Lockheed Martin GPS Update Enhances System Tracking Accuracy
OK you better read this one closely. There aren’t many of my posts that you’re going to see that give out kudos to Lockheed Martin or any of their “Beltway Bandit” cohorts, but I think this time is one where credit is due.
The accuracy of the GPS depends on many factors, almost all of which have to be sensed out in the cold, remote regions of space (about 20,200km or 12,550 miles) above the earth. All the satellites are controlled by the GPS Master Control Station at Schriever AFB, east of Colorado Springs, CO. The folks that watch over the birds and make daily corrections and adjustments can only do their work as well as they can “see” what they’re working on.
When the GPS was being built and brought up to operational status, the Air Force built monitoring stations at ground locations around the world that could receive signals from all the orbiting satellite, transmit the data to Schriever and furnish the basis for the calculations needed to make updates to the satellites. Depending on how you want to count, there were originally only six monitor sites.
However, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) (formerly the Defense Mapping Agency) and some other scientific users built their own monitoring stations over time. Nearly 15 years ago when I first worked for Air Force Space Command with the mission of reducing communication costs and increasing utility for the users, I was aghast at this fragmented, very expensive duplication of networks. Like many government ’stove pipes’ these occurred because money is allocated to this program manager in one agency and that program manager in another agency and money, to a program manager, is not only life to his or her project but it’s life itself. If a program spends x amount of millions a year it ‘earns’ a colonel to run it. If that colonel were to find a big hole in his funding bucket, wasting hundreds of thousands per year and were to plug that hole, next year he’d be spending (wasting?) less and only be a Lt Col or a Major. So, I never made a lot of progress in getting these disparate ground stations, all collecting exactly the same data from exactly the same satellites to merge.
A few years back there was finally some movement in this direction, but a great deal of resistance then came up because even if the data from all these additional sources were brought to the Master Control, the software wouldn’t be able to accept the new inputs. That “speed bump” stalled things for some time.
I don’t know how much Lockheed Martin was paid to finally overcome this challenge, but I guarantee it was money well spent. Not only are we taxpayers now going to spend a lot less money per year on duplicative communications leased lines, but, as the article points out, system performance of the satellites is going to improve 10 to 15%!
Some of the monitor sites are here: http://www.kowoma.de/en/gps/control_segment.htm
Now tell me again what military system you’ve ever seen show a performance gain like that without being thrown on the trash heap and replaced by something that cost twice as much.
Kudos to the dedicated folks at Lock-Mart, to the 2 SOPS and 50th Space Wing managers, my dedicated old comrades in AFSPC headquarters and the GPS Program Office folks at Los Angeles AF Station for having the gumption, the vision and the patience to do the right thing. A nice story to start off 2006 with.
