For decades, the United States has been a leader in
satellite navigation technology. The US Global
Positioning System, or GPS as most of us know it, was
initially designed as a military tool and is used
for things like missile guidance and drone
operation. But the technology has also become
indispensable to the lives of civilians, with use cases
going far beyond point-to-point navigation.
GPS is the only constellation that's used
for aviation for international flights.
There's 6 billion users around the world that use
GPS. GPS is used in all facets of daily life to
include telecommunications, to include financial
transactions, agriculture, as well as even ridesharing
services and newer capabilities as they come on
board.
Over the course of the past decade plus, we've seen
trillions of dollars of economic activity coming
from.
A 2019 study estimated that loss of GPS service would
constitute a $1 billion-per-day impact on
the US.
If we had an attack on the system, it could really
bring so many areas of our logistics and our supply
chain, even farming and our transportation system, our
airplane system to a grinding halt.
But the US is not the only superpower to have developed
satellite navigation technology. In 2020, China
launched the last satellite needed to complete its own
global navigation system, Beidou, which translates to
'Big Dipper.' And experts say it's challenging US GPS
in more ways than one.
Over the last 20 years, they have moved from putting
satellites over China to putting satellites in the
region to providing global coverage as of 2020.
That is a very rapid advancement.
It's not just seen as a military tool.
It is seen as a tool of diplomacy. One analyst has
called Beidou Beijing's Declaration of Independence
from the West, and I think that sums it up beautifully.
What we're seeing here is very much a statement that
China are looking to to reinforce this belief that
they've got serious infrastructure to underpin
their military ambitions, to underpin their defense
ambitions, and also to reassure their allies that
they've got the capability to deal with any threat that
comes their way.
The United States started launching its own navigation
satellite systems in 1978.
And today we have four different major global
systems. That's the Russian system, GLONASS, it's the
European Galileo and it's China's Beidou.
And China's Beidou is the newest entrant among this
constellation of satellite navigation systems.
But the United States' GPS system was the first and it
has been the satellite system of choice for some
time.
Orbiting the Earth at an altitude of about 12,550
miles. Today's GPS constellation is made up of
31 satellites.
The satellites work in tandem with a network of
ground stations and antennas that are used to
monitor, control and send data to the constellation.
Finally, devices equipped with GPS receivers track the
radio signals emitted by each satellite to determine
the exact location of the user based on how long it
takes for those signals to arrive. The more satellites
the device can see, the more accurate the location.
GPS is owned by the US government and run by the
Space Force, an independent military branch that's
organized under the Air Force. Historically, the
world of satellite navigation technology has
been collaborative, with each country or group of
countries. In the case of Galileo, offering use of
their respective systems to the international community
for free. In a civilian capacity, this means that
individuals and companies can take advantage of
multiple constellations for better accuracy and
coverage. But which navigation system a user has
access to depends largely on the equipment
manufacturer.
Your civil phone is able to bring in the GPS
constellation. They're able to bring in other navigation
satellite systems like Galileo, like Beidou, and
they choose to, the phone, is doing the selection as to
what satellite it's using.
You as a user are agnostic to it.
You just care that it's getting you from point A to
point B.
Many of the latest phones from manufacturers including
Apple, Samsung and Huawei, support all of the global
navigation systems.
What system a person uses depends on what satellites
are in their range at the time, with the phone
automatically connecting to the best signal.
Still, China has understood the importance of having its
own global navigation system for years, says Sarah
Sewell, who served as the undersecretary of state for
civil security, democracy and human rights before
becoming an executive at venture firm In-Q-Tel.
The Chinese have said that when they lost the ability
to track missiles that they had launched in one of the
altercations during the Taiwan Straits crisis, they
decided that that was a real wake up call and that
they needed to have their own system in order to be
able to ensure continued coverage, the degree of
accuracy that they wanted, and to not be relying on
another nation for something that was so vital
for their military operations.
The first Beidou satellites were launched in 2000 and
served only mainland China.
Now China's Beidou constellation is made up of
45 operational satellites, with 30 of those being the
latest generation BDS 3 satellites.
Like GPS, Beidou's satellites work in tandem
with a network of about 120 ground stations located
around the world. According to Chinese state media, the
Beidou system served over 1.1 billion users in 2022.
One reason for this wide-scale adoption, experts
say, is that China has invested aggressively in
subsidizing ground infrastructure and supplying
services to countries that are not well served by GPS.
There are parts of the developing world,
particularly Africa and parts of Asia, sometimes
South America, where not only are the American
systems not visible because the US constellation is
smaller than the Beidou system, but the ground
stations that amplify and increase the accuracy of the
signal are not existent for GPS, but may exist and
increasingly exist for Beidou.
Beidou's rapid growth could have some serious
implications for the US.
For one, now that China is no longer reliant on GPS,
some experts worry that China may be emboldened to
target it.
Our GPS system today is very vulnerable, so it would be,
unfortunately, all too easy to disrupt the services of
the GPS, spoof the GPS system and really make it
quite difficult and dangerous even for use on
the ground.
One feature in Beidou's latest satellites that's
missing in the US GPS fleet is known as two way
messaging.
GPS beams out, to put it really simply.
And two way messaging means that you beam back and when
you beam back, your location is revealed.
Currently, this feature is mainly available in China
and allows users to send short text messages in areas
without ground network cell coverage.
The Chinese government has touted use of the technology
as a tool for search and rescue missions.
But as Beidou matures, experts worry about the
system being used in a much more pervasive way.
The bigger fear right now is really that you will see a
movement into this Beidou system.
So you will see a movement of people who suddenly have
apps on their phone using this system and that
suddenly just becomes a tracking device and an
information device and a surveillance device for the
Chinese. And that's that's something that I think is as
dangerous or more dangerous than any sorts of attacks on
our own system.
If you want to start using the two way messaging for
other kinds of applications and for example, in the
self-driving car scenario, you're talking about
transmitting more data, you're talking about being
able to provide that service and therefore track
those locations at a far greater scale than is even
imaginable today. And that begins to look a lot like a
surveillance capability with privacy concerns.
Sewall says that for now, conducting this type of
large scale surveillance is unlikely, as the Beidou
system is currently limited by the amount of data
transmissions it can handle. Use of Beidou's two
way messaging feature also requires special chips that
are currently not widely available in the consumer
market, though some electronics makers are
beginning to adopt them.
Last year, Apple also introduced an emergency SOS
text feature in its phones using satellites from
US-based satellite operator Globalstar.
Experts say China's expansion of Beidou goes far
beyond military might.
Like GPS did for the US, Beidou is spurring massive
economic development in China to the tune of $156
billion by 2025.
Beidou is also helping China secure global
influence.
China has tied the export of many of its other forms of
infrastructure to the kinds of positioning, navigation
and timing data that it provides from Beidou.
And it integrates that with China's 5G offerings and it
subsidizes that through its Belt and Road and Digital
Silk Road initiatives.
Still, some experts stress China's claims about Beidou
should be taken with a grain of salt.
I think it's really difficult to get an accurate
picture of how many countries and how many
companies are using Beidou.
I think the figures that are officially released have
to be treated with a degree of caution.
One thing that is for certain with the amount of
satellites that are up there and with the capacity
that Beidou now brings, its use is going to be only
getting more and more widespread amongst a large
portion of people on the planet.
As the oldest global positioning system.
It stands to reason that GPS is in need of an update,
and the government has been working to modernize it.
But technical issues in both the satellites and
ground infrastructure have caused delays.
Out of the 31 satellites that make up the GPS
constellation today, so far, only six are the newest
generation known as GPS III.
The problem that we're facing right now is less, I
think, about a huge technological advantage in
China. It's just a technological advantage in
satellite orbit. We haven't got these systems up in
orbit yet. And China has.
In 2008, Lockheed Martin beat out competitor Boeing,
which manufactured many of the older GPS satellites, to
build the first generation of GPS III satellites in a
contract worth up to $3.6 billion.
The company completed that contract earlier this year,
delivering the 10th and last satellite in February.
Lockheed is now working on manufacturing 22 GPS IIIF
satellites, which will feature even more advanced
capabilities under a contract awarded in 2018.
The entire fleet is expected to be modernized
around 2032 or 2033.
We continue to look at how to bring in military signals
that are giving us better power, better accuracy,
better anti-jam.
So with GPS III coming on with military code and
giving you eight times more anti-jam capability, and
then our next version of satellites, GPS III Follow
On giving you 60 times more anti-jam capability in a
regional area.
As things change, we want to ensure that we are ready to
make adjustments whether to be on the ground, whether it
be in the user equipment or whether it be from a
satellite perspective.
That flexibility is imperative for us to stay
ahead of the threat.
Meanwhile, improved capability in GPS' civil
signals could bolster new use cases such as artificial
intelligence and autonomous cars.
The GPS III satellites, will also have improved
search and rescue capabilities. As a co-chair
on the House GPS caucus, Representative Sherrill made
it a mission to keep the conversation going about the
importance of modernizing GPS.
Just because it's ubiquitous, just because you
use it every day, you can't allow familiarity to breed
contempt. You have to invest in it.
You have to update it.
We have to make sure that that system that we all now
rely on so heavily is protected and upgraded and
really resilient.
We need to use this question about GPS and the meaning of
Beidou as a way to ask ourselves broader questions
about the digital infrastructure that will
undergird the world.
And I think the bigger question is what does the
West want the critical infrastructure of the globe
to look like, and are they comfortable putting much of
it in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party?