From Military Secret to Daily Essential

GPS began as a Cold War military project. The US launched the first GPS satellite in 1978. Civilian access was deliberately degraded by Selective Availability until President Clinton ordered that degradation turned off in 2000.

That change made civilian GPS far more accurate, but military and professional users can still gain advantages from encrypted signals, corrections, and specialized equipment.

Today GPS is so embedded that most people never think about it. Phones use it for navigation. Banks timestamp transactions with it. Power grids use it for synchronization. A GPS outage would cause cascading failures across modern infrastructure.