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USAF's Next-Gen GPS Satellites Will Be a Huge Upgrade...Eventually

Of all the modern miracles enabled by spaceflight, global positioning satellites are among the most useful and ubiquitous. Military and civilian users across the globe depend on the 31 satellites, in six different orbital planes above Earth, to provide continual navigation signals.

And the newest member of this constellation, a spacecraft called called GPS III, is the next generation of these vital navigation satellites. Launched on December 23 by a SpaceX rocket, GPS III is now in the hands of ground control crews at Lockheed Martin who are maneuvering the GPS satellite into its final orbit, a task that will be wrap up sometime next week.

“GPS III will ensure the availability of this critical utility with enhanced performance to billions of users worldwide for decades to come,” says Keoki Jackson, Lockheed Martin’s chief technology officer and former program manager of GPS III.

The launch of the GPS III satellite is considered a huge milestone in the US Air Force’s painful quest to upgrade the global positioning system. But this first satellite, was supposed to launch in 2014, and this four-year delay is only a glimpse of the problems that plague these satellites.

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