When Selective Availability was switched off in May of 2000, it happened without ceremony. No press conference, no fanfare—just a quiet instruction carried out in code.
Yet, that single act marked the first true threshold between a military capability and a civil infrastructure. Accuracy was no longer permissioned; it was assumed. The sky did not look different, but the relationship between users and the signal had changed irrevocably— accuracy is indeed addictive. Navigation ceased to be a controlled asset and began its evolution into a global public good.
Engineers understood the magnitude of that shift before policymakers articulated it. Once precision became openly accessible, innovation would inevitably proliferate, and once innovation proliferated, dependence would follow. After that point, GNSS would cease to be optional.
Almost concurrently, Europe’s sovereign decision to build Galileo confirmed the future of satellite navigation would not be singular. It would be plural, multi-sovereign, and globally stewarded. Galileo did not merely add capacity; it introduced a second philosophy of ownership and civil governance. It signaled navigation was now too important to rest on a single system or a single state.
Inside the GNSS technical community, this transition gave rise not only to new engineering demands, but to a new interpretive need. Our journalists took a new approach to covering GNSS—one that went beyond simply reporting ongoing signals or standard applications, instead providing thorough analysis of the evolving underlying architecture.
One of the earliest stewards of that interpretive role was founding Inside GNSS editor Glen Gibbons, who helped frame GNSS as a global system rather than a single-constellation service, and, as Galileo matured, Brussels-based European editor and correspondent Peter Gutierrez, who carried that vantage from within the European regulatory and political context shaping civil navigation sovereignty.
Becoming GNSS Dependent
As multi-constellation navigation matured, GNSS increasingly became not an enhancement, but the underlying fabric of modern coordination. Supply chains, aviation routing, agriculture, timing synchronization, financial networks, construction automation, and critical infrastructure baselines shifted from “GNSS-compatible” to GNSS-dependent.
As the system landscape evolved—beginning with GLONASS’s parallel presence, later with Galileo’s civil governance, and finally with BeiDou’s rapid global deployment—resilience became a function of the ecosystem rather than an attribute of any one constellation. Diversity became continuity.
But dependency also brought exposure. Once GNSS served as infrastructure, interruptions had downstream consequences. Interference, once treated as a fringe condition, became a recurring engineering constraint at ports, borders and dense urban complexity zones. Spoofing moved from theoretical edge-case to recurring operational hazard. Adjacent-band stress became persistent.
Entering the Resilience Era
This is why the discipline shifted into the resilience era. The question was no longer whether GNSS would be used, but whether it would endure through contested conditions. Availability gave the world reach. Assurance will determine whether that reach can be relied upon.
The Protect–Toughen–Augment framework emerged as the structural response to this new reality: Protect the signal in the spectrum domain; Toughen receivers and front-end design so they withstand degradation; Augment navigation with complementary layers so the system remains viable even when stressed.
GNSS has always been built across the space, control and user segments, but in the resilience era the user segment carries new architectural responsibility. Continuity is no longer delivered by satellites alone; it is upheld in how systems are integrated and defended on the ground.
This shift carries a civic dimension. The constellations are sovereign, but the dependence is societal. The technical community now co-owns the responsibility for continuity.
GNSS has entered a stage in which success is not defined by signal availability, but by assuredness. The markers of progress are recoverability, integrity, fault tolerance, and trust-in-use.
Ensuring GNSS Endures
International GNSS Day therefore marks something different today than it would have 20 years ago. It is not a celebration of access. That era is complete. It is a recognition of custodianship—of the shared obligation to keep a backbone technology reliable under scarcity, interference, spoofing and geopolitical stress. GNSS no longer asks the world to adopt it; the world now requires GNSS to endure.
That is why this day, this moment in time, belongs not to any single constellation, operator, or state, but to the global technical community that integrates, protects, audits, defends, and continuously improves the infrastructure.
Inside GNSS+ exists for precisely the same reasons. The publication’s role is to maintain the reference platform where the engineering, policy, spectrum, regulatory, and infrastructure communities come together to sustain the system.
Today, that stewardship is carried forward by current Inside GNSS+ Editor Renee Knight and by Digital Editor and Cross-Platform Editor Richard Thomas, whose work ensures the GNSS community is not merely informed, but connected—across domains, across sovereign systems, and across technical layers.
The stewardship of this infrastructure is not held by any one agency or nation, but by the technical community itself—and Inside GNSS+ stands within that community, helping sustain the shared work of keeping GNSS resilient, interoperable and trusted.
