China launches final satellite to complete rival to GPS
BEIJING: China on Tuesday launched the final satellite in its homegrown geolocation system, completing a network designed to rival American GPS as it jostles for market share in the lucrative sector.
Footage broadcast live on television showed a rocket blasting off with the satellite from a mountainous region of southwest China, which state media hailed as another milestone in the country’s space programme.
The Beidou system — named after the Chinese term for the Big Dipper constellation — works on a network of about 30 satellites and competes with the US’s Global Positioning System (GPS), Russia’s GLONASS and the European Union’s Galileo.
“I think the Beidou-3 system being operational is a big event,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the HarvardSmithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said.
“This is a big investment from China and makes China independent of US and European systems.”
The final satellite, the Beidou3GEO3, will help improve the network’s accuracy.
China started building the system in the early 1990s to help cars, fishing boats and military tankers navigate using mapping data from the country’s own satellites.
Now the service can be used on millions of mobile phones to find nearby restaurants, petrol stations or cinemas, and to guide taxis.
In 2012, Beidou’s coverage entered commercial use in the Asia-Pacific region, becoming available worldwide in 2018.
Around 120 countries, including Pakistan and Thailand, use the services for port traffic monitoring, guiding post-disaster rescue operations and other uses, according to Chinese state media.
Beijing is counting on its trillion-dollar Belt and Road global infrastructure project to convince other countries to use its technology as it attempts to grab market share from GPS.
China’s geolocation services market is expected to be worth 400 billion yuan (US$56.4 billion) in this year, a senior official told state media.
The global geolocation services market will be worth US$146.4 billion by 2025, according to San Francisco-based Grand View Research.