China Launches the Latest Satellite for GPS Rival. China successfully orbited the last satellite of its Beidou navigation network on Tuesday.
With that, the global coverage of the Chinese rival for the US GPS network has been reached, the Chinese government has announced.
The satellite was launched in Sichuan Province. The Beidou project costs $ 10 billion and has been under development since the 1990s.
The first satellites entered Earth orbit in 2000.
The first generation of the network covered only China. The second-generation extended that coverage to the Western Pacific region.
In 2015, the third generation of satellites, Beidou-3, began deployment for global coverage.
The last satellite to orbit Earth on Tuesday is the thirtieth for Beidou-3 and the 55th across all three generations.