‘Little Blue Dot’ Review: Maps and Satellites
The Global Positioning System, designed by the U.S. military, became a mundane part of civilian life. It has lately been
Earlier this year a French naval officer went for a 4-mile run and, like millions of other runners around the world, uploaded his progress to Strava, the fitness app that plots workouts on a map. His route showed loops suspended over open water in the eastern Mediterranean.
Using satellite images taken an hour later, journalists at the newspaper Le Monde soon identified the officer’s location, as well as the location of many of his fellow sailors. It turns out the seaman had been running laps on a warship in the Charles de Gaulle’s carrier group. The carrier’s position had been among France’s better-kept secrets. The embarrassment in Paris was considerable.
This story is, in miniature, the one Katherine Dunn tells in “Little Blue Dot”: How a system, originally designed for the U.S. military to know precisely where on Earth things are, escaped into civilian life, became invisible and has lately been called back to war. Ms. Dunn, a business reporter and editor based in London, is a gifted storyteller. Her introduction promises “a wild, weird and fantastical ride”—and she delivers.
For most of human history, knowing where you were was an educated guess. Sailors practiced dead reckoning: Start from a known point, multiply speed by elapsed time, and then hope for the best. Latitude could be read from the stars, but longitude required something that nailed down time more precisely.
The longstanding problem of calculating one’s location appears to have been solved by the Global Positioning System. In fact, GPS also overcomes the challenge through time: A receiver uses the travel times of signals from several satellites, whose positions are known, to calculate its own position. The map in your pocket rests on atomic clocks in the sky.
It all began with a Soviet provocation. In October 1957 Sputnik crossed the American firmament, beeping as it went. Two scientists at Johns Hopkins tuned in. From the rise and fall of the signal’s pitch as the satellite passed overhead, the scientists could reconstruct the entire orbit from a listening post. Then came the elegant inversion: If a point on Earth could locate a satellite in the sky, then a satellite in the sky could locate a point on Earth.
The Vietnam War provided the humiliation that converted that insight into a weapons program. For years the American military failed to destroy a single bridge at Thanh Hóa—not for lack of bombs, but for lack of precision. Bradford Parkinson, the Air Force colonel who became GPS’s chief architect, spelled out the remedy on a sign at the entrance to the GPS Program Office: The mission was “to drop five bombs in the same hole.”
Even so, GPS spent its first decade as an orphan: Few in the military understood the system or cared for it; the real fight among the service branches, Ms. Dunn writes, was “the battle not to get stuck with the bill.” The turning point came in 1983 when a Soviet fighter shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 after the passenger jet mistakenly flew into Soviet airspace. President Ronald Reagan promised the still-unfinished system to the world’s civilians.
Commerce did the rest. By 1985 Silicon Valley had shrunk the receiver to the size of a typewriter. One young firm, angling for publicity, lent a unit to the writer William F. Buckley Jr., who was a “fanatical amateur sailor.” Buckley carried the device across the Pacific and reported back in the New York Times Magazine: “Navigation used to be deadly serious stuff,” he reflected, but this device “will change everything.”
Courtesy of “the greatest gift that the American taxpayer has ever given the world,” as one navigation executive put it, GPS is, these days, invisible infrastructure. The same signal that tells a dating app which lonely hearts are within a mile of each other also runs the clocks that keep cellular networks and financial exchanges in step. Yet it remains, first and foremost, a military tool. In 1991, when the Pentagon repositioned its satellites over the Middle East for the Gulf War, GPS coverage over America shrank. Highway maintenance, railroad scheduling and earthquake detection were among the civilian activities affected. As Ms. Dunn writes, that episode was among the first occasions—but certainly won’t be the last—during which civilians discovered with shock what GPS “was actually for.”
Ms. Dunn’s underlying theme is that humans spent centuries groping in the dark for their position, built a system that ended that groping, and then forgot the dark was ever there. Her later chapters can read like a dossier proving a point already made. Yet her warning extends beyond navigation: Can time itself be weaponized? An attacker cannot alter its passage but could make clocks disagree. Modern life turns out to be, among other things, a vast congregation of machines taking one another’s word for what time it is.
How such an attack would cascade through civilian networks remains uncertain. But alternatives exist: Precise time can travel by fiber-optic cable and be kept by land-based atomic clocks. And paper maps—the last resort—still work.
The whole journey—from military technology to civilian infrastructure and now global vulnerability—is neatly mirrored in the military’s own training curriculum. In 2006 the U.S. Naval Academy, having deemed GPS dependable, stopped teaching midshipmen celestial navigation—the discipline of fixing a ship’s position based on timed sightings of the sun and the stars. In 2015, with jamming and cyberattacks no longer hypothetical, the Navy put the subject back on the syllabus.