BeiDou regional service
China activates BeiDou-1's regional service. The technical justification is operational; the policy justification, repeated openly in Beijing, is that GPS is operated by an adversary that may switch the lights off.
A working catalogue entry, kept current. Each paragraph is drawn from the publicly documented record.
China's BeiDou-1 system reaches operational regional service in 2003-2004 with three geostationary satellites covering Chinese territory and adjacent waters. Beijing's published rationale is explicit: that GPS is operated by an adversary that may, in a contingency, switch the lights off.
BeiDou is the first sovereign challenger to GPS to actually fly hardware — and the political template for every subsequent national-GNSS conversation. The constellation will scale through BeiDou-2 (regional, completed 2012) and BeiDou-3 (global, completed 2020) into the world's third operational GNSS in less than two decades.
Each entry is publicly documented. Have a correction or a stronger source? Send it to the editorial team via the contact form.
