The United States and China are locked in a brand new race in space and on Earth for a fundamental resource: time itself.
And the United States is losing.
Global positioning satellites function clocks in the sky, and their signals have turn out to be the backbone of the global economy – as vital to telecommunications, 911 services and financial exchanges as they’re to drivers and lost pedestrians.
However, these services have gotten increasingly vulnerable as space becomes rapidly militarized and satellite signals on Earth are attacked.
However, unlike China, the United States doesn’t have a plan B for civilians in case these signals are destroyed in space or on land.
The threats could appear as distant as science fiction. But just last month, the United States said Russia could launch nuclear weapons into space, refocusing attention on the vulnerability of satellites. AND John E. HytenAir Force general who also served as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and is now retired once called some satellites “big, fat, juicy targets.”
Tangible threats have been growing for years.
Russia, China, India and the United States have tested anti-satellite missiles, and a number of other major world powers have developed technology to jam signals in space. One of China’s satellites has a robotic arm that may destroy or move other satellites.
There are other attacks happening on Earth. Russian hackers attacked the ground infrastructure of a satellite system in Ukraine, cutting off the Internet there at the starting of the war. Attacks resembling jamming, which jams satellite signals, and spoofing, which sends misleading data, have gotten more common, diverting flights and confusing pilots away from battlefields.
If the world lost connection to those satellites, economic losses would amount to billions of dollars a day.
Despite acknowledging the risks, the United States remains to be years away from having a reliable alternative source of time and navigation for civilian use in the event of missing or interrupted GPS signals, documents show and experts say. The Department of Transportation, which manages civilian timing and navigation projects, disputed this but didn’t reply to follow-up questions.
The Obama administration’s 2010 plan, which experts said would back up satellites, never got here to fruition. Ten years later, President Donald J. Trump issued an announcement executive order which concluded that interference or manipulation of satellite signals constitutes a threat to national security. However, he didn’t propose another or propose financing for infrastructure protection.
The Biden administration is asking for offers from private corporations, hoping they’ll offer technical solutions. However, widespread adoption of those technologies may take years.
Where the United States lags behind, China is moving ahead, erecting what it claims is the largest, most advanced and most precise timekeeping system in the world.
It is constructing a whole lot of measurement stations on land and laying 20,000 km of fiber-optic cables underground, in accordance with planning documents, state media and academic publications. This infrastructure can provide timing and navigation services without counting on signals from Beidou, China’s alternative to GPS. It also plans to launch more satellites as backup signal sources.
“We should seize this strategic opportunity and put all our efforts into building capabilities covering all domains – underwater, on the ground, in the air, in space and in outer space – as quickly as possible” – Scientists from China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation , state-owned conglomerate, – wrote in the newspaper last yr.
China has retained and modernized a World War II-era system often called Loran, which uses radio towers to transmit time signals over long distances. The improved version provides signals to the eastern and central parts of the country, extending offshore to Taiwan and parts of Japan. Work is underway to expand the system to the west.
Russia also has a long-range Loran system that is still in use. South Korea has upgraded its system to counter radio interference from North Korea.
However, the United States phased out its Loran system in 2010 President Barack Obama is asking it out “outdated technology”. There was no plan to exchange it.
In January, the government and personal corporations I tested the improved version of Loran on US Coast Guard towers. However, the corporations showed no interest in operating the system without government helpdue to this fact, the Coast Guard plans to do away with all eight transfer sites.
“The Chinese did what we in America said we would do,” said Dana Goward, president of the organization Robust basis for navigation and timing in Virginia. “They are definitely on the path to becoming space independent.”
What is the United States doing?
Since Trump’s executive order, greater than a dozen corporations have proposed various options, including launching recent satellites, establishing fiber-optic timing systems or restarting an improved version of Loran. However, few products have entered the market.
The private company Satelles, in cooperation with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado, has developed another time source using satellites that already orbit about 700 km above the Earth.
NIST scientists say the signals are a thousand times stronger than those from GPS satellites orbiting greater than 20,000 miles above Earth. This makes them harder to jam or spoof. And because satellites in low Earth orbit are smaller and more dispersed, they’re less vulnerable to space attacks than GPS satellites.
According to Satelles CEO Michael O’Connor, the satellites get their time from stations around the world, including a NIST facility in Colorado and an Italian research center near Milan.
China has similar plans to modernize its space-time system by 2035. It will launch satellites to strengthen the Beidou system, and the country plans to launch nearly 13,000 satellites into low Earth orbit.
China says its investments are partly motivated by concerns a few U.S. attack in space. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences said the United States is “making every effort” to construct its space cyberwarfare capabilities, especially after the war in Ukraine brought a “deeper appreciation of the critical nature of space cybersecurity.”
The United States has increased its spending on space defense, but the Space Force, a branch of the military, didn’t answer specific questions on the country’s anti-satellite capabilities. It said it was constructing systems to safeguard the nation’s interests as “space becomes an increasingly crowded and contested domain.”
In addition to civilian applications, the military is developing GPS backup options for its own use, including for weapons resembling precision-guided missiles. Much of the technology is classed, but one solution is a signal called M-code, which the Space Force says can be immune to interference and perform higher in war than civilian GPS. It’s plagued repeated delaysHowever.
The military can also be developing positioning, timing and navigation services that can be distributed via satellites in low Earth orbit.
Other remedies date back to the past. United States Naval Academy resumed teaching sailors who navigate by the stars.
What will occur if the US doesn’t find an answer?
Satellite systems – America’s GPS, China’s Beidou, Europe’s Galileo and Russia’s Glonass – are necessary sources of time, and time is the basis of most navigation methods.
For example, in the American GPS system, each satellite carries atomic clocks and transmits radio signals with details about its position and precise time. When a cellular phone receiver receives signals from the 4 satellites, it calculates its own location based on how long it took for these signals to reach.
Cars, ships and navigation systems on airplanes work the same way.
The remaining infrastructure can also be based on satellites. Telecommunications corporations use accurate time to synchronize their networks. Energy corporations need satellite time to watch grid conditions and quickly discover and investigate outages. Financial exchanges use it to trace orders. Emergency services use them to locate people in need. Farmers use it to exactly plant crops.
A world without satellite signals is an almost blind world. Ambulances can be delayed on permanently congested roads. Telephone calls will not be valid. Ships may wander off. Power outages may last more. Food may cost more. Getting around can be way more difficult.
However, some critical civilian systems were designed with the incorrect assumption that satellite signals would all the time be available– reports the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
This trust can have tragic consequences. Recent report from Great Britain showed that a week-long disruption to all satellite signals would cost the country’s economy nearly $9.7 billion. Some earlier report caused losses to the American economy of $1 billion per day, although these estimates are from five years ago.
“It’s like oxygen: you don’t know you have it until it’s gone” – Adm. Thad W. Allen, former Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard who heads the National Advisory Council on Space Positioning, Navigation and Timing, he said last yr.
For now, mutually assured losses are keeping major attacks at bay. Satellite signals are transmitted in a narrow radio band, making it difficult for one country to jam one other country’s satellite signals without disabling its own services.
According to Goward of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, using GPS without cost for 50 years has “got everyone hooked.” He said the government had not done enough to make alternatives available to the public.
“It’s just admiring the problem,” he said, “not solving the problem.”
