I like the idea behind LightSquared - establish a wholesale-only nationwide 4G LTE network, one that could be used to provide unique wireless services like television or what have you, as well as establish a competitive landscape for MVNOs (which are usually doomed to fail via contracts with AT&T and VZW).
No, I don’t believe the CEO set out to create a network that would intentionally disable GPS. Things like that aren’t good for publicity. However, now it appears that once they found out it did, they used their political influence to try to bury the story. That’s detestable and I hope we can get to the bottom of it.
Any competent Electrical Engineer could tell you this plan was doomed to fail. The physics of how radio receivers work show that a powerful transmitter nearby would swamp/cover-up a weak signal source like a satellite transmission. Any ham radio operator could have told you this too.
So one of several things must be true.
1) The CEO of LightSquared didn’t listen to his engineers
2) He hired in-competent engineers.
3) He is stupid - which begs the question - how did all these other supposedly bright people put him in charge?
The Bush administration had their own version of this called Broadband over Power Lines. That technology in it’s initial implementation would have jammed HF signals across the world - and made the short-wave bands unusable.
The administrations get caught up in their own agendas and ignore physics, and practical engineering constraints. Don’t bother them with facts.