A satellite mapped GPS jamming from orbit — and the interference is worse than expected

Space 3 min 80 sources

An experimental spacecraft measured how badly GPS is being scrambled across Europe and the Middle East, revealing that even satellites high above the jammers are losing the signal.

Key takeaways

A test satellite measured GPS jamming from orbit for the first time and found the interference across Europe and the Middle East was worse than expected.
GPS is easy to attack because the signal arriving from 12,000 miles up is faint; jamming drowns it out and spoofing replaces it with false coordinates.
The same weak signal that nations now scramble as a weapon also runs power grids, flights, farm machinery and financial clocks worldwide.

For the first time, a satellite has measured from space how badly GPS is being scrambled below it — and the answer surprised the people who built it.

What the satellite found

The spacecraft is Pulsar-0, the first of a planned navigation constellation from a California company called Xona Space Systems [15]. It orbits about 310 miles (500 km) up, in what’s called low Earth orbit — the busy band of space just above the atmosphere where most satellites and the space station fly [15]. Pulsar-0 is testing technology before Xona starts deploying 300 of these spacecraft later this year [15].

It also carries an ordinary GPS receiver, the same kind in your phone. When the team switched it on, the picture over Europe shocked them. “When we fly over North America, we see a beautiful signal all the time,” co-founder Kaz Gunning told Space.com. “But as soon as we started doing any operations above Europe… it’s quite a bit more than we expected” [15].

In the worst-hit areas, the GPS signal strength measured at the satellite dropped from a normal 40 decibels to as little as 10 — a steep fall [15]. The disruption stretched all the way from France in the west to the borders of Pakistan in the east [15].

Why GPS is so easy to attack

GPS, and its rivals like Europe’s Galileo and China’s Beidou, all work the same way: a handful of satellites orbiting more than 12,000 miles (19,000 km) up beam down a faint timing signal [15]. Your receiver listens to several at once and works out where it is and what time it is. The catch is that, after such a long trip, the signal arriving at the ground is extremely weak — easy to drown out [15].

There are two ways to attack it. Jamming floods the area with noise so receivers hear nothing. Spoofing is sneakier — it overrides the real signal with a fake one carrying the wrong coordinates, so your receiver confidently believes a lie [15].

Both have spread fast over the past five years [15]. Russia has been jamming the signal along its western borders, officially to throw off Ukrainian drones; the interference hits tens of thousands of civilian flights a month that pass through the region [15]. Combatants in the Middle East jam and spoof to deflect drones and to hide the positions of ships at sea [15].

What it means for everything that runs on the signal

The quiet shock in the data is that the jammers reach higher than anyone assumed. Satellites in low orbit — not just phones on the ground — are losing the signal as they pass over these regions [15]. That matters because spacecraft use GPS for more than location. An imaging satellite needs it to know exactly where it is and which way it’s pointing; without it, it can’t reliably aim its camera or even its own antenna back at Earth [15]. SpaceX’s Starlink constellation uses GPS to keep its satellites from colliding [15].

And it’s not only deliberate attacks. A severe solar storm in May 2024 distorted the signal so badly that precision farming machines across parts of the United States couldn’t work for days [15]. The same faint signal underpins power grids, financial timestamps, and oil drilling [15].

The fix, and its limit

Xona’s answer is brute strength: its Pulsar satellites will fly far lower than GPS and beam a signal about 100 times stronger, which is much harder to drown out [15]. The company says that against today’s jammers, that would shrink the area they can disrupt by roughly 95% [15]. Xona raised $170 million in March and plans to launch six satellites in October, with basic service in early 2027 [15].

A stronger signal raises the cost of jamming. It does not end the contest — it just resets it at a higher level.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

When a signal becomes a weapon, it stops being a signal

GPS works by everyone trusting the same faint signal — which is exactly why, once it became valuable enough to attack, it stopped being trustworthy.

A number that everyone agreed to trust

For decades, GPS quietly did one job: it told you where you were and what time it was. A few satellites high above the Earth beamed down a faint timing signal, your receiver listened, and out came a position. It worked because it was a shared measure — a single number that planes, ships, banks, farmers, and phones all agreed to treat as the truth.

The whole point of a shared measure is that nobody fights over it. It just sits there, reliable, in the background. You stop noticing it the way you stop noticing the floor.

The moment a measure becomes worth corrupting

Then the signal got too useful. The same faint beam that guides a delivery van also guides a drone to a target. The instant location became the difference between a missile that hits and a missile that misses, the signal stopped being neutral infrastructure and became a thing worth attacking.

So people attacked it. Russia floods its western border with noise to throw off Ukrainian drones; combatants in the Middle East do the same, and spoof false coordinates to hide ships at sea. The interference now stretches from France to the edge of Pakistan, and it scrambles tens of thousands of civilian flights a month along the way.

This is an old pattern with a name. When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. A number that everyone trusts is, for exactly that reason, a number worth corrupting — because corrupting it now changes outcomes. The trust that made GPS valuable is the same trust that made it worth breaking.

The proxy and the thing it stood for

GPS was always a proxy. The real thing you wanted was “where am I, truthfully.” The signal was just a convenient stand-in — cheap, global, good enough that everyone forgot it was a stand-in at all.

Spoofing is the sharp end of the problem. Jamming is loud: the signal goes quiet and you know something is wrong. Spoofing is quiet: your receiver still shows a confident position, but it’s a lie someone fed it. The proxy and the real thing have come apart, and the proxy doesn’t tell you. That gap — between the measure you can see and the truth you actually want — is where the danger lives. It’s the same gap as a test score that no longer reflects learning once teachers teach to the test, or a metric a company chases until the metric improves and the business quietly doesn’t.

Higher up than anyone thought

The new measurement carried its own quiet lesson. A test satellite turned on an ordinary GPS receiver in orbit and found it was losing the signal too — not just phones on the ground, but spacecraft 300 miles up. The jamming reaches higher than the people who deployed it assumed.

That is what usually happens when you optimize against a measure. The fix is aimed at one target — block the enemy’s drone — and the damage spreads to everything else that quietly depended on the same signal. The imaging satellite that can’t point its camera, the farm machine idled for days by a solar storm, the financial clock that timestamps a trade: none of them were the target. They are inside the same web, leaning on the same faint beam, and the contest over it doesn’t ask their permission.

A stronger signal, not a final one

The proposed answer is a louder signal — a new constellation flying lower and beaming about a hundred times stronger, much harder to drown out. On paper it shrinks the jammers’ reach by most of what it is today.

It is a real improvement. It is not an escape. A stronger measure raises the cost of corrupting it, which is genuinely worth doing — but it resets the contest at a higher level rather than ending it. As long as the measure is worth attacking, someone will build a way to attack it, and the people who matter most are the ones who never knew the fight was happening: the pilot trusting the dot on the map, the trader trusting the timestamp, you trusting the blue circle on your screen. We all run on signals we didn’t build and can’t check. Seeing how thin that trust is should make us hold our certainty about where we are — in every sense — a little more loosely.

03 · Lab · your turn

Trust the Signal

Rehearse deciding how far to trust a navigation signal as jamming rises, and feel the gap between the position shown and where you truly are.

04 · Hope · carry this

The same engineers who measured how badly the signal is being scrambled are already building a sturdier one — proof that when a thing we all quietly depend on starts to fail, people notice, and then they get to work.