GPS is lofted and maintained by the DoD. It's primary purpose is military. It would not exist as a free service without DoD's investment. Other satellite constellations with far fewer sats cost considerable amounts of money to use, and few of our modern applications for GPS would be very appealing at $xxx a month. Civillian GPS is a generous charity from US taxpayers to the rest of the world
No, its primary purpose is civilian. Its original and occasional purpose is military, sure, but as I mentioned, it is used far more widely now, by several orders of magnitude. Its military applications are so eclipsed now by non-war-related uses that the military origins are practically irrelevant.
Civilian use is wide yes, but this is only because it is provided for free by DoD. None of those uses would be economically viable if they had to bear the costs of developing, launching and maintaining the system.
Keeping track of the boats and missiles pays the bills. Everything else is just a happy accident of zero marginal use cost.
It still economically viable for large governments to make their own for just civilian use, under the same logic that has government funding roads, parks and other public goods.
The GPS system cost ~$12 billion to make, and needs ~$750 million a year in maintenance (mainly launching new stats as they have a service life of 15 years). This means it costs each US taxpayer $5/year to run. Quite a few road/subway projects cost more than the GPS system.
It’s not provided for free by DoD. We pay for it with taxes. Civilians do indeed bear the cost in full. I am not sure I understand where you are going with this.
Doing war stuff with GPS does not generate any revenue. It costs American citizens the same amount of dollars regardless of whether it is used for war or not.
Every GPS device pays a couple of cents to use the system, regardless of country. Whilst this initially may have been peanuts, I’d be pretty sure that this is a self-paying system by now.
Sure there is a royalty on some of the key parts of receiver hardware and software, but if you think that even comes close to the cost of the whole system you are in for a rude awakening. Those royalties won't have even paid for the original GPS sats, let alone the newer stuff going up in modern times.
The cheapest Iridium phone service plan is $50/month for just 10 minutes of talk time. Would you pay $50/month for 10 minutes of GPS navigation a month?
