The United States and China are engaged in a new race in space and on Earth for a fundamental resource: time itself.
And the United States loses.
Global positioning satellites serve as clocks in the sky, and their signals are vital to the global economy—as important to telecommunications, emergency services and financial markets as they are to drivers and lost pedestrians.
However, these services are becoming increasingly vulnerable as space is rapidly becoming militarized and satellite signals on Earth are under attack.
But unlike China, the United States has no Plan B for civilians should these signals fail in space or on land.
The risks seem as far away as science fiction. But just last month, the United States said Russia might deploy a nuclear weapon in space, refocusing attention on the vulnerability of satellites. And John E. Hyten, an Air Force general who was also vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and is now retired, once called some satellites “big, fat, juicy targets.”
The specific threats have been increasing for years.
Russia, China, India and the United States have tested anti-satellite missiles, and several major world powers have developed technology designed to jam signals in space. A Chinese satellite has a robotic arm that could destroy or move other satellites.
More attacks take place on Earth. Russian hackers targeted the ground infrastructure of a satellite system in Ukraine, disrupting the internet at the start of the war there. Attacks such as jamming, which involves drowning out satellite signals, and spoofing, which involves sending misleading data, are on the rise, distracting flights and confusing pilots far from the battlefield.
If the world were to lose connection to these satellites, the economic losses would amount to billions of dollars per day.
Although the risks are recognized, the United States is still years away from having a reliable alternative source of time and navigation for civilian purposes if GPS signals fail or are interrupted, documents show and experts say. The Transportation Ministry, which leads civilian timekeeping and navigation projects, denied this but did not provide answers to follow-up questions.
A 2010 Obama administration plan that experts had hoped would create a backup for satellites was never implemented. A decade later, President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order saying that jamming or manipulating satellite signals posed a threat to national security. However, he did not propose an alternative or suggest funding to protect infrastructure.
The Biden administration is soliciting bids from private companies in the hope that they will provide technical solutions. However, it could take years for these technologies to become widespread.
While the United States lags behind, China is forging ahead, building what it claims is the world’s largest, most advanced and precise timekeeping system.
The company is building hundreds of timing 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 timing and navigation services without relying on signals from Beidou, China’s alternative to GPS. There are also plans to launch additional satellites as backup signal sources.
“We should seize this strategic opportunity and devote all our efforts to building capabilities as quickly as possible that cover all domains – underwater, on the ground, in the air, in space and in space,” said researchers from China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, a state-owned conglomerate, wrote in a newspaper last year.
China has retained and modernized a World War II-era system known as Loran, which uses radio towers to transmit time signals over long distances. An expanded version delivers signals to the eastern and central parts of the country and extends offshore to Taiwan and parts of Japan. Construction is currently underway to expand the system to the west.
Russia also has an extensive Loran system that continues to be used. South Korea has modernized its system to counter radio interference from North Korea.
However, the United States decommissioned its Loran system in 2010, with President Barack Obama calling it “outdated technology.” There was no plan to replace it.
In January, the government and private companies tested an improved version of Loran on U.S. Coast Guard towers. But because companies have shown no interest in operating the system without government help, the Coast Guard plans to divest all eight transmission sites.
“The Chinese have done what we promised in America,” said Dana Goward, president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation in Virginia. “They are determined to become independent from space.”
What is the United States doing?
Since Mr. Trump’s order, about a dozen companies have proposed options including launching new satellites, setting up fiber-optic timing systems or relaunching an enhanced version of Loran, but few products have come to market.
A private company, Satelles, working with the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado, has developed an alternative time source using satellites already orbiting about 485 miles above the Earth.
NIST scientists say the signals are thousands of times stronger than those from GPS satellites orbiting more than 12,000 miles above Earth. This makes them harder to disrupt or fake. And because low-Earth satellites are smaller and more widely dispersed, they are less vulnerable to attack in space than GPS satellites.
According to Satelles CEO Michael O’Connor, the satellites get time from stations around the world, including the NIST facility in Colorado and an Italian research center outside Milan.
China has similar plans to improve its space-time system by 2035. It will launch satellites to expand the Beidou system, and the country plans to launch nearly 13,000 satellites into low Earth orbit.
China says its investments are partly due to concerns about an American attack in space. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences said the United States is “working hard” to expand its space cyberwarfare capabilities, especially after the war in Ukraine brought “a deeper understanding 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, did not answer specific questions about the country’s anti-satellite capabilities. It said it was building systems to protect the nation’s interests as “space becomes an increasingly congested and contested domain.”
Independent of civilian use, the military is developing GPS backup options for its own use, including for weapons such as precision-guided missiles. Most technologies are classified, but one solution is a signal called M-Code, which the Space Force says is immune to interference and performs better in war than civilian GPS. However, there were repeated delays.
The military is also developing a location, timing and navigation service to be distributed via satellites in low Earth orbit.
Other countermeasures look to the past. The US Naval Academy has begun teaching sailors to navigate by the stars again.
What happens if the US doesn’t find a solution?
Satellite systems—America’s GPS, China’s Beidou, Europe’s Galileo, and Russia’s Glonass—are the important sources of time, and time is the cornerstone of most navigation methods.
In the American GPS system, for example, each satellite carries atomic clocks and sends radio signals with information about its location and the exact time. When a cell phone receiver receives signals from four satellites, it calculates its own location based on the time it took for those signals to arrive.
Cars, ships and navigation systems on board aircraft all work the same way.
Other infrastructures also rely on satellites. Telecommunications companies use precise time to synchronize their networks. Utilities need time from satellites to monitor the health of the grid and quickly detect and investigate faults. Financial exchanges use it to track orders. Emergency services use it to locate people in distress. Farmers use it to plant crops precisely.
A world without satellite signals is a world that is virtually blind. Ambulances will be delayed on constantly congested roads. Cell phone calls are stopped. Ships can be lost. Power outages may last longer. Food can cost more. Getting around will be much more difficult.
However, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, some critical civilian systems were designed with the false assumption that satellite signals would always be available.
This trust can have dire consequences. A recent report from the UK showed that a week-long blackout of all satellite signals would cost the UK economy almost $9.7 billion. A previous report estimated damage to the U.S. economy at $1 billion per day, but that estimate is five years old.
“It’s like oxygen, you don’t know you have it until it’s gone,” said Adm. Thad W. Allen, a former commander of the U.S. Coast Guard and head of a national advisory board on space-based positioning, navigation and timing. said last year.
For now, mutually assured losses prevent major attacks. Satellite signals are transmitted on a narrow radio band, making it difficult for one country to jam another country’s satellite signals without shutting down its own services.
According to Mr Goward of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, 50 years of free GPS access has “got everyone hooked”. The government has not done enough to provide alternatives to the public, he said.
“It’s all about admiring the problem,” he said, “not about solving the problem.”
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2024-03-28 04:00:12
www.nytimes.com