Ok, so far, we have discussed the issue of GPS resilience and the risk to the U.S. from continuing to “admire” the exposure to our economy and yes, our way of life, and we have discussed the most public U.S. Government efforts to understand and mitigate this risk. First, I want to say hooray for the good guys that the U.S. Government is cognizant of this exposure and is engaged in remedy studies and efforts.
Let’s restate the task at hand from a practical standpoint, practical being a mitigation strategy/plan towards an acceptable level of a new solution. Solution means equivalent to the PNT performance for either the P or the N or the T or a combination thereof. Gotta start somewhere! This task encompasses the entire U.S. geography, eventually including remote U.S. locations. The government uses what it calls TRLs, Technical Readiness Levels, to assess solution efficacy. TRL 9 is ready to rock and roll in the real world, TRL 1 is a nice idea.
The ideal solutions would be highly resilient to any possible adversity. The ideal societal structure for a solution implementation and management organization is a Public/Private partnership offering the necessary governance to satisfy existing industrial standards and operational requirements. A solution could be a proprietary technology, an open technology or any combination so long as the “end” game satisfies equivalent performance requirements noted above as P or N or T. It is also not out of the question for there to be several solutions offered while none of them covers the entire GPS provided utility suite. What is important is to satisfy the target market P, N, or T requirements.
Sounds peachy, it's only missing the public and private cooperative engagement.
Issues such as needing spectrum to be granted from the FCC to private companies is not receiving actual direction from the government. It's not that the government doesn’t know what’s out there. Within the government, the Army Research Lab, the Air Force Research Lab, the Navy Research Lab, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory from the Department of Energy all have CPNT programs in place and active. However, they are not coordinated and the application for Industrial and Public use is not being publicly considered.
I am sure by now you have realized this is less a technical problem than a governance and financial problem. These implementation-throttling issues impede solutions from being implemented,
If we look at the possible solutions for CPNT resilience that can satisfy all the market, regulatory, affordable, scale issues, it is a small number. When you pare that list down to terrestrial only solutions the number becomes smaller. The way I am looking at the CPNT resilience issue is at scale. I am hopeful the discovery of a Russian satellite jamming GPS from above will illuminate the fact that space is not the cozy and safe place we want it to be. As a matter of fact, it is downright scary the space science capabilities our real adversaries possess. The idea of a loss of GPS at scale is much more realistic now because of these capabilities. I believe the LEO, MEO and GEO satellite environment we are accustomed to may change radically, and not for the better. So, what does that leave us with? Why the terrestrial environment of course! This well understood and exploitable environment must play a major role in mitigating the CPNT dilemma.
Oh, and by the way, a terrestrial solution does exist: BPS. The infrastructure BPS runs on is already available, the spectrum is licensed and in use, it's already continent wide and it’s been proven to satisfy its target market for P, N, & T service capabilities.
More next version of the CPNT blog.