World War II-era navigation system shutting down

[razark]

Originally Posted by krashkart

Betcha there would still be enough people around who know the ancient ways. Does the Air Force still shoot the stars from time to time? I remember my grandad telling me about how he did that when he was in.

Yeah, and some of us use slide rules instead of calculators. I decided that even though there was a more modern tool, I like the feel of using an older one. They were good enough to get us to the moon and back.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_navigation:

The U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy continued instructing military aviators on its use until 1997, because:

* it can be used independently of ground aids
* has global coverage
* cannot be jammed (although it can be obscured by clouds)
* does not give off any signals that could be detected by an enemy

The US Naval Academy announced that it was discontinuing its course on celestial navigation, considered to be one of its most demanding courses, from the formal curriculum in the spring of 1998 stating that a sextant is accurate to a three-mile (5 km) radius, while a satellite-linked computer can pinpoint a ship within 60 feet (18 m). Presently, midshipmen continue to learn to use the sextant, but instead of performing a tedious 22-step mathematical calculation to plot a ship's course, midshipmen feed the raw data into a computer.

Of course, the Apollo missions used star trackers and sextants to help guide them to the moon as well.