Space Force Now Says Its Most Important Mission Is Protecting GPS Satellites

In the pantheon of the armed companies, the U.S. Space Force has at all times been a little bit of an odd duckling. Its genesis throughout Donald Trump’s administration was hardly auspicious, a lot of its mission exists sooner or later tense, and it’d take some time for the conference of referring to its personnel as “Guardians” to catch on. It’s not clear when the department will truly even deploy troops in orbit, apart from not anytime soon, and there’s a widespread public perception that the Space Force has little mission past its defunct one as a Trump vainness venture.

So in the meanwhile, as first flagged by Task & Purpose, the Space Force is emphasizing defending the nation’s satellites from potential hurt—particularly, the Defense Department’s Global Positioning System (GPS) that allows folks throughout the planet to pinpoint precisely the place they’re. In a recruiting business posted to YouTube titled “Space Is Hard” on Tuesday, members of the service defined the significance of holding these satellites functioning and safe from anybody who would possibly need to hack or destroy them.

“I think it’s important because we use [satellite tech] in everyday life, for example, the GPS that we use every day,” Space Force intelligence officer Captain Pierre Jones mentioned within the clip. Colleague and operations officer Captain Natalia Pinto weighed in as effectively, including “The most important thing that the Space Force supports, from the perspective of a civilian, is the fact that we have GPS. That is something that is leveraged by an individual, companies, banks, all sorts of financial institutions. So from the outside looking in, that’s probably the most important thing that we rely on.”

As Defense One famous, whereas the very first thing that will come to thoughts for most individuals concerning GPS is discovering instructions to the closest McDonald’s, GPS is indisputably one of the crucial crucial space-based applied sciences in use at present. The 31 satellites that comprise the GPS system not solely present location information for commuters and vacationers, however present ultra-precise world timekeeping crucial to timestamps on the international financial network, guarantee electrical grid operators have correct real-time data, assist route mobile networks, coordinate site visitors alerts, and supply navigational information for aviators and transport. GPS additionally has countless scientific uses, together with earthquake and volcano monitoring and meteorological, hydrological, and atmospheric analysis. And it, after all, has numerous military uses.

While GPS is, because the New Yorker reported final yr, “remarkably robust,” potential ground-based dangers embrace GPS jamming, which might interrupt sign reception and render drones inoperable. Another is GPS spoofing, through which a malicious celebration can trick GPS-enabled programs into reporting false information. Other nations such as China have began racing to develop their very own GPS programs, and in contrast to a lot of these, the U.S. has no terrestrial backup systems in case the satellite tv for pc community fails. There’s additionally the potential of cyber or bodily assault on the GPS satellites themselves by a hostile nation-state.

Like different theoretical threats, equivalent to electromagnetic pulse attacks, the vulnerability of the GPS system is the topic of habitual chatter amongst members of Congress and defense pundits. Yet based on War on the Rocks, these dangers are sometimes overstated, as many business applied sciences characterised as reliant on GPS to perform are actually solely GPS-aided, whereas the chance of jamming or spoofing navy programs is mitigated by digital safety options, redundancy, and encryption. Physically capturing the satellites out of the air could possibly be disastrous, as would an adversary by some means taking management of or subverting the community with malicious code. War on the Rocks famous that both a bodily or cyberassault wouldn’t be a one-and-done concern, because the bodily distance between satellites and gradual add instances would make both methodology a prolonged sufficient endeavor to ask a response. A RAND Corporation research released in June 2021 concluded many dire assessments of GPS vulnerability have been overblown.

“Plausible potential threats from human actions and natural hazards are of very limited duration—days at most—and most threats are also quite limited in areal coverage,” the research’s authors wrote. “… When estimates of the cost of GPS disruption or loss include realistic adaptation options and existing complementary technologies, the estimates are surprisingly low.”

Elsewhere within the video, Chief of Space Operations General John “Jay” Raymond pitched the Space Force in much less aspirational phrases than a few of its prior commercials, promoting it as a brass-tacks operation involved with the complicated practicalities of defending area property hurtling across the globe.

“It used to be all we had to worry about was astrophysics, Kepler’s law, gamma rays, solar flares, rocket science, black holes, and the theory of relativity… But now we also have to track about 30,000 objects orbiting at over 17,500 miles per hour,” the final mentioned.

“And our entire way of life depends on us to protect our satellites from attack, day and night. So yeah, space is hard,” Raymond added.

While GPS received the principle shoutout, Captain Pinto additionally steered the Space Force might play a task in defending the International Space Station, which “mans three astronauts and also a lot of research is conducted onboard.”

The Space Force is aiming to expand to twenty,000 members within the coming years, up from almost 5,000 members in addition to about 10,000 civilians and reassigned Air Force personnel as of April. According to Task & Purpose, the service just lately launched YouTube and Twitter accounts for recruiting functions and despatched its first class of future recruiters to attend coaching at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California in August.