Multi-day GNSS Galileo outage -- Civilization survives

Fri Jul 19 05:30:49 UTC 2019

On Fri, 19 Jul 2019, Sean Donelan wrote:

> So much for the disaster scenarioes about a global clamity, planes falling 
> out the sky, the end of civil society because a global navigation satellite 
> system fails.  The European Galileo GNSS was down for days, and life went on.

It wasn't even in full production, and I am not aware of much equipment 
that solely relies on Galileo.

A lot of devices today can use multiple GNSS and this is great, as this 
incident shows that one of them can go offline. Relying on only one of 
them is risky.

This outage and its lack of ramifications doesn't imply that if GPS went 
offline there woulnd't be consequences. Galileo is just a few years old, 
and wasn't even in production. If GPS would go offline, you'd see a lot 
different fallout. Lots of things rely on GPS solely.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se