this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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Why is ESA launching satellites for the US military Global Positioning System?
They aren't, they're launching satellites for the Galileo satnav system.
The headline has been dumbed down for Americans who think all global sat nav is “GPS.”
That said, if you read the article, is does say that this is for Galileo, not GPS.
Alright but Global Positioning System is also a description of what all of them do, even if it's the name of a specific constellation it's not inaccurate to refer to the others as that. Even though it's not technically correct it's... actually I could argue that they're all technically systems used to give positioning information globally.
The generic term is not GPS, it's GNSS.
Maybe that would be an argument if they used lower-case global positioning system rather than specifically GPS.
Yawn.
Its a global positioning system, which has become a generic term (and has been since the late 90's). Just because you use the term "satnav" doesn't mean everyone does.
That term never caught on in the US, and was hardly used even 30 years ago (I say this as someone who adopted portable satnav as soon as it was available to consumers).
But it's not GPS. When referring to a generic system they use GNSS as abbreviation.
Said no one ever...