[Boatanchors] NIST FY 2019 Budget Would Eliminate WWV and WWVH

[Rob Atkinson]

Humor has been had at the expense of the President's move to establish
a space defense command, but in this case, the humor is based on
ignorance.  Firstly, a "space defense" already exists, it's just
spread out over several organizations and should be unified.

GPS:  Most folks don't know this but Russia, China, Japan, the
European Union, and a few other countries such as India already have
their own GPS birds in orbit or are in the process of deploying them.
This is so as to not have to depend on the U.S., but also to have
their own assets in the event of an attack on U.S. and to get their
own sky space.  This is just one example of a strategic asset that has
to be protected.  There are many many others but most people go about
their daily lives unaware of them.  It's easy to make fun of this with
old shows like Space 1999 on everyone's minds, but space defense
command should have been done a long time ago.

Good point to mention WWV et al., as a backup for standard time at
least, in the event GPS is disabled.

Rob
K5UJ
On Sat, Aug 18, 2018 at 3:50 AM Robert Downs via Boatanchors
<boatanchors at mailman.qth.net> wrote:
>
> Unfortunately, in spite of unnamed individuals and domestic groups, we do
> have some anti-ballistic missile defenses.  But we do not have that I have
> heard even rumors of any anti-satellite killer defenses.  And even if we
> did, available response times for any satellite defenses are on average one
> half or less than the available response times against all but submarine
> launched ballistic missiles.  So if it ever came to a real shooting war, the
> first thing that we would lose would be GPS.
>