Sarah Laskow reports at The Atlantic about the aftereffects of the KAL 007 incident,
where the Soviet Union shot down a passenger plane on September 1,
1983.
All 269 passengers were killed, including a U.S. Congressman en
route from New York City to Seoul via Anchorage.
At first, the Soviet
Union wouldn't even admit its military had shot the plane down, but the
Reagan administration immediately started pushing to establish what had
happened and stymie the operations of the Soviet Aeroflot airline.
It is
widely believed that Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was already well off course
when the crew routinely radioed that it was over its proper ''way
point,'' or checkpoint, at a 90-degree angle to Shemya Island in the
West Aleutian chain.
Ultimately, the Boeing 747 jumbo jet cut across the
lower tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula and the southern tip of Sakhalin
Island, where it was shot down by a Soviet fighter.
This resulted in President Reagan making a notable choice. While this
choice was reported at the time, it was not the biggest news to come out
of this event: Reagan decided to speed up the timeline for civilian use of GPS.
The U.S. had already launched almost a dozen satellites into orbit
that could help locate its military craft, on land, in the air, or on
the sea. But the use of the system was restricted.
Now, Reagan said, as
soon as the next iteration of the GPS system was working, it would be
available for free.
It took more than $10 billion and over 10 years for
the second version of the U.S.'s GPS system to come fully online.
But in
1995, as promised, it was available to private companies for consumer
applications.
It didn't take long, though, for commercial providers of
GPS services to start complaining about the system's "selective availability" which reserved access to the best, most precise signals for the U.S. military.
In 2000, not that long before he left office, President Clinton got rid of selective availability and freed the world from ever depending on paper maps or confusing directions from relatives again.
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