GPS (Navstar Global Positioning System)

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The United States military navigation system that became global civil infrastructure. The first Block I satellite launched on 22 February 1978; initial operational capability was declared in December 1993 and full operational capability on 27 April 1995, with a nominal constellation of 24 satellites in six medium-Earth-orbit planes. Civil use was deliberately degraded for two decades by Selective Availability, an intentional error injected into the civil signal, which the United States switched off on 1 May 2000 — improving typical civil accuracy roughly tenfold overnight and directly enabling consumer navigation, precision agriculture and vehicle telematics as commercial industries. The system is funded and operated by the US Space Force, its civil service is provided free worldwide by standing policy, and its most economically load-bearing output is not position but time: the atomic-clock timescale it broadcasts is the reference that synchronises telecommunications networks, power grids and financial timestamping. 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.