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What’s New: An announcement by China of plans for an even more advanced version of BeiDou. Improvements will include satellites at LEO, MEO, and GEO that are a formal part of the BeiDou structure.

Why It’s Important:

• Having the world’s best PNT is a source of prestige and influence.
• BeiDou will be the preferred over GPS and adopted more and given precedence in systems
• When other countries adopt BeiDou into their infrastructure and other systems, China can gain an on/off switch for that nation’s essential service. This could be partly overcome by using multiple GNSS, but we suspect the free equipment and tech advice from China doesn’t include that.

What Else to Know: There is a way the U.S. could leapfrog China and regain world leadership in PNT:

• Commit to maintaining GPS as a first class system for the indefinite future.
• Commit to an internet-based High Accuracy and Robustness service for GPS.
• Re-state GPS/GNSS vulnerability and there is not that much more that can be done in space alone to make users more secure.
• Announce development of  a policy, procedure, and technology package of PNT capabilities that integrates fiber time and terrestrial broadcast with GPS and Galileo, and has the flexibility to incorporate other systems and signals as well.
• Begin implementing that resilient architecture in the U.S. (we estimate it would <$80M/yr) while also marketing it to allied and non-aligned nations as “sovereign PNT that can stand alone while also validating and cooperating with GNSS” so no country has to rely solely on the good graces of another for its essential PNT services.

We should all be about PNT meeting user needs and serving people, and not about one system or type of system.

China sets to build next-generation BeiDou system