Positioning Navigation and Timing Executives Want More Resiliency for GPS

WASHINGTON, Dec. 5, 2024 – Executives in the positioning, navigation and timing space want more resiliency for GPS in order to ensure communications viability.

Virginia Tech’s Professor of Practice David Simpson noted in the Thursday discussion, which included Iridium’s President and Chief Technology Officer Greg Gutt, that the telecommunications industry relies on PNT for wired and wireless technology, the internet of things, and healthcare monitoring. The panel was moderated by Wiley Rein Associate Jillian Quigley.

“PNT is under attack today [by adversarial nations,]” Simpson said. “When we lose PNT, we lose things like the timing [which is] important for communications, or for long haul communications.”

Simpson cited spoofing as an example of electronic warfare tactics that could be used by adversaries to derail U.S. communications and geopositioning efforts.

NextNav’s Vice President of Government Affairs Ed Mortimer agreed, asserting that the federal government must support innovative technologies in the private sector in order to compete with resilient and increasingly dominant PNT initiatives by adversarial nations such as Russia or China.

Both nations have formulated answers to the U.S. Global Positioning System in the form of Russia’s GLONASS and China’s BeiDou, with the latter using a mixture of low Earth orbit, middle Earth orbit and geosynchronous satellites to maintain a robust communications and positioning network. 

“The fact that we don't have the national backup to GPS is quite, quite shocking,” Mortimer said. “[The government must research] potential complementary, resilient backups that they may look to to make sure that [we] have resiliency and backups to GPS.”

NextNav, a global positioning company headquartered in Reston, Va., has recently advocated for the establishment of a ground-based GPS backup system, arguing that a backup could shelter the American economy from up to $663 million in potential losses during a GPS outage.

The executives were speaking at the Federal Communications Bar Association’s Space and Global Communications Committee Lunch and Learn event at Wiley Rein’s offices here.