Russia’s Hoping to Make Its GLONASS Positioning System a Competitor to GPS

The United States and Russia have an interesting relationship where space is concerned. After years of competition in the early space age, the two nations have fallen into a cooperative pattern, particularly with activities relating to the International Space Station. But there are limits to the nations’ cooperation as demonstrated by NASA’s recent ban on all cooperation with Russia in space (except where the ISS in concerned) over the conflict in Crimea. There are other space-based activities that promise to be affected by tense relations between nations, like the global network of positioning satellites.

The United States owns and operates the Global Positioning System, a service that provides users with positional, navigational, and timing (or simply PNT) information, an incredibly useful service for helping people with no sense of direction get from point A to B, among many other things. The GPS system is actually in three parts. First, there’s the space-based segment consisting of satellites in Earth orbit that transmit signals, a network maintained and controlled by the US Air Force. Then there is the control segment consisting of ground stations that monitor the satellites’ positions and orbits, also managed by the USAF. And finally there's the user segment, the device like your smartphone that receives the signals transmitted from the satellites and turns that data into positional information displayed to the user.

The American GPS system is not the only one of its kind out there. Russia has its own equivalent system, the Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS). Like GPS, it uses a series of satellites monitored by ground stations to continuously transmit signals to user devices across the planet. GLONASS is managed by the Russian Space Forces, and the system as a whole is operated by the Coordination Scientific Information Center of Russia’s Ministry of Defense.

At the moment, GPS is ahead of GLONASS in accuracy; GPS is accurate to within 6 feet and GLONASS is accurate to within about 10 feet. Part of the reason is because GPS has more control stations. The American system has ground stations throughout the world while the Russian system only has foreign ground stations in Antarctica and Brazil.

But now, Russia is trying to make GLONASS a stronger competitor to GPS, upping the number of ground stations and pushing for its adoption in more countries. It has been Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal to increase GLONASS’ standing as an alternative to GPS since he stepped into office in 2000. The effort really took roots in 2011, allowing Russia to decrease its dependency on America’s network.

Last week, Russia announced its intention to integrate GLONASS with Belarus and Kazakhstan, strengthening the navigation network as well as the nation’s space, security, and military cooperation with two close allies from the former Soviet Union. Russia is also planning to increase its ground network with the addition of 50 stations in 35 countries. So far, Russia is pushing GLONASS as an alternative to GPS in South Africa, China, India, and Brazil, four major emerging global economies. Russia hopes to eventually set up control sites in Vietnam, Spain, Indonesia, and Cuba in an effort to develop a more reliable network. The United States and Europe, clearly, are excluded from the GLONASS system.

Whether or not these countries will take Russia up on its offer to join the GLONASS network is unclear for the moment. Certainly there are reasons why these nations might want to not become dependent on a Russian system. China in particular has been wary of joining GLONASS, choosing instead to develop its own GPS-style system called Beidou.

Like so many great space-based innovations, GPS and GLONASS are products of the Cold War. The two equivalent systems that came about to help two separate militaries during a prolonged international conflict are now competitors in a global market. And the increasingly tense relationship between Russia and the United States in the wake of the Crimean crisis, there’s more reason for Russia to get GLONASS up and running on a truly global scale.

But GLONASS isn’t quite there yet. Modernization of the system is slowly getting underway, but it’s still not reliable enough for widespread civilian use. Launch failures, technical problems, and political corruption are also issues affecting the system’s modernization. The gap between GPS and GLONASS will eventually shrink, though what major technical developments might emerge in the meantime could upset the balance even more.