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Many Americans say they couldn't survive without GPS - turns out our economy wouldn't do well either. But if it's so important, why don't we have a backup? Russia and China do. Navigating this question for us are Wailin Wong of Planet Money's The Indicator and Nate Hegyi, host of New Hampshire Public Radio's Outside/In.
WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: If the U.S. lost access to satellite navigation...
DANA GOWARD: It would ripple through society like a horrendous damaging tidal wave.
NATE HEGYI, BYLINE: That is Dana Goward. He is the president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation.
GOWARD: Which is kind of a horrible name for most people. But, essentially, we advocate for policies and systems to protect the GPS satellites, signals and users.
WONG: Dana says a potential GPS outage could throw the U.S. economy into free fall. Farms, many of which rely on GPS-enabled equipment, could lose crops. Large shipping ports would come to a standstill. It could cripple offshore drilling operations.
GOWARD: If it were to go away, we would be in a near-existential crisis.
WONG: A GPS outage can seem like a far-fetched idea, but it's actually happening in many places around the world right now. In war zones in the Middle East and Ukraine, combatants are using jammers or spoofers to mess with the signals from satellite navigation systems.
HEGYI: But these jammers only work in a localized area. What the U.S. is really worried about is someone trying to blow up the actual satellites. Earlier this year, the chair of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee warned that Russia was developing a nuclear anti-satellite weapon, one that, if detonated, could put most of the satellites in orbit out of commission for at least a year.
WONG: At first glance, this might seem counterintuitive. Putin could potentially destroy some of his own satellites. But Russia, along with China, have terrestrial backup systems.
GOWARD: Unfortunately, in the U.S., we shut ours off in 2010.
WONG: The United States had a system called LORAN. It was a relic of World War II, a couple dozen 700-foot ground towers spread across the country that transmitted powerful radio signals. Not as accurate as GPS, but it got the job done. In 2004, the Bush administration wanted to upgrade it to make it more precise.
GOWARD: The money for that was taken away in the various budget processes, and the old system was shut down without new replacement.
HEGYI: That shutdown happened during the Obama administration. They called LORAN obsolete in the era of satellite navigation. But then, a few years later, they said, oops, our bad.
WONG: So in 2018, Congress passed a law requiring the Department of Transportation to build a backup to GPS, but then they didn't appropriate enough cash to do that.
GOWARD: And so in 2020, President Trump issued an executive order that told people, you know, you really need to make sure you're not relying too much on GPS, and go out and protect yourselves and find other sources of timing and location information.
HEGYI: That's where we are now. There are companies that provide GPS alternates to businesses and consumers, but Dana says they're hard to come by, and, unlike GPS, if you want to use it, you got to pay for it.
WONG: Dana and other advocates say the most cost-effective way for the country to get on similar footing to Russia and China is for the government to rebuild and upgrade LORAN.
HEGYI: Dana says it would cost less than a hundred million dollars a year to operate, much less than the couple billion dollar we spend every year operating GPS.
WONG: But again, there are no concrete plans to build this.
GOWARD: We're hoping that the government reconsiders that, and they will have an alternative, and we won't all be out of business.
HEGYI: Nate Hegyi.
WONG: Wailin Wong, NPR News.
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