A GPS Blackout Would Shut Down the World

Around 12,500 miles supra our heads, nan satellites that dress up nan Global Positioning System (GPS) softly support nan world running. A blackout would consequence successful almost instantaneous chaos.

“You would spot postulation jams, a batch much postulation accidents, because proscription is going to spot nan first astir contiguous impact,” says Dana Goward, nan laminitis of nan Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a kindness which useful to fortify GPS.

Thousands of planes successful nan air, which usage GPS among different systems for navigation and precision landing, would look a activity of uncertainty. Then different captious parts of society—from financial transactions to power accumulation systems—which person travel to trust upon nan precision positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) provided by nan US-owned constellation of 31 GPS satellites whitethorn commencement to stutter. The ripples would beryllium felt astir nan world.

“If it was a catastrophic infinitesimal that happened astatine a blink of an oculus and we mislaid GPS entirely, you would spot this world seizure of everything that moves, each portion of information that moves, each quality that moves. All of that would unopen down,” says Erik Daehler, nan vice president of defense, satellites, and spacecraft systems astatine Sierra Space. The timing signals included successful GPS would beryllium 1 of nan astir impactful losses. Cell telephone connections would apt collapse. Billions would quickly beryllium wiped from banal markets amid nan disruption.

A GPS outage could beryllium peculiarly ruinous to nan United States, which has a dense reliance connected its sovereign abstraction strategy and has dragged its feet successful building backups that tin supply nan required resilience needed to support nan state running. The US has fallen behind, nan National Space-based PNT Advisory Board warned past year. In contrast, China has reinforced its ain much modern outer navigation system—BeiDou—with a sprawling web of fiber-optic cables and terrestrial power signals.

The conditions needed to origin nan full GPS web to beryllium wholly knocked retired would beryllium bonzer and apt would travel pinch wider societal ramifications. Such an outage, for instance, could beryllium caused by China aliases Russia firing anti-satellite weapons against nan GPS satellites (the US besides has anti-satellite weapons), a powerful geomagnetic storm, aliases an escalation successful nan capabilities of physics warfare.

Despite nan improbability of a full outage, GPS isn’t infallible. It has its demons. “What really happens is, regionally, GPS gets messed pinch and jammed and interfered pinch connected a regular basis,” Daehler says. Thousands of planes and ships are having their GPS interfered with each week, and signals are regularly disrupted astir warfare zones.

“America is not good prepared astatine all,” Goward says. More should beryllium done to build retired PNT systems that tin enactment arsenic a backstop to nan space-based GPS signals, he says. “There’s not a wide general awareness. We surely don’t person a resilient PNT architecture aliases a PNT architecture of immoderate benignant different than GPS.”