GLOBAL POSITIONING & NAVIGATION NEWS February 21, 2001
HOW SERIOUS IS THE GPS SPACE THREAT?
A Jan. 11 report directed by now-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
stresses U.S. dependence on satellites and the vulnerability of those assets.
How serious is the threat to the national infrastructures reliant on precise
timing and positional information? GPS supports not only defense but civil
aviation, telecom and power distribution infrastructures.
The federally mandated Commission to Assess U.S. National Security Space
Management and Organization cites the threat that vulnerable space resources
pose to national security. It calls for the United States to develop "new
military capabilities for operation to, from, in and through space."
Placing weapons in space "will add a new dimension to the reliance on
space of civil applications," says John Beukers, who supports Loran as a back-up
to GPS time. (He is a director of the International Loran Association.) "How
would we fare with the loss of GPS for days, weeks, months or even years?" A
"diversity of complementary space and terrestrial systems" could mitigate risks
from space- and ground-based threats, Beukers says.
The threat to the GPS satellites in space is extremely unlikely, two
satellite analysts say. Short of all-out war, deliberate jamming and ultra-
wideband (UWB) transmissions in the GPS bands (see story, p. 1) pose far more
pressing threats to the U.S. space-based radio navigation system. The GPS
satellites are 11,000 nautical miles high, there are a lot of them, and they are
radiation-hardened.
John Pike, director of GobalSecurity.org and long-time foe of space
militarization, says he's more concerned with threats to low-flying military
reconnaissance spacecraft than with the survival of the GPS system.
Even if the space threat is put in perspective, too little attention is
being paid to coping with loss of GPS, the Rumsfeld commission says. Commanders
lack the modeling and simulation tools to understand "how to cope with the loss
or temporary interruption of key space capabilities, such as ... GPS, satellite
communications, remote sensing or missile warning information."
In that regard, a new U.S. Army space war game plans to place more
emphasis on the threat to commercial satellites, which are vulnerable because
they are not hardened. The exercise will address the use of micro-rockets
against low earth orbit satellites and commercial jammers to disrupt GPS,
reports GPNN sister publication, Defense Daily.
Copyright 2001 Phillips Business Information, Inc.
