Failure of the GPS System?

Recently the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report titled “GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM: Significant Challenges in Sustaining and Upgrading Widely Used Capabilities” that warned the system is at risk for near-future failure if not maintained better and upgraded soon.

From all the resulting furor in the sailing press, you’d have thought that NASA had announced unequivocally that the sky is falling.

Dust off your sextant! Carry paper charts in your hip pocket—everywhere! Don’t get on an airplane! Buy a new plotter keyed to the Russian GPS system for when ours fails! Hubbub! Outroar!

It’s not as if I’m some superpatriot who believes the US government never screws up, but really, c’mon, people! The satellites aren’t falling (yet) and I really doubt a budget issue will ground the system. This reminds me of the Y2K furor nine years ago when some people were convinced every computer on earth would stop and society would rapidly disintegrate back to caveperson days. It just ain’t gonna happen. Look at what this report actually says:

If the Air Force does not meet its schedule goals for development of GPS IIIA satellites, there will be an increased likelihood that in 2010, as old satellites begin to fail, the overall GPS constellation will fall below the number of satellites required to provide the level of GPS service that the U.S. government commits to. Such a gap in capability could have wide-ranging impacts on all GPS users, though there are measures the Air Force and others can take to plan for and minimize these impacts.

There are more qualifiers in those two sentences than you can shake a stick at. “If… likelihood… level commits to… could have… though there are measures…”

That said, I own a sextant myself and keep paper charts on board. But the likelihood of a electric or electronic failure on your own boat is several thousand times that of a whole GPS system failure. If you’re concerned, put your energy into triple backing up your own systems.

Besides, even if a few satellites did actually fall before they fixed the system, with modern GPS receivers your navigational potential error zone might expand only from inches to a few feet.

And if you’re passing within a few feet of a killer rock or reef, I’d say you were already in trouble—long before Chicken Little looked up.

Related article: Basic Navigation with a Chartplotter