GPS is under attack — a satellite just mapped how bad

Your phone knows where you are. Until it doesn't.

GPS is under attack. All over the world.

Let me explain. Bad actors are jamming and faking the signal. Jamming drowns it out. Faking sends a wrong location.

And it's getting worse fast.

A startup called Xona put a test satellite in low orbit. From up there, it mapped the mess below.

What it saw was grim. Whole stretches of Europe and the Middle East have lost good GPS.

"It's quite a bit more than we expected," the team said.

Why is GPS so easy to break? It's faint.

The signal comes from way up high — past 12,000 miles. By the time it reaches you, it's a whisper… a cheap jammer can shout over it.

And the damage is grave. Planes lose their bearings. Ships drift off course. Some have crashed.

It hits money too. Banks use GPS time to stamp trades. No signal, big trouble.

So here's the opening. If old GPS is weak, build something stronger.

That's Xona's bet. Its planned fleet will beam a signal 100 times stronger from low orbit.

A louder signal is far harder to drown out. The first satellites go up this fall.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Can't the army just fix this? Its signal is tougher, yes.

But you don't use the army's signal. Your phone, your plane, your bank all lean on the weak civilian one.

And that's the gap these startups want to fill.

A whisper got jammed. The fix is to shout…

Ouch. A new audit landed this week. It found NASA spent $5.9 billion on Artemis hardware that's now canceled. The agency changed its Moon plan and dropped the old gear. One launch tower alone ran near $2 billion. A single adapter neared half a billion. The work got done. But the need vanished. It's a hard look at how government space money can melt away. Plans change. The bills don't.

Blue Origin took a hard hit last month. Its big New Glenn rocket blew up on the pad during a test. The blast wrecked its only launch site. But the firm isn't backing down. CEO Dave Limp says he wants a new New Glenn on the pad before 2026 ends. That's a bold goal. The pad needs repairs, and the cause needs a fix. Jeff Bezos is racing to catch SpaceX. The clock is loud.

Here's a gap science is finally filling. For decades, women have flown to space. Yet no study ever tracked menstruation in orbit. A new project called Operation Period will change that. It will study how zero-g affects the cycle. Why now? More women fly than ever, and private trips are booming. Better data means safer, healthier missions. Space medicine still has blank pages. This fills one.

Set an alarm for tomorrow.

A small craft called Link will launch at dawn. Its target: NASA's old Swift telescope.

We told you about this plan a couple of weeks ago. Now it's go time.

Swift has watched the sky for 22 years. But it's sinking. By October, it may fall too low to save.

So Link will chase it down and give it a push. Higher orbit, more years of life.

Link is the size of a fridge. It packs ion engines and three robot arms.

If it works, it proves a whole new trade: fixing satellites in space.

One rescue. A huge prize…

Back to that broken signal. How does GPS even work?

Picture about 30 satellites circling high above. Each one shouts the same thing… "Here's the exact time, and here's where I am."

Your phone listens to several at once. It checks how long each signal took to arrive. From those tiny gaps, it pins your spot.

It's clever. But it's fragile.

The signals travel 12,000 miles to reach you. They arrive faint, like a far-off whisper.

So a small jammer can bury them in noise. Then your phone hears nothing.

Spoofing is sneakier. It sends a fake but strong signal. Your phone trusts it and reports the wrong place.

In other words, the whole system runs on trust and timing. Break either one, and it fails.

That's why a stronger signal from low orbit could help so much.

Closer and louder beats far and faint.