As reported by The Atlantic: On the first day of September in 1983, the Soviet Union shot down a
plane. Its military officers thought it was a spy plane, they said
later. But it was not: It was a passenger jet, Korean Air Lines Flight
007, and the 269 people on the plane all died.
The flight had originated in New York; one of the
passengers was a U.S. congressman. At first, the Soviet Union wouldn't
even admit its military had shot the plane down, but the Reagan
administration immediately started pushing to establish what had
happened and stymie the operations of the Soviet Aeroflot airline.
President Reagan also made a choice that, while reported at the time,
was not the biggest news to come out of this event: He decided to speed up the timeline for civilian use of GPS.
The U.S. had already launched into orbit almost a dozen
satellites that could help locate its military craft, on land, in the
air, or on the sea. But the use of the system was restricted. (It was
meant, for instance, to help powerful weapons hit their targets—it
wasn't the sort of tool governments usually want to make publicly
available.) Now, Reagan said, as soon as the next iteration of the GPS
system was working, it would be available for free.
It took more than $10 billion and until over 10 years for
the second version of the U.S.'s GPS system to come fully online. But in
1995, as promised, it was available to private companies for consumer
applications. Sort of. The government had built in some protection for itself—"selective
availability," which reserved access to the best, most precise signals
for the U.S. military (and anyone it chose to share that power with).
It didn't take long, though, for commercial providers of
GPS services to start complaining. Location-based services, after all,
are only as good as their actual usefulness—and if you've got a customer
lost in the woods, you want that customer to know as precisely as
possible where they are so they can get un-lost. In 2000, not that long
before he left office, President Clinton got rid of selective
availability and freed the world from ever depending on paper maps or
confusing directions from relatives again.
GPS has not, however, been a panacea for international
conflicts over the positioning of large vehicles. Just a few years ago,
in 2007, a group of British sailors were detained by the Iranian government, which said they had wandered into Iranian waters. The British GPS system showed the boats in Iraqi waters. But it didn't matter.
According to the Iranian authorities, they had been in Iranian waters.
The sailors were released eventually—but only after almost two weeks of
discussion over where, exactly, they had been.
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