Talk about deployment hell - puts things into perspective:

"to counteract the General Relativistic effect once on orbit, they slowed down the ticking frequency of the atomic clocks before they were launched"

The mind boggles.

It makes me uneasy that we only have this single system though (the effects of a GPS failure would be quite severe I guess). Do the people behind GPS collaborate with the Galileo folks?

Thanks a lot for the submit, now I need to find a good book on the history behind the GPS!