I think that it is unlikely that private industry alone would have developed GPS, but I would hate for people’s take home message to be “If it wasn’t for the cold war and the corresponding U.S. military spending, we wouldn’t have GPS”.
It’s quite feasible for other state(s) such as the EU, Russia or even now China to set up such a system; possibly as public-private initiatives if need be. Alternate Earth would still have GPS (IMO) it just may have come later and be less open (initially at least).
But would Private Industry have the same value of GPS? I don’t think it would. It would be required to nickle and dime me as much as possible, or huge up front fees. “the share holders demand it”.
My rather vague memory is that the early designs for Iridium included a nav payload. Part of the reason it was dropped was opposition from the military. There are now proposals for enhanced GPS capability aided by second generation Iridium satellites. There is little doubt that a commercial nav sat system could, and in the absence of GPS would almost certainly eventually have been built. It would probably have been about 20 years later than GPS, since the costs have dropped so much. Commercial launch vehicles are finally significantly cutting costs, and advances in electronics make for vastly smaller systems needed - allowing the systems to ride along with other communication payloads that pay most of the costs. However the commercial reality remains - it would not have been free, and very likely this would have very significantly slowed down the pace of development. The fact that any chip designer can enter the market with a GPS system an not pay a cent towards the costs of the system is one reason for the very fast and agghressive development of GPS. Motorola/Iridium totally got the commercial basis of the system wrong and it went broke. Billions lost. I suspect that their commercial model for a satnav system would have been equally flawed, and probably for much the same reasons, and in the same manner. Eventually things would have sorted themselves out, but we would not be where we are now with GPS.
You are nickled-and-dimed, though. But instead of calling it a subscription fee it’s called “taxes”.
I think it’s safe to say that we wouldn’t (yet) have a GPS system as functional today without the government. However, we can’t say this is a good thing without knowing the total cost. If we all payed $10k extra in taxes* over the last 20 years we might not think it worth it.
$10k number pulled out from where the sun don’t shine and is for illustration purposes only.
I suspect that private industry would pay for GPS by a combination of:
Large-user fees. These would be fees to users in industries like transportation, shipping, mineral exploration, logging, etc. They’d pay enormous fees for the organization to have access, possibly with some special features to justify the cost. It’s a safe bet that the government itself would be one of the largest users.
Bundled fees. We already see this all over the place. For example, you don’t pay for most cable channels separately. You don’t pay for each cell tower you access (at least, not anymore). Instead, these kinds of fees are bundled into one bill so that the incremental cost is pretty small for each user, but sufficient revenue is still generated in total. You might be offered an upgrade price for increased usage or higher resolution.
It certainly would be accomplished eventually. I wouldn’t be surprised if the free market version was a lot cheaper to deploy than the government version.
Going from memory I wanted to point out that Pres Reagan, after the Soviets shot down KAL 007, mandated that the then military-only developing GPS system be made available for civilian use for free (albeit with the somewhat less accurate signal). Conspiracy theories aside KAL 007 was caused by the flight crew mis-programing their INS (inertial nav system) and straying over Soviet airspace. That, and the Soviets being a little too trigger happy (course there was the USS Vincennes…)
I think private interests would definitely have developed GPS. The market for commercial air & sea traffic and ground delivery services like FedEx & UPS alone, customers who would have happily paid a premium to subscribe, would have been a very viable business model. But it would have been at least a decade or two later in coming. And if it had been pay-only, even with a reduced ‘consumer rate plan’, it would have taken forever to reach critical mass (i.e. become ubiquitous) like it is now.
However, assuming that the cellphone industry had developed the way it did even without any civilian-use GPS signals available to it, I think today we would just be using cell tower triangulation instead. Of course that would also mean that it would only be available ‘for a nominal additional monthly fee’.
Gotta love the threat of nuclear annihilation. Put a man on the Moon, gave use cheap powerful desktop computers, the internet, interstate highways, and GPS!
Depending on how one defines GPS, the private sector has already developed differential positioning systems that can be orders of magnitude more precise than satellite GPS. These devices are already revolutionizing agriculture in the US.
The usual differential systems are differential GPS - they depend upon the satellite system, but use a local base station to correct for selective availability dither (if in use) and for ionospheric propagation delay variability, which is the dominant issue that reduces accuracy. Simply knowing that the base station is not moving can be enough to make a huge difference in accuracy, and if you sit it down for a while it can work out its location to a remarkable degree. Or you just put the base station on a previously surveyed mark. The base station transmits the error value of its GPS location to the mobile GPS receivers, and they can correct their GPS derived location. Works very well. Has been available for a decade or so. Precision agriculture was indeed an early adopter. I came across its use in agriculture 15 years ago, so it isn’t new.
All very true, but it should be noted that systems do exist that do not require any satellite signal at all, you just need more monuments to triangulate with. Should also be noted for the purposes of this thread that until relatively recently most cell phones that offered “GPS” in fact had no GPS receiver, position was calculated using local cell towers, this would be another example of the private sector producing a workable GPS.(provided you had signal and enough towers)
