The United States and China are engaged in a new competition in space and on Earth for a fundamental resource: time itself.
And the US is losing.
Global positioning satellites act as clocks in the sky, and their signals are fundamental to the global economy, essential for telecommunications, 911 services and financial transactions as well as for motorists and lost pedestrians.
But these services are becoming increasingly vulnerable as space rapidly becomes militarized and satellite signals on Earth are attacked.
But unlike China, the United States does not have a Plan B for civilians if their signals are destroyed in space or on land.
Risk may seem far-fetched, like science fiction. But just last month, the United States said Russia could deploy nuclear weapons in space, bringing renewed attention to satellite vulnerabilities. John E. Hyten, a retired Air Force general who also served as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, once called some satellites “big, fat, juicy targets.”
Concrete threats have increased in recent years.
Russia, China, India and the United States have tested anti-satellite missiles, and several major world powers are developing technology to jam signals in space. One of China's satellites is equipped with a robotic arm that could destroy or displace other satellites.
Other attacks have also occurred on Earth. Russian hackers targeted the ground infrastructure of Ukraine's satellite system and shut down the internet at the start of the war in Ukraine. Attacks such as jamming, which drowns out satellite signals, and spoofing, which transmits misleading data, are on the rise, altering flight routes and confusing pilots far from the battlefield.
If the world lost connectivity with these satellites, the economic loss would reach billions of dollars per day.
Despite recognizing the risks, the document says it will be years before the U.S. has a reliable alternative source of time and navigation for civilian use if the GPS signal is lost or interrupted. shown and stated by experts. The Department of Transport, which is leading private timing and navigation projects, disputed this but did not respond to subsequent questions.
A 2010 plan by the Obama administration that experts had hoped would create a satellite backup never materialized. Ten years later, President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order saying that interfering with or manipulating satellite signals poses a threat to national security. But he did not suggest alternatives or offer funding to protect infrastructure.
The Biden administration is soliciting bids from private companies, which it hopes will provide technical solutions. However, it may take years for these technologies to be widely adopted.
While the United States is lagging behind, China is moving forward, saying it will build the world's largest, most advanced and most accurate timekeeping system.
The company is building hundreds of timekeeping stations on land and laying 12,000 miles of fiber-optic cable underground, according to planning documents, state media and academic papers. This infrastructure can provide time and navigation services without relying on signals from China's BeiDou, which replaces GPS. There are also plans to launch more satellites as backup signal sources.
Researchers from China's aerospace science industry said, “We should seize this strategic opportunity and focus our efforts on building capabilities to cover all areas of underwater, ground, air, outer space, and deep space as soon as possible.'' ”. The Corporation, a state-owned conglomerate, said in an article last year:
China has maintained and upgraded a World War II-era system known as Loran that uses radio towers to transmit time signals over long distances. The enhanced version will provide a signal to the eastern and central parts of the country, extending from offshore to Taiwan and parts of Japan. Construction is underway to expand the system westward.
Russia also had a long-range Loran system, which is still in use today. South Korea has upgraded its systems to counter radio interference from North Korea.
However, the United States abolished the Laurent system in 2010, with President Barack Obama calling it “obsolete technology.” There were no plans to replace it.
In January, the government and private companies tested an enhanced version of Loran on a U.S. Coast Guard tower. But the companies have shown no interest in operating the system without government support, so the Coast Guard plans to dispose of all eight transmitting sites.
“China has done what we said we would do in the United States,” said Dana Goward, president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation in Virginia. “They are firmly on the path to independence from space.”
What is the US doing?
Since Trump's executive order, about a dozen companies have proposed options including launching new satellites, installing fiber-optic timing systems and restarting a souped-up version of Loran. However, very few products have been launched on the market.
The private company Satells, in collaboration with the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado, has developed an alternative time source using satellites already orbiting about 785 miles above Earth.
NIST scientists say this signal is 1,000 times stronger than that from GPS satellites, which orbit more than 12,000 miles above Earth. This makes it difficult to intercept or spoof. Low-Earth orbit satellites are also smaller and more dispersed, making them less vulnerable to attacks in space than GPS satellites.
Sateles CEO Michael O'Connor said the satellites get their time from observatories around the world, including the NIST facility in Colorado and an Italian research center outside Milan.
China has similar plans to upgrade its space-time system by 2035. It plans to launch satellites to augment the BeiDou system, with plans to launch nearly 13,000 satellites into low Earth orbit.
China claims the investment is motivated in part by concerns about a U.S. space attack. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences said the United States is “fully committed” to building space cyberwarfare capabilities, especially after the Ukraine war “deepened awareness of the importance of space cybersecurity.”
The United States has increased spending on space defense, but the Space Force, a branch of the military, did not respond to specific questions about the country's anti-satellite capabilities. The ministry said it was building a system to ensure national interests as “space becomes an increasingly crowded and contested domain.”
Apart from civilian use, the military is developing GPS backup options for its own use, including weapons such as precision-guided missiles. Most of the technology is classified, but one solution is a signal called the M-code, which the Space Force says is resistant to jamming and performs better in war than civilian GPS. . However, it has been plagued by repeated delays.
The military is also developing positioning, timing, and navigation services delivered by low-orbit satellites.
Other measures look to the past. The U.S. Naval Academy has resumed teaching sailors how to navigate by the stars.
What happens if the US doesn't find a solution?
Satellite systems such as America's GPS, China's Beidou, Europe's Galileo, and Russia's Glonass are important sources of time, and time is the basis of most navigation methods.
For example, in the American GPS system, each satellite carries an atomic clock and transmits radio signals containing information about its location and precise time. Once the cell phone receiver receives signals from the four satellites, it calculates its position based on the time it took for those signals to arrive.
Navigation systems in cars, ships, and aircraft all work the same way.
Other infrastructure also relies on satellites. Telecommunication companies use precise time to synchronize their networks. Power companies need time from satellites to monitor power grid conditions and quickly identify and investigate faults. Financial exchanges use this to track orders. Emergency services use this to locate people in trouble. Farmers use it to plant crops accurately.
A world without satellite signals is a nearly blind world. Ambulances are delayed on roads that are constantly congested. Mobile phone calls are interrupted. The ship may go missing. Power outages could last even longer. Food costs may increase. Travel becomes much more difficult.
But the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency says some critical civilian systems were designed with the false assumption that satellite signals would always be available.
That dependence can have dire consequences. A recent report from the UK estimates that if all satellite signals were to go down for a week, the country would lose nearly $9.7 billion to its economy. Previous reports put the damage to the U.S. economy at $1 billion per day, but that estimate was five years old.
“It's like oxygen. You don't know if you have oxygen until it's gone,” said Gen. Thad W. Allen, former commander of the U.S. Coast Guard and head of the National Advisory Council on Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing. says this. I said last year.
For now, we thwart large-scale attacks by mutually guaranteeing losses. Because satellite signals are transmitted over a narrow radio band, it is difficult for one country to jam another country's satellite signals without shutting down its own services.
According to Goward of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, offering GPS for free for 50 years “got everyone hooked.” He said the government was not doing enough to provide alternatives to the people.
“It's glorifying the problem, not solving it,” he says.