GPS Is Broken

Last week, two airliners lost GPS over Sweden.

A KLM flight from Amsterdam to Helsinki on September 17.

Then an Air Canada flight from Delhi to Toronto the very next day.

The KLM crew had to ask for a reset of its avionics mid-flight.

Both planes landed safely, thankfully, by falling back on older navigation systems.

And it’s happening more and more often.

Six Nordic and Baltic countries have formally told the International Civil Aviation Organization that the interference comes from transmitters inside Russia, in Kaliningrad, Saint Petersburg, Smolensk, and Rostov.

Sweden’s Transport Agency logged 142 satellite navigation interference reports in the first five months of this year alone.

And that’s the quiet corner of the map.

The Day 1,100 Ships Went Blind

When Operation Epic Fury kicked off on February 28, the Persian Gulf lit up with jamming.

According to the maritime analytics firm Windward, more than 1,100 ships in the Gulf had their GPS and tracking signals scrambled.

Vessels showed up on screens sitting at an airport… at the Barakah nuclear power plant… on dry land inside Iran.

Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz fell by about a third in a single day.

Windward called it “the sharpest acceleration in jamming events recorded in maritime history.”

That’s 20% of the world’s oil and gas moving through a chokepoint where nobody could trust their own position.

So what did Washington do about it?

Seven weeks later, it threw out the fix.

The Pentagon Passes on GPS

On April 17, the Space Force cancelled OCX, the next-generation ground control system for GPS.

The program was supposed to be done in 2016.

Instead, it ran a decade late and cost $6.27 billion, up from an original estimate of $3.7 billion.

The Space Force called the problems “insurmountable,” warning that forcing the system online could put existing military and civilian GPS at risk.

In plain English, the Pentagon spent $6 billion trying to patch GPS and concluded it couldn’t be done.

And the search for a replacement is moving fast.

GPS-Free Navigation Gets Real

This month alone, the Defense Innovation Unit flew an Embraer 170 from Puget Sound to southern Alaska and back, four hours and 23 minutes, with no GPS at all.

Northrop Grumman flew its Lumberjack drone under electronic attack, over land and open water, and it kept navigating the whole time.

And an Australian firm steered a ship across the Coral Sea using quantum gravity sensors, staying within one nautical mile the whole time.

Real navigation takes three things: Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT).

GPS handled all three from space, which is why it’s so easy to interfere with.

But now, the goal is to deliver all three from a box small enough to fit inside a drone, a missile, or a submarine, without a single signal from a satellite.

The company that can do that is in line for one of the biggest profit opportunities of the decade.

And it’s already here.

The Quantum Compass

In researching this issue, I found a company that makes a quantum optical clock that’s already been tested by the Royal Navy.

It makes quantum motion sensors designed to wipe out the drift that has plagued backup navigation systems for decades.

And it makes quantum gravity sensors, including one it’s building for NASA to fly in space.

Every one of those devices runs on the same core technology: individual atoms, trapped and chilled by lasers to a hair above absolute zero.

Nature already calibrated them. The company just figured out how to read them.

It has been doing work for DARPA for more than a decade.

It’s sitting on more than 230 patents, issued and pending.

And it only started trading publicly this year, so almost no one knows about it.

Except Washington.

The Commerce Department just signed a letter of intent to put up to $100 million into this company and take an equity stake in exchange.

The U.S. government is about to become a shareholder.

That’s about as strong a vote of confidence as a small company can get.

And you can find out all the specifics in my latest report right here.