2:00 P.M. EDT 
MR. SCRIMENTI: Ladies and gentlemen, this is the start of today's briefing. Again, cell phones, beepers, if you could turn them off, we do have a Power Point presentation, which Mr. Braibanti will kind of go -- refer to from time to time, and then of course, as usual, have our opportunity for questions.
Our guest speaker here tonight is Ralph Braibanti. He's from the State Department Space and Advanced Technology Staff, which handles a broad range of international issues involving outer space and he also currently heads the U.S. team engaged in negotiations between -- the European Commission on Satellite Navigation Systems.
So you guys have his biography, so I won't go on any further. And I -- Mr. Braibanti, I thank you very much for coming up to New York from Washington to do this briefing for us today. I'll turn it over to you.
MR. BRAIBANTI: Thank you very much and thank you to the Foreign Press Center for coming up with the idea of doing a briefing on what's certainly one of our busiest topics in our office at the State Department right now.
I have a presentation on the Global Positioning System, GPS, in general. I don't know exactly what your interests are, so I'm going to -- and they may be different from person to person so -- but I'll run through my slides fairly quickly and then why don't you, by asking questions, that will give me some indication as to what areas I should try to go into and in more depth.
GPS, for those of you who are not familiar with it, and some of you may know more about it than I do, but I'd better begin by giving you the basics anyway -- it's a U.S. funded and run system. It has 24 satellites orbiting the earth in orbital planes in medium-earth orbit, which means higher than the space shuttle, for instance, or the space station orbit, but well below what a geostationary orbit orbits at.
Each one of these satellites emits a very weak radio signal and the concept of using it for navigation or timing is that we know exactly where each satellite is at any instant in time because the engineers set it up that way. And then if you have a receiver on the ground, it receives -- if it receives signals from three satellites, it does some basic math to do triangulation about how long it takes for the signal to reach each satellite to your receiver, and it uses a mathematical algorithm to then compute exactly where you are on the earth's surface.
If you have three satellites in view, then you can tell where you are on the earth's surface. If you have four satellites in view, then you can also tell your altitude and therefore use the system for air navigation, for example. You can tell when you reach a point of 10 feet above a runway or something like that. If you have five or six satellites in view, it doesn't change the basic mathematics except that it gives you a more reliable signal because you compute the signals from the whole range of satellites and then you average them out, and so you get a more precise fix on where you are.
The signals are weak, which means -- and you have to have them in line-of-sight with your receiver -- which means that if you're in a situation to where you're standing between two skyscrapers, for example, you may only have one satellite in view and may not be able to get any fix at all. But the GPS industry is very innovative, both in the United States and in other countries, and so they're developing compensation technologies to adjust for all those kinds of things.
You can -- I mean, the simplest thing is you can put a beacon at a fixed point on the ground and use that as one of your signals, and you know where that location is, so you don't have to have as many satellites in view.
So that's how the system works. It's a dual-use system. Of course, it was designed by our military for military use but it became so -- but the signals are out there -- once they leave the satellite they're out there in the air and anyone can get them and so it was natural that a whole civilian application industry would develop on its own. And it did. And as a result, the civil, non-military side of things or probably, at least in terms of the industry, they probably generate more income and more uses by far than the military use.
We have a stable policy. Since 1983, we decided after a fairly intensive review that we would make the signals available free of charge with no direct user fees and wouldn't try and come up with any mechanism for it to charge people money to use them or anything like that, so our signals from our satellite are out there for anyone to use -- not just in the United States -- but anywhere in the world.
We also set up a management structure that's carry out-chaired by the Defense Department and the Transportation Department, so we have one military agency and one civilian agency, and thereby having, by co-managing the system they're supposed to balance the military and the civilian interests. That's our management structure, co-chaired by Defense Department and Transportation Department. Let's see what I've got here.
Okay, this just means that we are going to keep providing the signals for the foreseeable future because it's become so crucial to our own economy that it wouldn't make any sense to do anything else. It's even becoming more significant because one of the big users is going to be the aviation industry. The aviation industry already uses it, but it's going to gradually, over time, they'll phase out other bases of navigation and phase in GPS so that it will become not just a useful add-on for air navigation. It will become, eventually, the primary system for air navigation.
The resolution that you get -- and somewhere later on in our slide there's a -- some figures. We monitor the kind of resolution we're getting on a global basis and you can get a precise fix of between two and ten meter accuracy. If you use various of added technologies, you can bring the accuracy down to 50 centimeters or there are even advanced techniques that you use mostly for surveying and mapping, but also for some other things where you have to have very precise measurements where you can get your accuracy down to the centimeter level.
I think these are some of the more familiar applications. When I was waiting here I just was told of another application, and then the Time Magazine article gives another application that I'm a little bit familiar with, which is GPS gaming, where you go out and look for -- you have a coordinate that's given to you when you go look for a treasure that's at that location, or you have to follow a route going from one spot to another using your GPS receiver. But that's really kind of fun. But I think the big things, really, are things like -- well, from an economic point of view, the big-ticket item is car navigation. That's the biggest sector of the, the biggest income earner for the industry. And because Japan uses GPS in their cars more than anyone else, Japan is also the largest producer of GPS user equipment, with the U.S. second and Europe third.
Aviation is going to grow. The other sectors are all going to grow. There's a whole aspect of this, which is generally overlooked, which is the telecommunication and timing thing. You not only get a precise location from the system, but you get a precise time. So -- where you can get a better, more precise time if you're interested in that, than from almost any other source. So there's a whole field of timing specialists who use it like if you're using -- if you're a bank -- your computer may be set up so that you have to, your transactions have to line up in order according to time and you have a GPS incorporated into the system to do that for you because you have to break the time down into very small increments.
Our system of 24 satellites plus four backups is being modernized, but it's not the only system out there. Russia has its own system, which it uses primarily for military use. They'd like to have a -- it used for civilian uses also, but the civilian use today is relatively small.
DGPS and DGBAS refer to augmentation systems where if you put up two or three additional satellites, you can get even more precise location or a more reliable. SBAS is another augmentation system. All of these things, pseudolites, that's a -- all of these things are planned or actual technologies for improving the system.
Our modernized satellites are better than the ones today, which were designed 20 years ago or more. We have built the modernized, improved satellites already, but the ones that are up there have a longer lifespan than was originally intended, so the satellites -- the first new satellites are sitting, waiting for enough of the old ones to die to send up the new ones.
You won't be able to make much out of that, but that's the type of thing that we use to tell, depending on the various color or the cross-hatching, what kind of performance you're getting anywhere in the world. Because of the orbits of the satellites, there are a few kind-of pockets where reception is not as good as other places: right over the poles, for instance, it's more difficult to get as many satellites in view as closer to the equator. But nevertheless, the system is essentially global. You can get some service virtually anywhere in the world unless you're blocked by a mountain or a skyscraper.
The modernized systems that we're building will have additional signals available for the civilian user community so that you can get better reliability. Why would you need greater reliability? Well, there are things like, as the signals come through the atmosphere, if you're -- through the ionosphere they can get distorted a little bit, so your signals can be a little -- can become not as accurate as you would like. So if you have two or more signals from this satellite, you -- again, you can average out all of the signals and make sure that the majority of your signals are good ones and you can get better accuracy and more reliability.
The biggest thing my office is working on right now is we're negotiating an agreement with Europe on cooperation between our system and the system that the Europeans plan to build, which is called Galileo. It will be similar to ours with a constellation of 24 to 30 satellites in the same type of orbit, and we hope that we can cooperate. And we have an agreement, which we are negotiating on GPS-Galileo Cooperation. We hope that we can finish that up later this year, but there are some complicated issues, which I'll go into a little later.
So that's our biggest -- I'll go back to this one. The main thing that we at State Department and the U.S. Government, as a whole, is working internationally is our talks with the European Commission. And I'll tell you a little bit more on the details of that a little bit later.
We already have a cooperative arrangement with Japan where we have consultations a couple of times a year on various issues. And the consultations have become even more important because Japan has announced that they're going to build their own system of several satellites, which they call the QZSS.
It's an interesting system because the satellites -- well, the "QZ" stands for Quasi-Zenith, which is a kind of orbit where they'll have three satellites that follow a Figure 8, and they go over -- they're arranged so that if you are on the ground the satellites move in a Figure- 8 pattern so that at any point and time one of them is over Japan. So it's a real neat system for Japan. And what happens is, by combining the signals from this with GPS you get better performance.
The idea, though, for getting better performance is all the satellites in the constellation have to be interoperable. And what is -- interoperable is a very complex question. At the one extreme, the idea would be to have -- I have my hand-held receiver, say, in my hand, and that receiver can get satellite. It can get the signals from all the satellites that are up there, U.S., Russian, Japan, whatever; so then instead of getting, say, four GPS satellites and using those signals, you get four GPS plus four from Europe, plus a couple from Russia, and one from -- one or two from Japan. So you get a really good reliability and accuracy.
But, of course, that all depends on the frequencies that you use and the antennas that you use and the kind of equipment that you have in your receiver. If you're all using -- it turns out that if you're all using exactly the same frequency, depending on the power level, your signals can actually start interfering with each other. So it's a big -- a big part of our discussions from Europe are just purely technical. We have engineers who are experts in the system on both sides trying to figure out, okay, what signals should Europe use for Galileo so that they can maximize the benefits to users on the ground? And it's a very complex subject.
We are very interested in -- now since we know that the system is available and can be used around the world -- we're very interested in making sure that people around the world know enough about it so that they can take advantage of it, particularly for using the system for sustainable development type applications. And there is a lot of interest in this in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
In order to provide basic information, we've sponsored four regional workshops already, plus a follow-up session at the UN Committee on Outer Space in Vienna. And we're going into a next phase, now, where we're going to have some additional workshops for follow-up later on in the year.
We also have a thing that we call, up there, the CGSIC, which is something which the U.S. Coast Guard organizes for us, but it's basically a big GPS users' convention, which takes place two or three times a year where all the users are invited to come and get the latest on what the system is, how it can be used, and what their interests are.
If, for example, there's a place in Australia, where they say, "Well, we're really not getting very good reception, and we can't use it for a particular use that we would like to use it for," then they can use this opportunity to convey that to us, and we try and figure out a way of working with them to solve the problem. There's a lot of information on all of this at those websites if anyone is interested in it. You don't have to copy those down because that's in your briefing material.
Going back for a minute to our discussions with Europe on Galileo, the three kinds of issues that we are trying to sort of with the European Commission: technical, security and trade-related. I'll just give you an overview of what of those three categories is about.
The technical is what I said before, trying to help them, work with them to design their satellites in terms of the power, the frequency that they use for the signals, the orbits of their satellites, and so forth, so that the user on the ground can benefit by being able to use both systems as easily as possible.
Trade-related issues are -- relate to -- there is a, one crucial difference between the Europeans' planned Galileo system and our own. They want to have several services. They want to have a free service like ours, but they also want to have a system where they charge a fee. And they're doing a lot of work on figuring out how you would make that system work. They want to do this so that they can make the users contribute to sustaining the system.
They have a challenging situation ahead of them to figure out how to do this, however. But their basic concept is that they would like to somehow charge users and then provide them certain guarantees of a more reliable service or a more accurate service than the person who pays nothing yet. What we are discussing with them is that the idea of them looking into this raises, for us, a potential concern, which is that they could decide to mandate through government regulation that certain categories of users must use Galileo instead of GPS. And this would be, in some sense, discriminatory to the base of users who are out there that are already using GPS.
And our argument is: why should, you know, we want to have a regime in which the user gets to choose. If he really thinks it's worth his while to pay an extra -- a fee to use Galileo because he's getting better service, fine. But if he feels that he could get the same or adequate service by using Galileo for free, he should be able to make that choice rather than having some requirement that he must use Galileo. So that's one of the -- there's a whole category of trade-related issues like that that we're trying to sort through.
The security issues relate to the fact that our GPS is used not only by the United States military, but it's used by NATO forces, and the stories coming back from the Iraq War have mentioned a lot about how GPS is used for precision munitions, and so forth, and so on. It's one of the technologies that's revolutionizing warfare and defense, not only for us, but for many other countries.
Our concern is that Galileo be built in such a way that it not create problems for our military users, and that includes the idea of what we do in a crisis area. If we needed to, we have a military contingency, which we call Navigation Warfare, which means that in a crisis area or area of conflict, we want to deny adversaries access to any signals while we want our NATO military forces to have access to our military signal. And how you do that is through some kind of jamming. It's a localized jamming, where you go in and you jam all the signals so that no one can get anything except the people who happen to have access to our NATO-designed military receivers. And if Galileo chooses to use a -- well, if the technical design of their system makes that more difficult for NATO to do, then it's a problem for us. So that's a whole category of issues that we are discussing, as well.
We hope to reach agreement with them later on in the year, as I said before, which should help everyone because then we will have the prospect of by, say, 2010, when our modernized satellites are up there and the Galileo satellites are up there, of having a system that really goes well beyond what the current system is, and the current system will look kind of like a Model-T.
So let me leave it at that and open it up to questions. As I said before, I'm happy to go into any of these areas in greater detail depending on your interests.
QUESTION: (Inaudible) I wonder, there is a lot of talk about the possibility that Iraq can (inaudible).
MR. BRAIBANTI: The issue there is, some Russian private companies have been marketing in the trade media, a jammer, a GPS jammer. And we have -- the ads have been appearing in the trade press for several years and we've always been concerned about that. And we think that the Russian Government should impose export control so that that kind of equipment should be controlled and not exported because there are obvious consequences.
As it turned out, there were reports in the media that some of these systems had been sold to Iraq. I don't know the details, myself. I do know that if they were bought and used, they were of absolutely no consequence to the war and they did not turn out to be of any significant concern to our armed forces.
Yes.
QUESTION: I would be interested if the United States with the question, legal question of privacy protection. It is well known that, for example, (inaudible) have knowledge of the (inaudible) implanted a GPS recorder, then they penalize the persons who, for example, exceeded speed limit, or they are out of the range that a car goes, for instance, and penalized without his knowledge. And secondly, what for example, I would (inaudible) anybody a GPS recorder without knowing just to know all the locations that a person is mobile and so on. Are there, I mean, legal protection for protecting usage of frequencies of government (inaudible).
MR. BRAIBANTI: There's no legal protection specifically for Galileo. They're the same protection of privacy rights that would apply for any technology. I mean if I go to the District of Columbia, we have a big issue about using cameras for speeding tickets, for example. Well, that's a technology that people think -- that some people think violates their rights. Whether it does or not, you know, I would leave to the courts to decide. I would say GPS is just one of several technologies that raise at least potential issues that there could be abuses. But right now there are no protections that I am aware of, legislation or anything like that that would apply specifically to GPS. We'll see as the uses proliferate whether this becomes a problem or not. Right now, at least I haven't seen anything in the papers of any court cases where people have felt that their rights were being abused. But it's just like any new technology; the potential is out there for some people to be unhappy with some uses.
QUESTION: I've seen an article in Buyer's Magazine and it says that (inaudible) GPS-3 will be offering some kind of a subscription and now you are saying only Galileo was looking for some fee, so what is -- the story's wrong? The information's wrong? But I've heard, also, some rumors that GPS-3 that could replace the U.S. version could also become a subscription.
MR. BRAIBANTI: We have two phases of modernization for GPS. The first one, the satellites have already been designed. And for that, there is no plan; I can assure you, because I know for certain, there is no plans for any subscription or fee-based service.
There's a follow-on modernization phase, which we call GPS-3, and we are in the process of -- but I think the "R series" of satellites that you refer to are ones that are already designed, so I think I could say with certainty that for those, if there was such a story, that wouldn't appear to me to be accurate.
GPS-3 modernization is kind of -- we're in the process of designing -- and everything, you know, anything -- well, I don't want to say -- you know, how can I put it? There's more flexibility for figuring out what we're going to do to design the best possible satellite, but the only thing I can say is that there's no consideration for the -- even for the GPS-3 satellites to go to any kind of fee-based system. There's no consideration and I think within the U.S. Government there's no kind of current of thought that thinks that that's a good idea.
QUESTION: Europe (inaudible) cross (inaudible) between GPS and Galileo about, I mean, more in detail, like technical conflicts?
MR. BRAIBANTI: What are -- the technical conflicts are -- well, they relate to the design of the Galileo signals, which means the spectrum of frequency that those signals use and the power level of the signals, those are the two most important considerations. If the power level is too high, it can blast the GPS signals off the air or vice-versa, if our power levels are too high it can blast Galileo off the air. And if -- depending on the precise frequency that you choose for the Galileo signals, you either get good interoperability with our signals or relatively poor interoperability.
What's more important to us than interoperability is that they not interfere with our existing signals, and there are some places that they could choose to put their frequencies that would make our signals less easy to receive and could make, or could make our military program for denying access to the -- to adversaries of civil signals while, at the same time, maintaining access to our military signals more difficult.
It's already appeared in the paper, the so-called "M Code Overlay Issue." If you see that phrase, what that is, is there was a proposal by Europe to use for their -- for one of their services the exact same frequency that we used for our military frequency. And what that would mean would be that it would be difficult for us or for NATO to deny access to that signal without, at the same time, causing what we call "fratricide," or making it impossible to receive our own military signals by our forces in the field. So we have indicated that we're strongly against that, and that's been probably the hottest issue that we have been discussing over the past six months. But I'm confident that we'll find a resolution to that.
I should say just one other thing on this whole thing of so-called "jamming" and "navigation warfare" and so forth and so on, there have been stories appearing in the U.S. press and in the European press particularly, and also elsewhere, that mischaracterized what that is all about by implying that what we would do in the event of a conflict is scramble all the signals so that somehow our service around the world would be diminished and so that if there's a war going on in Iraq, maybe that means that GPS service in Asia or Africa or the United States is going to be somehow diminished. But that's not what the program is all about.
What we're talking about, if we ever did it, would be localized jamming -- where signals would be unreceivable for adversaries within a circumference of, say, 100 kilometers or 200 kilometers. And service in Europe or the United States or anywhere in the world would be -- except in the area of conflict -- would be unaffected.
QUESTION: But that rumor is now so strong that, like, sailors, like, transatlantic sailors (inaudible) they don't trust GPS to the point that they only use it as backup to the traditional navigation system. And that's still from that they recall that during the Gulf War the GPS was off by so many miles, usually in the South Pacific that (inaudible) island (inaudible) wrong. Can you actively account for these rumors?
MR. BRAIBANTI: There were rumors that during Kosovo war we diminished the service and during the Gulf War we diminished the service, but I can say, categorically, that that did not happen. As best we can determine, because we've looked into this to make sure that we didn't do anything or that our military didn't do anything, and in fact, the service, we are sure, maintained -- was maintained at the same level throughout those conflicts.
My guess is that what happens is there are always spots or times when the service gets bad. I mentioned the scenario if you're walking between two skyscrapers and, with your handheld receiver, and you've been getting a good signal out in the open fields, then you walk next to a big building and your service goes bad. Or, out in the middle of the ocean, there may be little pockets where you can 't get as many satellites in view as you had the previous -- 100 kilometers away. And so there are reports of poor service, and then people attribute those to different reasons, but those are just natural phenomena, natural weaknesses in the system.
And the whole point of our GPS modernization program is to address those weaknesses that we know are out there because as I said before, our system was designed many years ago, so we are living -- even though the technology is neat enough so that they write magazine articles about it, it's not up-to-date technology.
QUESTION: (Inaudible) did you or did you not lawfully present tactics for GPS information (inaudible) possible without your (inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: No. We have the capability of doing so but, to my knowledge, we've never actually used it.
QUESTION: What's your assessment on how much the war in Iraq and diplomatic communications (inaudible) without a GPS?
MR. BRAIBANTI: I would say not at all, not at all.
QUESTION: Can you tell us a little bit more about the top of the control system in Colorado Springs (inaudible)? What are they doing?
MR. BRAIBANTI: At Colorado Springs, I believe at Peterson Air Base, they have the so-called GPS Control Center where they essentially maintain the satellite constellation. They make sure that they're at the correct orbit; monitor the status of the signals. If one gets slightly out of orbital alignment, send instructions to the satellites to put them back on the proper course -- that type of thing. That's what they do in -- at Colorado Springs.
QUESTION: Once again, are they considering (inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: No, no.
QUESTION: Are they, is it (inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: Well, right now, we don't -- we're not having three-way discussions, but I think the Japanese system is relatively new and the -- so we have been having discussions with Japan. I mean, we already have an agreement with Japan where we have regular consultations, and so it's natural that we would have such a bilateral between us and Japan. And, of course, we have our bilateral discussions with Europe.
I think it's natural though that, as the Japan -- Japan's plans become mature and we have sorted out our own issues that we have with Europe and Galileo, that we'd probably join forces and have some mechanism for all sitting in the same room and talking about things together, but we are not there yet.
QUESTION: (Inaudible.)
MR. BRAIBANTI: Well, as should be obvious, because I work for State Department, I'm not an engineer or a technical expert on this, but my understanding is that there are finite limits on the number of satellites you can have up and emitting these kinds of signals before they start interfering with each other.
So what the limit is is something -- well, we haven't approached it yet, but once we have the full constellation of European satellites, if they go through with their plans for 24 to 30 -- and as I am sure we will maintain our constellation of 24 to 28 satellites -- once they're all up there, my sense is that you're getting fairly close to the limit. If you add -- my understanding is it probably doesn't work to have -- add another full constellation so that you are up to 70 -- up to 90 satellites, or something like that, because then the signals start interfering with each other and it becomes -- you start getting poorer performance each satellite that you add instead of better performance.
QUESTION: I have two questions. One of them is until a military signal (inaudible) American military to have more (inaudible) interrelation from there (inaudible)? That's one part. Another question is about (inaudible) dimensions being (inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: Okay. The first question is our satellites put out a military signal and a civil signal, and in some sense, they're very close to each other so that the new satellites, one of the things that we are trying to do in designing them is put them farther apart in the spectrum so that it will be more easily to -- more easily distinguishable from each other.
But the military signal, I would say, is not -- does not necessarily give you a better fix, in terms of you can tell where you are within, say, one meter instead of 10 meters, or something like that. But it's a somewhat more powerful, and therefore more accessible signal. It would be less susceptible to those problems I talked about -- about you're going through terrain and go between hills, and all of a sudden you lose some of the satellite signals.
So it's probably, I would say, it's more reliable, but it doesn't necessarily give you a better fix. And it depends on what your -- you have got to keep in mind, it depends on what your need is. If what your need is is the most accurate fix, down to the millimeter, then you rely on the technical augmentations.
QUESTION: Are you talking about the receiver side?
MR. BRAIBANTI: It can be on the receiver side, or can be on -- in the case of, for instance, for aviation where they have a particular need to know their altitude with considerable precision so that you can conduct landings using only GPS, which right now you probably wouldn't want to risk doing, we're putting up additional satellites so that -- and we'll put up satellites that cover the United States, Japan's putting up the satellite system that I mentioned that covers Japan; and Europe is putting up an augmentation satellite, apart from Galileo for Europe. So with those additional satellites in view, then you get better reliability and better accuracy. So that's one of the techniques.
Another technique is to have a signal on the ground near an airport giving you additional signal, and therefore, greater accuracy as you approach an airport. So there are all kinds of techniques like that.
QUESTION: Another question about Galileo (inaudible.)
MR. BRAIBANTI: Oh, well, we don't -- we don't know, and this is why it's a difficult issue to get a handle around because, in some sense, Galileo is still being designed, and some of the -- a lot of the decisions are still in flux.
Let me give you a kind of "worse case scenario" would be if a foreign airliner, or any airliner that was landing in European -- at a European airport, was forced by regulation to have a Galileo-specific receiver on board the aircraft -- and aircraft receivers are relatively expensive -- so that if you were an operating airline, you'd have to have an expensive piece of GPS equipment and an expensive piece of Galileo equipment and otherwise, you would have to avoid Europe.
Well, the airline industry is, obviously, very international, and that would be -- it just doesn't work. And I think all airline companies, not only American, have a kind of lingering concern that this should not happen. So that's an extreme example, and I don't think that will happen because I think the European policymakers are savvy enough to see that they'd be shooting themselves in the foot by doing that.
QUESTION: I have one other question. And if they're coming from bases, actually, some kind of agreement from countries about this kind of question, even with the bases appeared a question (inaudible) with Europe to Galileo some sort of binding, or are they supporting nothing so each time you have to decide on every state or we do that -- and not that way?
MR. BRAIBANTI: Well, right now there is nothing because in GPS -- not only the technology is new, but the issues are new for policymakers. So there are within, for instance, international organizations like ICAO regulates -- is an international organization regulates aviation internationally -- and they have been dealing with particular rules and regulations for aircraft navigation.
There is a -- the World Maritime Organization deals with ship navigation, and so they deal with certain aspects of it. But what we are trying to do now is have a written agreement between us and the European Union that would bind us to certain principles of cooperation and, say, certain things we will do, or certain things we won't do. And that's what we're in the process of negotiating -- have been for probably two years, and probably will be -- we hope to reach an agreement, as I said earlier, before the end of this year.
QUESTION: How many individuals do you think (inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: I didn't bring my Commerce Department slides on the amount of -- numbers of users and how much income is generating, and so forth, and so on -- but, certainly, millions. I couldn't be more specific than that.
QUESTION: (Inaudible) what you think the feature of car navigation (inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: Well, car navigation is an interesting field because, as I said, there are so many cars that once you get used to having a navigation system in every car then you're talking about millions and millions of units. So it generates a tremendous amount of income. So it's a very important field for the GPS equipment industry. And because Japan is the early adopter, if you go to Tokyo you'll find most the cars in downtown Tokyo have the equipment in them; whereas, in the United States it's rare that you see it.
So I think what's happening is for the United -- or for Japan that's a relatively mature industry, and the growth is going to come in other areas; whereas, for the United States, that's a tremendous growth area because sooner or later people are going to get used to having it, one could guess, in their cars and the manufacturers will start putting it in most cars and it will generate a lot of income in the United States.
Europe, I think, is somewhere -- is closer to our situation than to the Japanese. I think it's a big growth, potential growth area in Europe, as well.
QUESTION: Could you see any (inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: Well, the ideal situation for the user is you buy your car with that piece of equipment in it and it's automatically interoperable between GPS and Galileo, so your piece of equipment in your car is getting the signals from the Galileo satellites and from the GPS satellites and integrating them. So from the -- as long as you're not -- so that it's the combination that's so attractive and the reason, and driving us really toward cooperation. The opportunity is so great.
Now, you'd have to get a -- if I'm using a car that already has a system in it using GPS only, I suppose it would be optimal if that -- if that same piece of equipment could also receive the Galileo signals. That's not likely to happen. Most likely, you'd have to get a new piece of equipment that was designed to get the signals from both satellites. But Galileo is not going to be operational until 2008, '09 or '10, so the equipment manufacturers have plenty of time to figure out what the technical specifications are and design the new equipment and get it ready for the market by the time Galileo satellites are turned on.
QUESTION: If there are so many cars with GPS systems, what would be the advantage of developing a different system in Europe? Why not use a system (inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: Well, from our perspective, we've designed GPS so that it's good enough for the user by itself without additional systems, other than for the aviation community, as I said. For particular needs, you need certain kind of augmentation systems. So it really -- but there's no question that if the satellites are designed to be interoperable, the users will benefit from having Galileo, just from having more available, as well as GPS. I mean that's the reality. So the real question that you would have to ask is, you know, how much better service do you really need and how much better service does it really add? And that's a -- I guess it's an important question, but it's more for Europe to ask than for us because it's their system and their money that's paying for it.
QUESTION: (Inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: How? I'm sorry.
QUESTION: (Inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: Well, as I answered the other question as well, unfortunately, I have some slides that give all the market information and how much it's growing and so forth, but I didn't think to bring those with me. But it's growing at between 10 and 20 percent a year, which is fast, and it's in the hundreds of millions of dollars, but I don't have the precise figures.
And as I said before, as far as user equipment, right now Japan has the biggest share of -- has the biggest share of the market, the United States is second, and Europe is third.
QUESTION: Would it be possible, following the briefing (inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: Sure. I can send them to our center here and they can forward them. Be happy to.
QUESTION: (Inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: No, because the satellites are U.S. Government owned and we, as a matter of policy, decided years ago to make these signals available free of charge. Our thinking was twofold. I'm oversimplifying it, but basically we thought that if the signals are out there free, it will spawn innovation of equipment, it will develop the market and will generate economic growth that will benefit the U.S. economy as a whole. That was one of the thinking.
The other thinking was that since the signals are out there in the air and anyone who has a receiver can get them, it's going to be pretty hard to figure out a way of collecting these. So we thought that it really was not worth the trouble and the benefits of generating economic innovation and economic technology innovation and economic growth, outweighed any gains that you can get by charging for the signals.
QUESTION: (Inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: No, no. As I said before, we haven't -- you know, I sit in on all the policy deliberations on these types of things within the U.S. Government, and I can assure you that no one is proposing that or seriously thinking about that.
QUESTION: Can you follow up a little bit about (inaudible) and how much more to set up the system and how much (inaudible) replace the satellites and all?
MR. BRAIBANTI: It's more than $10 billion for our GPS system. It's difficult to calculate because you have to then -- you have to -- for example, the ground control station at Peterson Air Base, how do you -- how do you compute how much that costs to maintain in terms of the -- so there are various ways of looking at it. But I think a conservative estimate is, certainly it's cost us at least $10 billion.
QUESTION: (Inaudible) military proposition and the project people have the access (inaudible) of enacting that (inaudible), which was then eliminated about four years ago or three years ago?
MR. BRAIBANTI: Exactly. No, you have it exactly right. We started off, the GPS started as a military system. The civil applications came as an afterthought, but as I said, have grown so substantially so that now it's a really important element. Back in the days when it was seen more as a military system than a civil system, we had a policy of purposely degrading the civil signals. The military signals are encrypted so only a person who has the military receiver can get it; whereas, the civil signals are not encrypted so that anyone who has the technology can build a receiver and get the signals.
But in the old days, we purposely dithered with the civil signals a little bit to make sure that the accuracy was not too great, so the accuracy might be something like a hundred meters instead of ten meters. But we realized that eventually there wasn't any point in doing that. From a policy point of view, it wasn't serving any policy benefit to the U.S. Government and it was hurting the civil user community, so four years ago we stopped doing that. That was called selective availability.
There's also some reports that appear from time to time that say that, erroneously, that in the event of some future the conflict, the U.S. will turn back on this selective availability, but I can assure you, as well, that that -- in no one's plans would we do that. Really, at this point, it wouldn't serve any purpose.
QUESTION: (Inaudible) television (inaudible) radio (inaudible) government approved (inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: What we're interested in is a -- and I call these trade related issues because they get into the whole question of trade policies that affects anything, and we have plenty of trade issues with Europe and the rest of the world. But, I mean, basically we're looking in this area for a level playing field, or nondiscrimination. One of the European proposals -- and I don't want to get too deeply into them because they should -- it's not my place to describe what Europe's stands are, but I know they have told us one of the things that they're exploring is to charge a tax on the ships that are put into the Galileo equipment so that maybe, I don't know what it would be, a 10 percent, 5 percent, 1 percent tax on the sale of the equipment, and then that would go to a fund that helps sustain the cost of the Galileo system.
Well, that wouldn't have a problem for us unless somehow -- I mean, that's up to Europe to decide whether they want to do that or not, but where we would have a problem would be somehow if they maybe -- if they discriminated by making it more difficult for a U.S. manufacturer or more difficult for GPS equipment or GPS chips to be sold in Europe than for Galileo chips. So the kind of fee generation schemes they generate, they come up with, the way we judge them is do they create an uneven playing field for U.S. manufacturers or service providers, or not.
And, you know, I'm sure that at the end of the day, when they decide what they want to do and we talk it through, that we'll figure out some way that is mutually acceptable.
QUESTION: On the other hand (inaudible) between Europe and the U.S. (inaudible). Do you have to then (inaudible) recent problems (inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: Well, we are so -- what can I say? One can never separate out our issues and say, well, we're not part of the whole picture of the transatlantic alliance and U.S.-E.U. relations. But I would say our issues tend to be sufficiently technical and complex in their own right, so that I would say that the -- you know, and that the issues will be settled kind of on the merits of what we're discussing.
QUESTION: (Inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: I haven't -- it hadn't occurred to me. I haven't thought about that. So I'd rather not try and answer that.
QUESTION: How much do you spend to maintain the system every year?
MR. BRAIBANTI: Well, again, as with the trade figures, I can probably try to send you some material on our costs, as well. I told you before how much it costs. It costs hundreds of millions -- tens and hundreds millions of dollars to maintain and operate the system. It's a very complex operation. It also requires a lot of experience. We have been doing this for -- how many years, 30 years, roughly? And when we started doing it, we didn't know nearly as much as we know today, and every year we learn how complicated it is to maintain the system and keep it operational. And so, really, an extraordinary effort goes into it.
So, but as the cost, I mean, it's at least $100 million a year and maybe $400 million a year. I don't -- but it's in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. I'll try and get more precise figures.
QUESTION: And on (inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: And on?
QUESTION: (Inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: All the Defense Department. All the Defense Department.
QUESTION: (Inaudible) also (inaudible) technical (inaudible) Galileo (inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: If we can resolve the issues that we have that are under discussion, that would -- we would be happy to, you know, give them the benefit of whatever experience that we had. A logical way of doing that would be for U.S. contractors who are involved in building and maintaining GPS to play some role as subcontractors to the European prime contractors. So that's a logical relationship that may well develop, but we'll see.
QUESTION: (Inaudible) got Star Wars (inaudible) beyond (inaudible)?
MR. BRAIBANTI: That's beyond anyone's thinking. The whole idea of crippling any satellite is -- so that's kind of way out there, at this point and time.
A PARTICIPANT: Okay, thank you all.
MR. BRAIBANTI: Thank you all for coming.
MR. SCRIMENTI: This is the end of the briefing at the New York Foreign Press Center. Thank you very much.
