Societal Impact of Spaceflight: Apollo, Shuttle, China, Russia, Reconnaissance, GPS, Earth Satellites, JPL, Food Standards, Spacefaring Species (NASA SP-2007-4801) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: Progressive Management
Published: 2012-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

After 2000, a rapidly expanding family of autonomous or remotely controlled robotic military systems relied on GPS navigation to perform a wide variety of tasks on land, at sea, underwater, and in the air or outer space. Unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with GPS, which had been under development since the 1980s, flew reconnaissance and surveillance missions over Bosnia and Kosovo during the late 1990s and, thereafter, proliferated among military organizations worldwide. In 2001—2002, Predator drones carrying AGM-114 Hellfire missiles attacked Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan.13 On 25 January 2002, a GPS-Aided Inertial Navigation System (GAINS) on the third stage of an SM-3 interceptor launched from a U.S. Navy Aegis cruiser helped successfully demonstrate the exo-atmospheric interception of an incoming target missile.14 During Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, the U.S. Navy ordered the first wartime deployment of the GPS-equipped, Remote Environmental Monitoring Units (REMUS) autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to locate suspected mines in the port of Umm Qasr.15 By November 2004, the DOD had contracted with Applied Perception, Inc. (API) to build two interrelated, GPS-enabled robotic prototypes—a 3,500-lb (1,588-kg) Robotic Evacuation Vehicle (REV) and a 600-lb (272-kg) Robotic Extraction Vehicle (REX)—for the safe recovery and transport of wounded soldiers from the battlefield to a nearby field hospital. Clearly, such vehicles could have numerous other military and nonmilitary applications ranging from logistical supply, ordnance disposal, surveillance, and assault to firefighting, crowd control, soil sampling, pest abatement, and exploration of hazardous environments.16

Perhaps the most pervasive U.S. military application of GPS by 2006 involved the tracking and coordination of various battle elements in real time using the GPS-enabled Force XXI Battle Command, Brigade-and-Below (FBCB2) satellite-based tracking system and its Blue Force Tracking (BFT) variant. American soldiers had suffered roughly a quarter-million casualties in the twentieth century due to so-called friendly fire, primarily because of the difficulty during intense conflict of discriminating quickly between friend and foe. As early as springtime of 1987, engineers and scouts from the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division used two 17.5-lb (8-kg) GPS manpacks during exercises in the Pinon Canyon training area of southern Colorado to maneuver through "enemy" lines in snow, rain, fog, and darkness to accomplish their objective. Four years later in Operation Desert Storm, with only 16 satellites in the constellation, GPS aided positioning and maneuvering of large troop formations, plus precision bombing, artillery fire support, and special operations in relatively featureless desert terrain. Coalition forces relying primarily on more than 12,000 personal receivers, each costing about $3,500, prevented countless casualties by reducing the so-called fog of battle.17

A decade after Desert Storm, U.S. forces conducting war games in California and Florida located and tracked troops, aircraft, and assorted equipment in real time using an Inexpensive Range Instrumentation System (IRIS). That experimentation demonstrated that low-cost, commercial off-the-shelf hardware could be used to coordinate ground and air activities, thereby enhancing the safety of friendly forces. By 2005, U.S. and allied forces in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq relied on more than 8,000 GPS-enabled FBCB2 units and another

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