Elon Musk's other unfinished project

There’s one bit of the future that Elon Musk has built and isn’t interested in using: A potential power that researchers have identified in his Starlink satellite system. For the past two years, Todd Humphreys, an Army-funded researcher at the University of Texas in Austin, and a team of researchers reverse-engineered signals sent from thousands of Starlink internet satellites in low Earth orbit to ground-based receivers, finding that the constellation could form a precise navigation system. What’s more, this powerful new function could, in theory, be set up overnight with just a few tweaks to the system’s software. If true, this would be a very big deal. Right now, the U.S.-owned Global Positioning System (GPS) is the most prevalent technology used in the global navigation satellite system, a general term describing any satellite constellation that provides positioning, navigation, and timing services on a global or regional basis. It’s reliable enough but in reality, it could be better. Satellites in the GPS constellation are “all too susceptible to jamming.” For a system that has an economic impact of about $1 billion a day in the United States alone, that’s a problem. Starlink satellite signals are much wider and have more channels than GPS satellites, making it harder for attackers to disrupt since there are more frequencies to cover. These would offer a reliable backup to GPS and other navigation systems in Europe, Russia and China. Also, each Starlink terminal focuses on only one satellite at a time with a narrow beam — so it ignores jamming signals coming from different directions. In contrast, the military has to use costly phased-array GPS antennas to prevent its receivers from “pulling in everything above it,” such as jamming signals, Humphreys told us. If put into operation, Starlink satellites could provide a low-cost and highly accurate navigation service resistant to jamming from adversaries.