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If Tom Cruise is a blockbuster’s leading man, the film is sure to be a lock-on hit. Seven months after its release, Top Gun: Maverick was still being shown in cinemas, having made a whopping £1.25bn worldwide. It was, critics claimed, the nostalgia-fest audiences were always likely to embrace two years removed from the pandemic, bringing back the original movie’s actors, basic plotline and even, to the genuine confusion of many aeronautical experts, the F-15 jets long since surpassed by the fifth-generation warplanes of most advanced militaries.
The reason, as one character pointedly notes, is that the latest jets and their missiles were reliant on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and, therefore, could not be used in the top-secret mission that unfolds in the film’s finale. Usually referred to as GPS (though, strictly speaking, this refers to a US-run GNSS), such technology underpins not only military logistics but also aerial navigation, shipping, and a plethora of digital services. While it’s unlikely that The Big Bad in Top Gun: Maverick would be able to jam or spoof the GPS of a sixth-gen fighter, that’s not the case for commercial applications, where cases of navigational sabotage have become so common that the race is on to find alternatives to this trillion-dollar technology.
GPS can fail in several ways – something its inventors discovered as soon as they began testing it, explains Faragher. Aside from being straightforwardly jammed, the technology can be spoofed (meaning that a device or vehicle is made to appear in an incorrect location), disrupted by space weather, or show confusing results in busy, built-up areas. These were forgivable flaws during GPS’s testing period in the mid-1990s, says Faragher, when one considered how expensive and complex it was to disrupt its signal. That’s not the case now. “You can transmit noise [which can jam GPS] using a mobile phone [and] it can cost as little as £100,” Faragher says. “And the barrier to spoofing has lowered, too.”
That’s partly thanks to innovative frontline commanders in Ukraine desperately thinking up new ways to prevent GPS-reliant drones from hitting their dugouts, but also tech-savvy illegal fishermen hiding contraband tuna from coastguard vessels and truck drivers trying to give their management-installed tracker systems the slip. Jamming incidents, too, have become fairly commonplace near the airspace of rogue nations, with 800 such cases being reported in Russia-adjacent Lithuania in the last three months of 2024.
GPS failures can cost companies millions of pounds in lost revenue – billions, says Faragher, if the system were to completely crash. The danger to human life, too, is clear. Spoofing and jamming at sea could lead to other vessels experiencing navigational errors, themselves linked to over half of all casualties on the open ocean. Recent history, too, provides several examples of passenger jets being shot down by authoritarian regimes after accidentally straying too close to their airspace.
Little wonder, then, that governments and startups alike are scrambling to source backup systems. The UK government has proven especially proactive, experimenting with everything from quantum navigational systems for aircraft that parse data from atomic clocks and the Earth’s magnetic field, to drawing up plans for adopting eLORAN (enhanced long-range navigation), a World War II-era innovation that uses towering radio masts and low frequencies to offer backup PNT capability.
Though improbable in the context of the movie, the prospect of GPS jamming raised by Top Gun: Maverick is a very potent threat in the real world. (Photo: Miguel Lagoa / Shutterstock)Autonomous arms race
Inertial navigation devices are also promising alternatives to GPS. This includes researchers at CalTech shrinking gyroscopes down to the size of a grain of rice so that they can better interact with advanced semiconductors, as well as other teams utilising VOR (high frequency radio technology using beacons), DME (distance measuring radio from base to flying vehicle) and even WiFi networks to backstop GPS in specific conditions.
In the fast-growing autonomous space, solving navigational issues has taken a turn to the vehicle itself. Venture capital-funded Focal Point Positioning, explains Manuel Del Castillo, its VP of Business Development, has worked on a software interface for GPS chips that mitigates interference that accompanies the technology’s use in remote or urban environments by ensuring that its GPS receivers only focus on the right information from space and ignore reflected or spoofed signals.
Such a software interface, Del Castillo explains, is critical because GPS has been a laggard technology in autonomous vehicle development (“If the technology performs well in some circumstances but is unreliable in others, it won’t be used,”) he says. He adds that other smart devices could also use software to support GPS’ performance and, as smart city technologies continue to proliferate, location services could be enhanced by straightforward data exchanges with surrounding sensors in fixed positions or those on board emergency vehicles.
AI, the buzz technology of the moment, is also being used to boost navigation. TERN AI, which already has a contract with the US Department of Transport, is trying to solve the autonomous or smart-enabled navigational conundrum without GPS. “Rather than looking at strengthening the signal [as others have],” says Shaun Moore, co-founder of the AI-powered autonomous vehicle technology provider, “we said, ‘Let’s turn it on its head: what if the signal didn’t exist?’”
TERN AI’s approach, explains Moore, sees models parse data from sensors on the vehicle itself to build up digital map layers for navigation. That’s led to boosts in performance in areas where autonomous vehicles have usually struggled, like mountainous terrain – and, because there are no external signals, it doesn’t have the same risk profile as GPS. “Autonomous vehicles won’t be on the road en masse until the visuals are sorted for snowy environments,” says Moore. “Our solution solves that.”
Autonomous vehicles struggle with GPS in urban areas and difficult rural terrain, leading startups to explore AI-powered backup systems. (Photo: Dusan Petkovic / Shutterstock)Looking to the stars for GPS alternatives
Navigating by the heavens also has its appeal, with French startup Sodern offering a star tracker unit for customers that, handily, also works in the day. Other firms, meanwhile, have set their sights on launching GNSS constellations into low-earth (LEO), rather than medium-earth orbit, the logic being that a lower height means a stronger signal – at a time when it’s cheaper than ever to throw a satellite into orbit.
LEO has its problems. The market for new constellations is so hot, explains Faragher, that the risk of satellite collisions has reached an all-time high, potentially compromising the reliability of an LEO-based GNSS system. Indeed, most GPS alternatives come with downsides, says Faragher. Quantum-based solutions, too, are flawed, reliant as they are on Earth’s ever-shifting gravitational field. The RIN chief executive is more optimistic about AI, albeit limited to the niche area of autonomous vehicles.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Moore disagrees – specialisation, he argues, is the future. The flaws in GPS, he argues, are too big for a one-size-fits-all solution to overcome. Rather, says Moore, “we will have solutions [in the future] tailored specifically to air, land and sea.”
Indeed, as Faragher says, there will likely always be some reliance on satellite navigation, despite the risks. And with the low price points (GPS chips cost as low as $1 to manufacture), giving users access to countless apps within 30 seconds, there will likely be “no magic bullet to replace GPS” – unless, perhaps, you’re Tom Cruise.
