Many studies conducted by various government agencies and private organizations on the technology of precise measurement and positioning at sea have established that (1) the need for improved accuracy is great and rapidly increasing, and (2) the state of the art has been advanced to a point where a coordinated, well‐planned program aimed at meeting requirements would provide valuable, practical, and economic results. Now is the time to carefully assess the over‐all situation, both the identified needs and the estimated potentials, and to decide what the next steps should be for using available knowledge. An efficient program should be designed and initiated to meet at least present critical needs and to build a firm foundation for meeting future needs.
This paper is concerned with assessment of only the four systems that Battelle has examined in some detail, namely, Airborne LORAC, Doppler Satellite, C‐Band Radar, and Very‐Long‐Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), and the acoustic system that is required with all presently available systems. Also, the paper is concerned primarily with the geometric aspects of geodesy rather than, for example, with its physical aspects or with such special areas as satellite altimetry.