42 Replies to “Those Are Some Nice Satellites You’ve Got There”

  1. Damn. That means all my farmer buddies would have to go back to steering their tractors. The humanity!!!

  2. Well, we went hundreds of millennia without GPS. It might even be an advantage to not have something that can be hacked into and spied on.

  3. If you cannot get from point A to point B without a GPS, maybe you should not drive a car.

    GPS was invented by the US to make sure they knew where their military equipment and personel were at all times, and that is a valid use for it.

    but to find the closest star bucks?

    sorry no.

    2. Spoke with a 30yr old today – he explained the difference between Google and Apple gps – he cannot read a physical map.

    1. BUT, will they shoot-down their OWN Nav-Sats”. Then, there is a string of Chinese ones up there, all racing around the globe in precisely-calculated polar orbits.

      As for “Boomers”, no not the “category” of people of a certain age, but the large nuclear submarines lurking in the worlds oceans:

      Once submerged, satellite signals are useless to them. Thus, they use, and have done so for decades, ultra-long radio waves from huge antennae all over the world. BIG static targets.

      GPS, especially with the “speech” facility, is quite handy. Try driving, at night, across California to LAX, in time to return the hire-car and do an international check-in, SOLO, with paper maps. You would probably need to start early, the day before.

    2. Roger that! Can we just give them the coordinates for the Twitter, Instagram, and Google satellites?

      1. Dan, I’m so old school, I’ve NEVER used a GPS for map directions. Or anything else as far as I know. Personally, I would rather give them the coordinates for the Twitter, Instagram, Google and Facebook head offices, and request a long range bomber for a fly by. But that’s just me.

  5. This smells like the Americans trying to draw the conversation toward the bad Russians again. Nobody is blowing up anything.

  6. Want to ground general aviation? If the Russians knock out the GPS satellites, I bet our friendly government will order GA to cease operations. For safety reasons you understand.

    1. It certainly would be inconvenient, but we are trained to navigate the old fashioned way with maps and the good old E6-B. IFR would be most affected, but VFR would be relatively OK. Note also that the remote GPS receiver I carry in the cockpit will also access GLONASS, so unless the Russians manage to block my receiver, I should still be able to get a satellite signal.

      Commercial traffic would likely be the worst affected. Also, in the USA all traffic flying in controlled airspace is required to use ADS-B which uses a GPS signal. No GPS, no ADS-B.

  7. On one hand, I seriously doubt that Russia ( or China for that matter) wants a war with the USA, even though Biden and democrats have made the USA weaker and easier to defeat. There is too much to lose in such a war.

    On the other hand, GPS, like many other things of our modern technology are amazing in what they can do, yet put us in a very precarious position, more than anything before.

    A nuclear EMP explosion above a large city would destroy the electric power stations and it would take months or years to repair them…this would mean millions of people without electricity…no heat in winter, etc etc…many, if not most, would die.

    More ” ancient” technology, (if we can call that technology) such as a wood stove would not be affected even if it took 3 years to repair power stations , it would keep you warm, cook your food, provide hot water etc etc

    Modern technology is definitely fascinating yet so damn fragile…it will be a huge factor in the causes of our ( soon to happen , I give it 25 years, at most ) downfall.

  9. Too bad the US wasted trillions in the Islamic wastelands instead of continuing with SDI and staying well ahead of Russia and China. Since Reagan, the US has elected 5 duds and one loose cannon populist who was never in control of the deep state. Meanwhile, Russia, the biggest gas station in Europe has rebuilt its military and China is openly taking over the rest of the planet. The west is more concerned with allowing boys going into girl’s bathrooms and committing economic suicide with green theocracy.

  10. There are only so many ways to explain to the bloodsuckers that Russia is done letting them rape her, and the next time the Germans try, the Russian army is marching all the way to the Rhine and the Germans are getting one-way tickets to Siberia, to end their days in the slavery the master race planned for the Slavs.

    Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, leader of the free world, has needed them all.

  11. Countries like Russia and China are sabre rattling now, because there’s a brain dead idiot in the white house. Who shouldn’t even be there.

  13. I understand the concern with GPS but if it wasn’t for one I’d still be lost in LA.

    1. Forget LA, even with a GPS trying to figure 580, 680 and 880 signage in Oakland and what direction is a challenge…

    2. If it wasn’t for GPS you might be able to read a map, create a route card, and navigate to your destination while paying attention to the traffic surrounding you.

    1. Do they not have their own? No way the US is going to give them the keys to the high resolution version of GPS.

      Plus, couple weeks back I saw a clip of a Russkie military flight engineer using a slide rule.

      2. My recollection was that the highres version was unlocked just before Gulf War I because the U.S. military could not get enough highres receivers in time. My GPS receivers seem to all be highres.

  15. OK. Make sure to remind them to knock out their GLONASS satellites too. In certain parts of Latin America, my handheld GPS units frequently find more GLONASS fixes than GPS fixes.

  16. Regardless of what side one takes, it is a clever that. While we make jokes about reading maps, destruction of the GPS satellites would cripple American military and commercial activity in the extreme. I don’t think most people realize how important the GPS system has become in society and warfare.
    It is a vastly superior deterrent to nuclear weapons.

    1. I would guess that, were nav. and comms. satellites to start “winking out”, the scale of “terrestrial” warming would rapidly go “global”.

  19. Was it a real threat?
    Just cause they said they could do it,does not mean they are threatening to do it.
    Stating the simple fact,that they have the technology and could do so..
    Yes they do.
    I read the link,is Russia making a threat? or an observation?
    “All 32” is awful specific.

    1. Well what they going to say? “We are going to blow up 27 of your weak willed puny Western GPS Satellites”.

      Now THAT would seem weird.

  20. The big danger here is not the individual satellites being destroyed, it is the fact that when you destroy a satellite you are basically converting the mass from one object into many objects.

    These new smaller objects are the ones that hang in orbit for years causing problems for everything else.

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