A depiction of Nexus satellites in a medium Earth orbit constellation.
Astranis
The U.S. Air Force began deploying the Global Positioning System — more commonly known as GPS — nearly 50 years ago, satellites which have become critical infrastructure for both the military and the economy.
Since then, GPS is estimated to have generated more than $1.4 trillion in economic benefits, according to a Commerce Department study. But the agency warned that an “outage could potentially have an economic impact of $1 billion a day.”
Pentagon leaders believe those losses are a conservative estimate, leading the U.S. Space Force to kick off a roughly $2 billion satellite program known as the Resilient Global Positioning System. Called R-GPS for short, the program is intended to provide an alternative, backup network for the current satellite system.
“[GPS is] vitally important to everything we do day-to-day, from the stock market, for timing of every transaction, to the crops we field,” Lt. Col. Justin Deifel, leader of R-GPS at the Space Force’s Space Systems Command, told CNBC.
“It’s like water and electricity. … It’s a utility of the economy and a utility of a warfighter that we need to make sure is available,” Deifel added.
The importance of the existing 31 GPS satellites in orbit, as well as the potential threat in space from U.S. adversaries like Russia and China, has led the Pentagon to prioritize building the alternative R-GPS network — and the Space Force has turned to the commercial space industry to do so.
Last month, the branch awarded four companies with contracts for R-GPS design concepts: Astranis, Axient, L3 Harris and Sierra Space.
first satellite malfunctioned last year due to a third-party issue with its solar arrays, the company’s experience operating in the distant geosynchronous orbit has Gedmark confident about its chances in the R-GPS program.
“We are the only company that has proven on orbit a spacecraft of this class — a low cost, [radiation]-hardened satellite for high orbits,” Gedmark said.
