Can You Live Without GPS?

It’s a scary thought that with some of the escalating conflict in the world, the GPS system we and the economy as a whole relies upon is vulnerable and a backup unavailable.

And because of course Congress is Congress, here’s an excerpt from the podcast.

GOWARD: Russia and China both have terrestrial systems that can give them GPS-like information in the event that signals from space are not available. Unfortunately, in the U.S., we shut ours off in 2010, and we have no sign of starting up something like that again.

WONG: Before GPS, the United States had a system called LORAN. That's an acronym for Long Range Navigation. It was a relic of World War II - a couple dozen 700-foot ground towers spread across the country that transmitted powerful radio signals - not as accurate as GPS, but it got the job done. In 2004, the Bush administration not only wanted to keep LORAN as a backup to GPS. It wanted to upgrade it to make it more precise.

GOWARD: The money for that was taken away in the various budget processes, and the old system was shut down without new replacement.

HEGYI: That shutdown happened during the Obama administration. They had a completely different view than the Bush administration and called LORAN obsolete in the era of satellite navigation. But then, a few years later, they said, oops, our bad.

GOWARD: We shouldn't have shut down that old system. We should have upgraded. We're going to do that. But again, nothing happened.

WONG: So in 2018, Congress passed a law requiring the Department of Transportation to build a backup to GPS by the year 2020, but then they didn't appropriate enough cash to do that.

Sigh...