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swissiws t1_iy8dvg2 wrote

Us European have our GPS satellites (Galileo) and it's mainly private money

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sleepyzalophus t1_iy8g05q wrote

Galileo is great. It’s effective and relatively inexpensive. It unfortunately requires a lot more maintenance of uploading ephemeris data than GPS does. GPS gets daily ephemeris updates but can go as long as a week without it and still have okay accuracy. Galileo operates with multiple uploads per hour and if a satellite misses updates for a day, as happened in 2019, the whole constellation turns off. The two systems perform different roles so it’s a bit unfair to compare them directly. All of NATO uses GPS so Galileo doesn’t have as strict resiliency requirements; therefore, they can be made differently and cheaper. It’s an excellent system for what it does with its public/private signals though.

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