Could you live without GPS? It's OK, the economy can't, either

0:01NPR.

0:11This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong, here with friend of the show, Nate Hedgie. He is the host of the public radio podcast, Outside In. Welcome back to the show, Nate. It's so great to be back, Waylon. And I have a question for you. How often do you use GPS? Oh, in the car? I am Michael Scott driving into a lake. I'll do whatever the GPS says. Can't live without it. Well, you are not alone. A recent survey found that nearly half of all Americans say they could not live without GPS in their car. And it turns out the American economy could not live without GPS either. Satellite navigation systems ensure that the clocks on Wall Street all align, that commercial fishermen know where to go, and of course that your Lyft driver knows where to pick you up.

0:57But our access to GPS is becoming increasingly vulnerable to attacks from foreign adversaries. A study from a few years ago found that an outage could cost our country at least$1 billion a day. And we don't have a backup. Russia does, China does, but we don't. Today on the show, we're going to explain who owns GPS and why we don't have a plan B if it fails.

1:42wallet app to see your credit limit offer in minutes. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com. Support for NPR and the following message come from Edward Jones. What does it mean to live a rich life? It means brave first leaps, tearful goodbyes, and everything in between. With over 100 years of experience navigating the ups and downs of the market and of life, your Edward Edward Jones Financial Advisor will be there to help you move ahead with confidence. Because with all you've done to find your rich, they'll do all they can to help you keep enjoying it.

2:20Edward Jones, member SIPC. This message comes from NPR sponsor Veeam. AI promised intelligence, but it also exposed everything people couldn't see, like scattered data and hidden risks. Now there's a new way forward where protection, governance, and AI trust move together. With Veeam plus Security AI, you can see your entire data estate in real time. Because when resilience, security, governance, and AI trust come together, innovation moves safely and faster. Learn more about accelerating safe AI at scale at Veeam.com. Okay, so GPS stands for Global Positioning System. It was invented around 50 years ago by the U.S.

3:06military. We now have a constellation of about 30 satellites owned by the feds that zip around the earth. Russia, China, and the EU all have their own versions. And it works like this. The satellite sends radio signals that tell the GPS receiver in your phone or smartwatch where you are and exactly what time it is down to a fraction of a second. Nowadays, almost all of our critical sectors, from banks to telecommunications to energy, use it. So if the U.S. lost access to satellite navigation... It would ripple through society like a horrendous damaging tidal wave. Oh, is that all? So that is Dana Goward.

3:48He is the president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation. 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. Dana says a potential GPS outage could throw the U.S. economy into freefall. Your cell phone might stop working. Farms, many of which rely on GPS-enabled equipment, could lose crops or miss entire planting seasons. Large shipping ports would come to a standstill. It could cripple offshore drilling operations. A member of the president's National Security Council has called GPS a single point of failure for America.

4:28So if it were to go away, we would be in a near existential crisis because there are just so many things that we depend on that depend upon GPS that folks don't realize. 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. It's actually freaking out pilots flying over those zones because they rely on GPS to help them navigate. What you essentially do is you begin broadcasting a GPS-like signal that is even fainter than the real GPS signal.

5:09And then you crank it up slowly, slowly, slowly until it reaches up the same strength as the real GPS signals in the environment. then go a little bit past that. And then most receivers will go from the real signal to the slightly stronger signal and say, oh, that's the real one. I must be over here. 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. That is just a Bond movie villain move right there. It totally is. But 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.

5:57Here's that chair, Republican Mike Turner, at a panel talk in June. This threat would mean that our economic, international security, and social systems come to a grinding halt. This would be a catastrophic and devastating attack upon Western economic and democratic systems. Vladimir Putin knows this. Checkmate. At first glance, this might seem counterintuitive. The explosion would be pretty indiscriminate. After all, the U.S. isn't the only country with satellite navigation systems in space. The European Union, China, and Russia have their own ones too. So if Putin actually used this weapon, he could potentially destroy some of his own satellites.

6:38But, as we said earlier, Russia and China both have something we don't. A backup plan. Dana Goward says this is a major problem. Russia and China both have terrestrial systems that can give them GPS-like information in the event that signals from space are not available. Unfortunately, in the U.S., we shut ours off in 2010, and we have no sign of starting up something like that again. Before GPS, the United States had a system called LORAN. That's an acronym for Long Range Navigation. It was a relic of World War II. A couple dozen 700-foot ground towers spread across the country that transmitted powerful radio signals.

7:22Not as accurate as GPS, but it got the job done. In 2004, the Bush administration not only wanted to keep Loran as a backup to GPS, it wanted to upgrade it to make it more precise. The money for that was taken away in the various budget processes, and the old system was shut down without new replacement. That shutdown happened during the Obama administration. They had a completely different view than the Bush administration and called Loran obsolete in the era of satellite navigation. But then a few years later, they said, oops, our bad. We shouldn't have shut down that old system. We should have upgraded.

7:59We're going to do that. But again, nothing happened. So in 2018, Congress passed a law requiring the Department of Transportation to build a backup to GPS by the year 2020. But then they didn't appropriate enough cash to do that. 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. 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.

8:36And unlike GPS, if you want to use it, you got to pay for it. What we really need is something that can be widely and broadly adopted by everybody that uses GPS in the United States so that our economy and national security are protected and not just the folks that can afford to subscribe to a commercial system. Here in the U.S., 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 that old system we already had in place, Loran. This new system, by the way, would have the very clever name of E-Loran.

9:17Oh my gosh, the government literally has no ideas about how to name anything in a clever way. It should have been I-Loran. Dana says it would cost less than$100 million a year to operate, much less than the couple billion dollars we spend every year operating GPS. But again, there are no concrete plans to build this. We're hoping that the government reconsiders that and helps everyone find a way forward where we can have a widely adopted alternative so that when GPS is not available or global navigation and satellite system signals are not available, they will have an alternative and we won't all be out of business.

9:55But I guess until then, Waylon, maybe we should buy some atlases just in case. I remember when I first started driving, it was, you know, pre-smartphone, like years before the smartphone, years before Google Maps. And we just had this big spiral bound book in the glove compartment that had maps of the city of Chicago and all of the surrounding suburbs. Like you had maps in the glove compartment. We survived like as a civilization. Absolutely. Absolutely. Not without stressors. I remember driving through Chicago with my dad pre-smartphones. There was a lot of swearing. A lot of swearing. This episode was produced by Angel Carreras with engineering by Patrick Murray.

10:33It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Kate Kinkenden edits the show in the Indicators of Production of NPR.

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