Galileo

node

The European Union's global navigation satellite system, and the first designed from the outset as a civil system under civil control rather than as a military asset with a civil by-product. Initial services were declared on 15 December 2016 and the constellation has been built out toward a nominal thirty satellites in three medium-Earth-orbit planes. Its distinguishing services are a High Accuracy Service delivered free through the signal itself, and an authentication capability intended to let a receiver detect a spoofed signal — a direct response to the recognition that free, unauthenticated navigation signals are trivially forgeable and that a great deal of infrastructure trusts them anyway. Galileo's economic argument was never that it would sell signals; it was that European industry and infrastructure should not depend on a system another government could degrade or switch off, which is a sovereignty case rather than a revenue case. Not a place.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.