China is taking its rivalry with the U.S. to the heavens, spending at least $9 billion to build a celestial navigation system and cut its dependence on the American-owned GPS amid heightening tensions between the two countries.
Location data beamed from GPS satellites are used by smartphones, car navigation systems, the microchip in your dog's neck and guided missiles — and all those satellites are controlled by the U.S. Air Force. That makes the Chinese government uncomfortable, so it's developing an alternative that a U.S. security analyst calls one of the largest space programs the country has undertaken.
"They don't want to depend on the U.S.'s GPS," said Marshall Kaplan, a professor in the aerospace engineering department at the University of Maryland. "The Chinese don't want to be subject to something that we can shut off."