Without it, ATMs would stop spitting out cash, Wall Street could blunder billions of dollars' worth of stock trades and clueless drivers would get lost.
Most people may associate the Global Positioning System with the navigation devices that are becoming standard equipment in cars. But GPS has become a nerve center for the 21st century rivaling the Internet - enabling cargo companies to track shipments, guiding firefighters to hot spots and even helping people find lost dogs.
"It's a ubiquitous utility that everybody takes for granted now," said Bradford W. Parkinson.
He should know. Three decades ago, as a baby-faced Air Force colonel just out of the Vietnam War, Parkinson led the Pentagon team that developed GPS at a military base in El Segundo, Calif.
Now, scientists and engineers are developing an $8 billion GPS upgrade that will make the system more reliable, more widespread and much more accurate.
The new system is designed to pinpoint a location within an arm's length, compared with a margin of error of 20 feet or more today. With that kind of precision, a GPS-enabled mobile phone could guide you right to the front steps of Starbucks, rather than somewhere on the block.
"This new system has the potential to deliver capabilities we haven't seen yet," said Marco Caceres, senior space analyst for the aerospace research firm Teal Group. "It's hard to imagine what industry wouldn't be affected."
The 24 satellites that make up the GPS constellation will be replaced one by one. The overhaul will take a decade and is being overseen by engineers at Los Angeles Air Force Base in El Segundo.
"We know that the world relies on GPS," said Col. David B. Goldstein, the chief engineer for the upgrade.
San Diego found out firsthand in 2007, when the Navy accidentally jammed GPS signals in the area, knocking out cell-phone service and a hospital's emergency paging system for doctors.
The upgrade is designed in part to prevent such outages by increasing the number of signals beamed to Earth from satellites orbiting 12,000 miles up. By triangulating the signals from four satellites, GPS receivers -- and there are now more than a billion of them -- can pinpoint your exact location on the ground.
Besides GPS' obvious application, positioning, timekeeping for the financial industry has become a crucial use for the system. Transactions as varied as ATM withdrawals and Wall Street stock trades are time-stamped using precise atomic clocks ticking within the GPS satellites. The clocks are accurate to one-billionth of a second. On Wall Street, a fraction of a second could mean billions of dollars.
Several countries are developing their own satellites. The European Union, China and Russia are spending billions of dollars on their versions.
"GPS has truly become the lighthouse of the world," Parkinson said.
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