Friday, July 15, 2011
The satellites which keep global order
It takes an eight-man team and a further 5,000 civilian employees to keep these objects 12,500 miles above Earth on course, while they travel at 4.5 miles a second, and “on a bad day there isn’t even time to go to the bathroom”.
What are we talking about? The GPS satellites, run by 2d Space Operations Squadron in America, which stop planes colliding with one another, keep ships on course, save the world from chaos – oh, and keep your sat-nav on track.
We don’t give a second thought to the fantastically clever little box on our dashboard – which guides us through the UK roads only occasionally telling us that we’re actually ploughing through buildings or driving in the sea – but we should.
It’s almost a miracle that the system works at all, and some of us would be very lost without it.
Maybe from now on, instead of shouting at it when it goes wrong we should take a deep breath and wait until our hard working GPS take a moment to sort itself out, it’s the least it deserves.
Photo by Lee Jordan via Flickr, under Creative Commons Licence
Labels: driving test, GPS, roads, sat-nav, satellites, UK
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posted by Fuse @ 2:33 AM 
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