WHAT IS THE “GEODESY CRISIS”? “The future of precision missiles, as well as drones, driverless cars, super-precise synchronized clocks, and navigation of the Moon and Mars, depends on a specialized science called geodesy, a field Americans dominated a generation ago — but have almost entirely abandoned.” (Zilkoski D. B., 2022) In a few words, we are now at a place in the United States where we have such a small number of Geodesists that the number could be considered zero. At the same time, some of the European countries have many more Geodesists than the U.S. and China has more Geodesists than all the countries in the world combined. In a white paper released on Jan. 1, 2022, by 15 of the top Geodesists in America, they address this very issue. They titled the paper, “America’s Loss of Capacity and International Competitiveness in Geodesy.” This paper states: “The U.S. is on the verge of being permanently eclipsed in geodesy and in the downstream geospatial technologies. This threatens our national security and poses major risks to an economy that is strongly tied to the geospatial revolution, on Earth and, eventually, in space.” (Bevis, 2022) They conclude with this statement: “GPS ... really launched the geospatial revolution and what is now a vast geospatial economy. GPS drove an explosion of scientific and technological creativity that extended far beyond the original conception of ‘positioning, navigation and timing.’” (Bevis, 2022) This white paper goes on to explain more details about this crisis. Essentially stating that the U.S. Government, mostly the DOD, began significantly reducing funding for academic research and graduate training in geodesy in the early 1990s because the predominate thinking at the time was that there is “no need to fund geodesy research … because all important geodesy problems were solved” with the advent of GPS. This ignorant attitude, along with China’s increasing investment in academic research over the past three decades, has placed China at or near the top of geodesy knowledge, putting them at the cutting edge of all technologies flowing from this basic science. “The U.S. disinvestment process not only restricted basic research in pure and applied geodesy, thereby reducing the flow of the new ideas and knowledge that drive innovation in our geospatial technologies, it has done tremendous damage to academic programs in geodesy as well.” (Bevis, 2022) 57
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