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Comment by justeleblanc | Hacker News Reader

Any examples you'd care to elaborate about?

Galileo might be a good example to discuss in this context.

Are you talking about the satellite navigation system that's been usable and widely used for about a decade? The one that gives location data ten times more precise than GPS (1m vs 10m)? That's a "failed copy costing billions to Europeans"? Really?

Galileo was down for 5 days in a row in 2019. I won't go in to the details of other issues of, for that Bert Hubert's blog is a good start.

Now that's an indictment! One major outage in nearly a decade. Better write off the whole programme as a waste of money.

Meanwhile the whole US government gets shut down seemingly every other year.

Are we still on the satellite communications subject?

Yes, we are. Why?

Because GPS has never been shut down, to my knowledge.

Can you be more specific on how exactly this one-dimensional evaluation of a resolved issue contributes to your argument?

Because who wants to rely on a navigation system which occasionally goes down for nearly a week?

Clearly you have no idea how these kinds of issues are resolved, and how policies are reviewed and modified, following such an occurrence. An abhorrently depressing view on humanity's future that you believe there is nothing that we learned from this. I thought this discussion forum was about our progress toward the future by the virtue of the hacker spirit?

Are you sure you're writing from an informed perspective? Galileo holds a LOT of expensive, time-consuming lessons that this project will do well to absorb. Outages are only scratching the surface.

You'll note that I didn't say "Galileo sucks," or "those guys are morons," or that there was no reason to build it. But the fact that it took longer to commission than the original NAVSTAR GPS system doesn't augur well for a Starlink clone. Which, in any event, will probably be so highly regulated and censored that it will be more like an orbital Minitel than a conventional ISP.

Has GPS ever experienced a major outage in its ~30 years of operation?

Not that I know of. What's your point?

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