GPS has no backup, and the jamming just moved to orbit. (Source: T-Minus Space-Cyber Briefing)

On T-Minus Space-Cyber Briefing, I joined Maria Varmazis and Dave Bittner to work through a Veritasium investigation into years of strange GPS interference over Europe, Greenland, and Canada. The geometry ruled out a ground source: 75 brief events between 2019 and 2026, spread across a continent-sized footprint, point to something in space, most plausibly a Russian early-warning satellite in a Molniya orbit. Whether that signal is an offensive capability or a wartime-reserve communications band parked next to GPS and leaking each time it is tested, the takeaway holds. For the first time we have clear evidence that the cheap, ground-based GPS jamming we have discussed for years has been extended into the space architecture itself.

The part that should worry decision-makers is the resilience gap. GPS is the most important utility nobody treats as critical infrastructure: it sets the timing that cryptography, the power grid, and internet connectivity depend on, yet a phone receives a signal roughly as strong as a car headlight seen from 12,000 miles away. When communications fail or undersea cables are cut, we have fallback options. When water treatment fails, we have fallback options. For position, navigation, and timing, we have almost none. The better news is that the fixes are real and arriving: cryptographic signatures that defeat spoofing, terrestrial timing approaches in the spirit of LORAN, and quantum navigation and quantum clocks that aim to remove the GPS dependency rather than patch it.

Key topics

• Jamming In Orbit: The cheap “$30 jammer” asymmetry has long lived on the ground; the new and notable fact is clear evidence of an interference capability operating from space.
• The PNT Resilience Gap: Position, navigation, and timing is the one critical-infrastructure domain with no real fallback, and we lack even a complete inventory of what depends on it.
• Quantum As Exit: The strategic value of quantum navigation and quantum clocks is not securing GPS but removing the dependency on it, so timing survives even when the signal is jammed or spoofed.