altogether. (Ford Thunderbirds grow large and then small again before perhaps disappearing altogether.) Newspapers and magazines relinquish their dominance as heralds to the infotainment of broadcast media ... and all give way to the expanding universe of the Internet.

Like the first evening star, the Global Positioning System had the heavens to itself for only a brief span before first Russia's Glonass and now Europe's Galileo rose to claim a share of the popular imagination. Indeed, GPS had barely become a catch-phrase on the lips of technophiles--and a misunderstood enigma to the less savvy--before the arrival of a new concept, Global Navigation Satellite System or GNSS.

We now have three like-named annual GNSS conferences for three regions of the world: the Institute of Navigation's (formerly ION GPS) in the United States, the European Group of Institutes of Navigation's (formerly DSNS for Differential Satellite Navigation Systems and now also known as the European Navigation Conference, or ENC), and an itinerant event sponsored and hosted by organizations in Asia and Australia.

GNSS brings the excitement of a new paradigm, the evolution of an idea (GPS) so powerful that it had to be shared. And yet, neither GPS's time nor its season have passed. As the only existing, fully realized GNSS, it lives in the current moment, and its evolution is open-ended on the forward edge of time. Its season has not given way to Galileo or even GNSS. How could it? For with only the remnants of Glonass and a plan for Galileo's development, GNSS as a system of systems cannot yet be said to practically exist. (Of course, if we include the nearly completed augmentations such as WAAS, EGNOS, and NDGPS, as well as compatible commercial systems, we could argue that GNSS will arrive much sooner.)

In fact, we might even consider Galileo's season as having been the 10 years of slow gestation in the minds and pocketbooks of the European Commission and European Space Agency. When its physical formation finally occurs, a Galileo compatible and interoperable with GPS inherently will launch the era of true GNSS.

But that season--much anticipated--has not yet begun.

In any case, GNSS has plenty of time to enter into its own. Galileo's sponsors propose to loft a 30-satellite constellation in about the span it took the United States after the founding of the GPS Joint Program Office to get the first four GPS spacecraft into orbit. The lessons learned and technical advances accomplished since GPS's founding in 1973 certainly can expedite the Galileo project, but few still believe in the official 2008 target for completing the European system. And even fewer will hold the Galileo Joint Undertaking to that deadline.

With new GPS signals beginning to come on line next year (L2C, M-code) and in 2008 (L5), the U.S. system will be evolving in the same timeframe in which Galileo is emerging (see GPS JPO story beginning on page 30). So, there is time for GNSS and Galileo, perhaps even enough time to accommodate the inevitable complications from those interesting political partnerships that the European Union is forging with such nations as China, India, and Israel. GPS III, even if it hits its start date of 2012, will be years more in the making before it fully achieves parity with the capabilities proposed for Galileo.

Closer to home (or, at least, closer to my home) the suggestion of renaming this magazine has cropped up regularly over the years since Russia briefly completed a Glonass constellation in 1996. We even made it the subject of discussion at a meeting of GPS World's editorial advisory board last May.

The conversation was robust and good-hearted, with GPS and Galileo advocates alike exhibiting respect for the achievements of both systems and the brand identity of a 15-year-old publication. Perhaps, the most elegant argument against ever changing GPS World's name was offered by a French editorial advisor, Jean-Francois Bou. Once Europe achieves its own GNSS, Bou Suggested, most of its citizens will soon assume that GPS stands for Galileo Positioning System.

And therein may lie a lesson for any who would designate this time or that season as the exclusive domain of a favorite. As Shakespeare has Juliet ask Romeo, "What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet."

Especially if they are compatible and interoperable.

Glen Gibbons / Editor

ggibbons@advanstar.com