GPS is Ripe for Disruption
Space Startups Building Dual-Use, Next-Gen Position/Navigation/Timing Technology
Hello fellow space enthusiasts! 🚀
In May I shared my research on the history of GPS and how the technology works (link).
This week I am looking beyond GPS and examining the present and future of position/navigation/timing (PNT) technology, including dual-use space startups developing satellite constellations that can provide more accurate and more secure PNT than GPS.
There are five main reasons why I am excited about space-based, next-gen position/navigation/timing (PNT) technology:
GPS is vulnerable
Modern day society is overly dependent on GPS, and without it we’d be screwed
There is no GPS backup system; the US Government is now turning to the private sector for help after 16yrs of unsuccessful attempts to build a backup
GPS is not accurate enough or secure enough for future commercial applications like autonomous navigation
Space startups like Xairos, Xona Space Systems, and TrustPoint are focused on addressing #s 1-4
Note: if you haven’t done so already, I recommend you read my ‘GPS for Dummies’ post before continuing onward (here).
Okay now let’s go!
#1 - GPS IS VULNERABLE
The 31 GPS satellites in medium-Earth-orbit (MEO) are more >12k miles from Earth—their signals are relatively weak and can be overridden by more powerful land-based radio signals to either entirely block GPS signal reception (jamming) or discretely send false information to fool receivers into providing incorrect location readouts (spoofing). Jamming and spoofing can be used to hide activity, or disrupt and disable GPS systems, and it is increasingly common in warfare:
South Korea was subject to a major campaign of GPS jamming from North Korea in 2016, affecting ship and aircraft navigation. (CFRS.com)
Supposedly, in 2011 Iran used GPS spoofing to trick a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 drone to land on one of its airfields, where it was subsequently captured. (Hackaday.com)
A 2019 study found that Russia frequently spoofs GPS data to mask military activity in Syria, Crimea, and elsewhere. And according to current reports, Russia is actively spoofing GPS data during the war in Ukraine. (Nextnav.com, Hackaday.com)
However, it wouldn’t even take a malicious attack to disrupt GPS due to the sensitive nature of the satellites; for example, in January 2016 the US Air Force accidentally uploaded time data that was 13 millionths of a second incorrect to several GPS satellites—this resulted in a 12hr disruption to GPS receivers around the globe.
Despite this vulnerability, the US military has doubled-down on GPS technology with the promise that future satellites will be more robust and resistant to jamming and spoofing.
The Air Force and later the Space Force have awarded Lockheed Martin contracts to build up to 32 next-gen GPS satellites (five deployed to date, 17 of 32 possible ordered so far), for a maximum amount of $8.6B.
These next-gen satellites transmit a new signal (GPS-M) that is more powerful and less susceptible to jamming than past generations of the technology—however, the new signal is only available to the military and they haven’t even been able to take advantage of it because the they haven’t procured a meaningful amount of receivers that are compatible with the new signal.
#2 - MODERN DAY SOCIETY IS OVERLY RELIANT ON GPS, AND WITHOUT IT WE ARE SCREWED
GPS is one of the most widely used technologies in the United States in large part because it is relatively accurate and free to use—there are 900M GPS receivers in the US alone (vs population of ~330M), and more than just navigational services like Google Maps or Uber use it:
Cell-phone networks use GPS timing signals to manage data traffic
Financial markets use GPS timing signals to timestamp transactions
The electric grid uses GPS signals to manage energy distribution
Emergency services use GPS to locate and travel to critical situations
Agriculture uses GPS for maximizing yield via precision agriculture techniques
Airlines and maritime travel use GPS for both long-range travel as well as last-minute landing/docking maneuvers, and close-quarters navigation
GPS is used in a variety of entertainment and lifestyle apps, from dating services (Tinder) to augmented reality (Pokémon Go) to fitness (Fitbit)
The military’s command, control, communications, and information technology all utilize GPS as well
And many more uses
A world without GPS is nearly unimaginable.
Experts suggest that GPS has generated nearly $1.3T of economic benefit in the United States over the last decade, and in 2019 it was estimated that the loss of GPS signals would cost the US economy between $1B to $1.5B per day—in 2022 the costs would be even greater given increased usage of rideshare and delivery services (RTI International).
““GPS is still a single point of failure” for America. If GPS signals suddenly disappeared, transportation systems would immediately suffer. Everything would slow down, carry less capacity, and be more dangerous. Air travel would be less efficient and safe. Delivery services would be hamstrung. Uber and Lyft would be out of business. Other critical systems would follow over subsequent days. Cellphone towers and internet switches would lose synchronization. Banks could not timestamp transactions. Control systems for electrical grids, sewer and water systems, and many industrial applications would fail or revert to inefficient manual operations.”
Dana Goward, President of the Resilient Navigation & Timing Foundation, SpaceNews April 2022 (link)
#3 - THERE IS NO GPS BACKUP SYSTEM; THE US GOVERNMENT IS NOW TURNING TO THE PRIVATE SECTOR FOR HELP AFTER 16YRS OF UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPTS TO BUILD A BACKUP
GPS’ vulnerability and America’s overreliance on GPS are not new problems—the federal government has attempted multiple times over the last two decades to establish a complementary backup system—but progress to address the issue has been slow and ineffective:
In 2001, the Department of Transportation (DOT) released a report warning that GPS could become a “tempting target” for enemies of the U.S. The study was the first official acknowledgment that GPS was a national security vulnerability.
In 2004, President Bush mandated that the DOT work with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to establish an alternative and backup system for GPS.
From 2008 to 2020, the DHS and DOT announced, designed, and eventually abandoned plans to transform the World War II-era, land-based Loran-C (long-range navigation) navigation system into a system called eLoran (enhanced long-range navigation), which could serve as a modern-day backup and complementary PNT system for GPS.
Spoiler from 2022: A federal land-based eLoran system has still never implemented.
However, since 2020 there has been greater potential for collaboration between the federal government and the private sector in development of a GPS backup system:
In 2020, frustrated with past failures, the Trump Administration issued an executive order mandating specific steps for creating a backup GPS system—one of these steps required that in ~2022 and beyond, companies bidding on federal government contracts for PNT services will have to use new resilient PNT technology in addition to existing PNT technology “with the goal of encouraging the private sector to use additional PNT services and develop new robust and secure PNT services.”
In January 2021, the Trump Administration issued a policy memo focusing on the US’ dependence on GPS and the need to prepare for disruption in GPS signals, encouraging “the development of alternative approaches to PNT services and security that can incorporate new technologies and services as they are developed, such as quantum sensing, relative navigation and private or publicly owned and operated alternative PNT services.”
[Note from Case: following the initial release of this post, a few kind readers pointed out that the Space Development Agency’s planned Navigation Layer “will establish a GPS-independent navigation capability for the National Defense Space Architecture using optical communication terminals, and optical space to ground links” (link). While I didn’t identify this important detail in my initial research, my original point still stands—the government has yet to implement a GPS alternative PNT system, and is looking to partner with private industry to accomplish this important goal.]
#4 - GPS ISN’T ACCURATE ENOUGH OR SECURE ENOUGH FOR FUTURE COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS LIKE AUTONOMOUS NAVIGATION
GPS is awesome because its free-to-use signal provides accurate time within 3 billionths of a second and accurate navigation <10m; but future commercial use cases will require orders of magnitude more precision and significantly greater security against spoofing, jamming, and other malicious activity.
Take autonomous driving as an example of why GPS isn’t accurate enough for future use cases—Xona Space Systems (one of the startups I will discuss below) has actually presented a compelling argument regarding why, which I will draw upon here:
Xona CTO Dr. Tyler Reid (previously an autonomous driving researcher at Ford) believes autonomous driving will require decimeter-level accuracy in order to meet industry consensus expectations for safety and for consumers to safely adopt autonomous driving at mass scale—specifically this means 10cm accuracy 95% of the time and 30cm accuracy 99.999999999% of the time.
The gold standard of transportation safety more broadly is aviation, which only has ~one fatality per 10B miles traveled (note: this is 100x safer than automotive travel today).
Translating this level of safety to autonomous driving means minimizing a car’s location error to be less than 30cm from truth once every 1B miles driven—30cm is roughly the width of the painted lines on a road and 1B miles is 250x the entire US road network.
Meanwhile GPS is only accurate up to several meters, and even using enhancement techniques doesn’t improve signal accuracy enough for GPS to be heavily utilized in current autonomous driving systems, which instead focus on local sensors to detect immediate surroundings (ex. LIDAR, cameras, etc) and use GPS for general routing.
However, to reach the level of positioning accuracy described above, especially during adverse weather conditions, autonomous driving systems will require more contribution to location accuracy from global navigation satellite systems.
Additionally from a security standpoint, any autonomous vehicle that utilizes GPS for navigation would be susceptible to the same jamming and spoofing threats described above. A single spoofed autonomous car is potentially dangerous, but an entire fleet of spoofed autonomous cars could cause magnitudes more damage.
In my research, it seemed that autonomous driving enthusiasts and experts do not seem worried about the threat from GPS spoofing, though I did find a reports of a controversial 2019 study which successfully demonstrated that Tesla’s autonomous navigation systems could be spoofed to result in varying levels of dangerous situations (here).
While I won’t go into detail here, commercial use cases like augmented reality, smart cities, precision agriculture, and more, will all require simultaneous and mass scale PNT at levels of precision that GPS simply cannot deliver.
#5 - Space startups like Xairos, Xona Space Systems, and TrustPoint are focused on addressing #s 1-4
Enter Xairos, Xona, and TrustPoint. These space startups are all focused on addressing:
#1 - GPS Vulnerability
Enhanced security is at the heart of each company’s PNT technology being developed:
Xairos - the quantum properties of photons used in quantum communications enable communication that can’t be compromised without the message sender and/or the receiver knowing that a 3rd party attempted to intercept signals.
Xona - is developing PNT technology that has 100x better resistance to jamming and spoofing compared to GPS.
TrustPoint - still in development, but expects to provide anti-spoof and anti-jam capabilities, as well as quicker time to 1st fix vs GPS.
Additionally, these companies can achieve enhanced security in part because they are not burdened by legacy systems, but also because they plan to build LEO constellations which will inherently be able to transmit stronger signals less susceptible to hacking since they will be thousands of miles closer to the Earth than the GPS satellites are.
However, all of these systems are vulnerable to something like a solar flare up or a solar storm—this would potentially disable both GPS satellites and these next-gen satellites.
This is a fair point. Ground-based PNT systems would be a better backup in that circumstance, but would provide limited coverage since satellite systems are global and 70% of the Earth is water/not land.
#2 / #3 - GPS Overdependence + Lack of Backup System; US Gov Wants Help From Private Companies
Each of these companies emphasize that they are looking to provide a backup system for GPS.
They recognize that by doing so, they position themselves to be part of the solution for a major national security vulnerability for both civilian and defense infrastructure (#dual-use).
Company websites and management commentary acknowledge that initial customers are likely to be government-related.
However, given how slow the US government has been to implement a backup GPS system to date, one could question why these startups think this dynamic would change all of a sudden even if the solution is sitting right in front of them—we spend billions on the GPS system each year, but there has been very few budget dollars allocated to backup PNT systems since 2004.
Additionally, these startups could potentially end up in the same situation as the military and its GPS-M situation—a next-gen PNT signal is available, but there isn’t any compatible equipment able to receive it.
I would argue that the military most definitely will pay for a backup system to GPS. The question is which service(s) will they pay for, and how much of their budget will they allocate?
#4 - Future Commercial Applications Require More Accurate + More Secure PNT
Company websites and management commentary primarily focus on the commercial opportunity—this is in part to gain the attention of investors who want to see companies tackle large addressable markets, but also because use cases like autonomous navigation likely cannot be fully unlocked without the improvement in PNT accuracy promised by next-gen PNT startups.
Xairos - promises 1000x improvement in accuracy vs GPS given the ability to provide picosecond accurate timing vs GPS’ 3-4 nanosecond accurate timing (1 trillionth of a second vs 3-4 billionths of a second).
Xona - expects to provide more than 10x more accurate signals vs GPS due to ability to provide sub-nanosecond timing.
TrustPoint - still in development, but expects to provide better accuracy than GPS.
While you could argue that the outlook for commercial demand for these next-gen PNT services is the same as for any other segment of the space industry (i.e. commercial demand will be big in the future, but we don’t know when that will be or how we will get there), I would actually disagree.
Of all space technologies, PNT is probably the best known and most widely distributed space technology within the broader economy ($1.3T of value created via GPS over the last decade). I think there is potential that we see a quicker uptake of next-gen PNT services compared to other burgeoning space-based services because of familiarity with the base product.
The main impediment will be that these new PNT services are not free like GPS—does the improvement in service quality justify the increase in costs?
CONCLUSIONS
Private Investors:
I think it is clear that there are industry tailwinds behind next-gen PNT space startups: the government has been looking for a GPS backup solution for years, and there are future commercial use cases that may only work with the help of the technology they are developing.
However, go-to-market and user adoption are key questions I would want to dig into with management teams. What are conversations with potential customers like? Do they really see the benefit of paying for a PNT service, or is free GPS “good enough?” What is the government’s appetite for another space-based PNT service vs a ground-based service.
Company-specific thoughts:
Xona is clearly in a pole position given its material technology improvements vs GPS combined with its lead in constellation development compared to the other PNT space startups (which might give it a leg up vs the others in securing government contracts as a GPS backup).
Xairos’ technology still requires further validation that it can deliver as promised, but if it can then I would imagine it will almost certainly have some customers knocking on the door for its ultra-accurate and ultra-secure service. Education about its quantum communications technology will likely be a key factor in adoption (or maybe it won’t, and users will just be interested in the utility it provides).
TrustPoint is still in development, but has a strong management team that has executed in the past. Their decision to only burden customers with paying for receivers may help make the transition from GPS to their service smoother, since that is what customers are used to in the current PNT ecosystem.
Public Investors:
I would think large defense contractor corporate development teams are keeping an eye on Xona, Xairos, and TrustPoint—in particular, Lockheed Martin ($LMT) and L3Harris ($LHX) are probably watching them very closely.
Given that $LMT is already contracted for building up to 32 next-gen GPS satellites, I wouldn’t be surprised if they acquired one of these startups to incorporate their technology as hosted payloads on future GPS satellites.
$LHX supplies Lockheed Martin with the navigation payload for the GPS satellites, so it could be considering the same strategy.
PROLOGUE: PNT COMPANIES I WOULD WANT TO EXAMINE IN THE FUTURE
Starlink - What can’t this constellation do?! Multiple universities (UC Irvine, UT-Austin) have demonstrated the ability to use the Starlink constellation for near-global navigation and positioning. This adds another notch in Starlink’s belt as a dual-use technology, and is something I’d like to look into in the future.
Satelles - Founded in 2013, this company has payloads onboard 66 of Iridium’s LEO satellites. As a result, Satelles is able to offer PNT service advertised as a backup to GPS—it has even been recognized by the US government as an acceptable GPS backup. I am not sure I consider Satelles a startup, and I believe its service is only accurate up to a microsecond (less accurate than GPS) so I didn’t include it in my comparison above. However, this company is years ahead of Xairos, Xona, and TrustPoint in establishing a backup system for GPS and should be paid attention to for development in the PNT space.
Ground-based systems - The original US government solution for a GPS backup was going to be a ground-based system. I didn’t spend any time learning about them in this exercise, but it’s something I’ll maybe look into later to better understand the merits of ground-based vs space-based.