Laser links for satellites work fine, but if you're up against a 10 year old spy satellite or you're selectively jamming their SAR (radar imaging) or GLONASS positioning rather than their comms...
> Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said daily lives depend on satellites that power everyday technologies like mobile phones and banking apps, adding the loss of GPS would cost the UK economy £1.4bn a day.
Oh no! Not our precious banking apps! What a weird thing to call out specifically. It's also kind of strange to talk about how critical satellites have become to people's lives only to conclude with "Now we're taking out the satellites other countries depend on."
In a largely cashless society like the UK, ‘banking apps’ are effectively people’s wallets. Knowing you got paid, being able to pay your rent, being able to pay for goods and services… seem like pretty everyday concerns.
That's going to be a problem when the UK faces sustained service disruption attacks. Building fragile systems like this during peacetime is usually an ill-informed bet.
At the very least the idea of a population fearing for their future if an app doesn't work is frankly horrifying. In the case of banking apps there are already multiple, simple, well established, and widely supported alternatives to using the app available to them, but that should really be the case for anything actually critical
A lot of banks in the UK have mobile-app-exclusive features / services.
I imagine this is because of security, but it also makes little sense. If you don't have a smartphone it is about 5x harder to do anything online-banking related here.
I remember when I went camping a bit ago my phone died and I was unable to unfreeze my card.
> I remember when I went camping a bit ago my phone died and I was unable to unfreeze my card.
Not even over the phone? I'd be furious. Cell phone die, get lost, get stolen, get run over, etc. I'd personally hate to feel so entirely dependent on my phone being there 100% of the time. I don't even always carry mine with me.
I imagine that if all banking apps go down as a result of war then bank websites, credit cards, basically any other digital financial thing will also be down.
If you're bored, have Claude pull apart your APK and do a privacy report.
Your banking app is almost certainly using a company like (horrible and evil) Yodlee, which is given data by your banking app under the guise of "organizing your transactions into categories". Yodlee then quickly de-anonymizes it, by the identifiers which are identical and given to firebase, and various other orgs. Yodlee has been caught doing this before, and they still operate.
Lots of other companies do this, so if your banking app has any callbacks to anywhere but the bank itself, it's nothing but trouble.
After deanoymoization, such data is of course sold to everyone, including intelligence agencies, domestic and foreign.
So yeah that sucks, but... what does that have to do with the concerns being discussed here?
Digital banking in some form is pretty unavoidable for me unless I want a "live in the woods" type lifestyle and all the consequences of it. And I don't even live in the UK where they've embraced it more. My mortgage was sold to a very distant company and we've had mail problems. My dog recently needed middle of the night surgery and they wouldn't start without payment that exceeded normal cash reserves + daily.
Yes, all these things suck, but shooting digital banking in the knee without a solution to all that isn't helpful.
Which is why I think it is a stupid idea for a society to go cashless. They are just asking for a complete economic collapse if anything goes wrong with telecomms.
Just read the article and the conclusion was that they're using ground based systems to disrupt other countries satellites that are targeting the UK, not the one's that those countries depend on for their own internal services.
I guess the question is what does "targeting the UK" look like exactly? Flying over it? Flying over it with a camera?
They call out "tracking the movement of the UK's nuclear armed submarines or other sensitive military operations, such as those involving special forces." but that could mean they jam military satellites that are doing that, or it could mean they're jamming satellites that might be capable of doing that. What would that mean for something like a weather satellite?
Look, I'm a big believer in the importance of cash as an option in our society and the importance of keeping a supply on-hand for emergencies, but my mortgage company, employer, and a lot of other financial concerns are hours away from me, so yeah - my banking app is pretty fucking important to my daily life, and I don't even live in the UK where they have embraced digital banking even more.
It's light on the details of what they're disrupting and how, but there is zero suggestion in the article that they are disrupting digital banking, the Internet, or consumer services at all for for other countries.
Given the “Hybrid” attacks in Europe originating with Russia, the Houthi’s and Iran taking shots at shipping and the likelihood that certain countries are feeding Iran some of the intel… this is pretty understandable.
Russia makes whole regions inaccessible to GPS and it’s ultimately for the same underlying reason: soft kill systems and area denial scale better than kinetic options and are deniable.
It’s disappointing to see the majority of conversation here is moralizing and grandstanding rather than analysis.
It should be standard practice to use radio jammers and dazzling lasers against every non-allied foreign satellite that passes over our territory, or any of our military bases or warships. Why give them a free look?
If only that were true. The world would be a much better place if we only had to deal with waste caused by the military-industrial complex. But the unfortunate reality is that a desperate and expansionist Russia represents a serious threat. They need to be aggressively confronted and contained in every domain, including space.
> But the unfortunate reality is that a desperate and expansionist Russia represents a serious threat.
No, they do not. Attacking nato is suicidal behavior. Pretending like the war with ukraine is "expansionist" in intent instead of establishing a sphere of influence is just disingenuous. Was it stupid? Yes. Does it mean Russia is going to invade poland? Fuck no. Stop reading propaganda. You're smarter than your leaders. Act like it!
When I moved to the west coast, I was looking at the history and how cities like Burbank lived under a tarp cover that when viewed from the air looked nothing like the city/airport that they were covering. The fear of another Pearl Harbor like attack was that great. Plus, all of that cool shade while denying the enemy!!
There's a bunch of stuff for using terrain to figure out where you are [1], generally used for missiles and planes though, not sure if works well from a ground perspective.
On the ground, you might be able to use the broadcast positioning system: more or less GPS but instead of satellites, the broadcast signal comes from existing TV towers... TV towers may well be targetted at some point in a war, but there's likely more valuable targets at the beginning of a war.
I’m sure we’ll go back to beacons [1] here in the UK
Using fire to signify a message is thousands of years old. The earliest use of beacons in the UK dates back to the medieval period, primarily as a means of communication to warn of impending invasions or other dangers. Positioned on hilltops and along coastlines, these beacons were part of an early warning system signalling the presence of a threat, such as an approaching enemy fleet.
One of the most famous early examples is the network of beacons used during the Spanish Armada in 1588. As around 150 Spanish battleships approached, beacons were lit along the southern coast of England, from Cornwall to London. As a result of this rudimentary but effective system Lord Francis Drake had the time to mobilise the country’s defences and defeat the Spanish fleet before they were able to reach the English shore.
Pretty sure the Spanish Armada was <150 total ships, of which only a small subset would be the big galleon things. (And then my knowledge hits a wall, idk what the difference between a galleon and ship-of-the-line/battleship is)
I'm not sure how much to trust the rest of that website.
I think the general assumption is GPS is denied in most combat zones, it's constantly being jammed in and around Ukraine.
For most things the fallback is going to be everything we used to use. Maps, stellar navigation, inertial navigation that sort of thing.
Guided weapons wise, terrain mapping is pretty common for cruise missiles. Storm Shadow, for example uses GPS, terrain and inertial guidance systems. Trident uses inertia and stellar navigation.
As for why it hasn't proliferated into civilian use? Mostly it has its just the old things. You can perfectly well drive your car with a road map and sign posts. Pilots still train to use dead reckoning and beacons. Etc.
Actually it hasn't proliferated into civilian use because the military industrial complex has captured pretty much anything with real accuracy.
I had an old colleague who in a previous life worked on an incredibly accurate positioning system that was effectively a brief case that knew where it was at all times. The story he told was the DoD made them an offer they couldn't refuse, and everything became secret. I'm pretty sure the company in question is still in business.
I'm not trying to say it's not legal but it might not exactly be legal?
> the military industrial complex has captured pretty much anything with real accuracy
Real accuracy is a matter of application. For mainstream civilian use the 20-30cm offered by Galileo/GPS is beyond real accuracy. It gets even better for specialized civilian use or with the aid of differential GNSS (low single digit cm). You'd have to think real hard for a reason to need better precision on a global scale especially if that involves any extra cost.
Can't say how much of a priority accurate positioning would be for civilians during an armed conflict.
We also have visual navigation systems that can use satellite imagery to produce guidance packages. They will become increasingly less useful the longer the imagery goes without updates after a Kessler syndrome type event, though. Another strategy, which I believe the Ukrainians have been experimenting with, is scattering small radio beacons throughout the battlespace to provide a network of navigation aids.
In a true Kessler scenario where LEO is denied for an extended period of time, I expect a variation of that strategy is how we would replace GPS for most civilian use cases. Likely by using cell towers to triangulate, possibly enhanced with additional transmitters to improve accuracy and coverage. Pure cell tower triangulation would have much worse coverage than GPS, obviously especially in rural areas where cell service is often already poor, but also anywhere that getting a signal from multiple towers isn't easy or possible. Cell towers are never distant enough to use the relativity-based timing tricks GPS relies on, so multiple signals would be required to triangulate. We'd likely end up with substantially less precise positioning, maybe something more on the order of the 10-20m of error we used to see with GPS before the US stopped limiting civilian access to the deaccuratized version. Cell tower triangulation also obviously doesn't work for aviation or oceanic shipping, where trident-like inertial+stellar nav would probably be the only workable option.
That presumes we're not already in it. When historians 100 years from now look back on this period, what's going to be the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand? What's going to be the Reichstag fire of 2027?
Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Iran/US are going to be looked at as the precursors to WW3, the same way that the Sino-Japanese War, Spanish Civil War, and Sudetenland Crisis were the precursors to WW2 and the Russo-Japanese War, Moroccan Crisis, and Balkan Wars were the precursors to WW1.
Right, in future conflicts between major countries the satellites will be first casualties. The US military is aware of this and still trains personnel on analog navigation techniques. Inertial navigation works well for some missions and research is underway on alternative technologies. Civil airliners can still navigate without GPS, although this may reduce safety and increase workload.
We're also going to need a prompt launch capability to replace attrition losses. There should be warehouses full of spare navigation, reconnaissance, and communications satellites ready to mount on a reusable booster and launch within hours. Concerns have been raised over a "Kessler syndrome" due to orbital debris but in lower orbits with significant atmospheric drag this won't be a serious problem.
IIRC, the Navy stopped teaching officers traditional ship navigation methods for awhile, until the series of incredibly stupid incidents drew attention to the lack of basic navigation and piloting skills, then curriculums were partly reverted. Not sure if things have improved much; probably too early to tell.
This is the easiest trick technique for figuring out vaguely north/south direction.
Take an analog watch. Say it is 9am, point the 12pm/midday point of the watch at the horizon directly below the sun, the half way distance between the hour hand and 12pm is the fairly close direction of the pole. So in that case, the 10:30am point would be the pole.
In the northern hemisphere it points South, in Southern hemisphere it points North.
It is an old Army/SAS trick for keeping baring without a compass.
This reminds me of this scene from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead when they're trying to figure out whether Hamlet knows a hawk from a handsaw by the direction of the wind.
> Whatever that technology is, why hasn’t it proliferated into civilian life so that we all benefit from a resilient, non-GPS backup?
Once a stealth technology is integrated into civilian life, it's no longer stealth, and you lose the element of surprise if you have to use it in warfare. If somebody _does_ feel they have a clever secret work-around, the incentive is pretty high to keep it a secret.
Exactly, a notable time military tech has been deployed in public in full would be the TOR network. That was done to provide enough noise on the network to hide its purpose/make difficult to track.
GPS has relatively few satellites... but if in doubt, I think Starlink with its absurdly large fleet of satellites can be used as an alternative. Maybe not at a precision level good enough for precision farming, but good enough to roughly guide troops to where they need to go.
Modern cruise missiles and stuff like Storm Shadow, Taurus etc. already rely on sensor fusion - GPS, inertial navigation, radar, optics and probably a ton more to always keep track of the position.
Assuming Starlink is a no-show for whatever reason, airliners and ships will have to revert back to stationary navigation aids aka your good old light towers and radio beacons.
That's the thing, to take down any of the megaconstellations you need thousands of antisat weapons and that's just one constellation. Not sure about the competitors but at least for Starlink their laser links should provide ample fallback for ground stations going out of service.
There's technology now that matches local satellite images against the imagery that a drone or cruise missile sees to replace the GPS chip.
For fairly obvious reasons, militaries that have it would rather it stay in their hands, for fear of creating a non-state peer competitor that can do cheap long-range strikes on strategic targets.
It's fairly likely it'll fall into private hands anyway though, because anyone who can afford the prices for commercial satellite imagery could build such a thing.
The US military has been funding plenty of projects related to what it calls Alt-PNT, or "alternative position, navigation, and timing" systems. I imagine other nations have invested in this as well.
Which systems are actually getting deployed, and in what pieces of equipment? No idea, I imagine that's super duper classified.
Knock out? no, best option is to have them all pre-hacked and send out spoofed data at the most desired times, especially if you knew what weapon systems were relying on them. Knocking out the satellites is like flipping the table in chess, you'd only do it if you were pretty sure you had no chance of winning because everyone else in the tournament won't like it. The duopoly-based cold war is over and those winner-take-all tactics were what drove USA policymakers to try so hard to get China to play on the world stage.
You could have the GPS constantly changing in the same way as time sensitive rolling key authenticators work. Without the base private key, you wouldn't be able to decode it in time. So it remains functional for those that need it but becomes useless, actively works against those without it.
You may be right, but if that happens the resultant space debris will serve as an additional terrible outcome of any major conflict.
We will have to kiss goodbye to any future space launches, existing satellites are likely to get knocked out and ultimately our frontier space era will grind to a hault.
You pretty much have to do this to knock out starlink (or similar constellations in future). There's so many currently deployed and they can be launched with such cadence that knocking them all out isn't feasible.
we don't use the word WAR anymore. it's uncouth. it's CONFLICT now. they'll call this the era of the Great International Technology Conflict or Technology Hostilities.
You see a lot of real world stuff going on in Ukraine. They haven't knocked out GPS satellites but have local jammers. The missiles and the like can use a variety of alternative systems like inertial navigation and terrain matching. There are a couple of startups that make a box that can navigate with a camera looking down at the scenery for ~$1 or 2k.
The location system in your phone often uses a resilient, non-GPS backup based on cataloguing the locations of WiFi routers. Not due to enemy action but your Starbucks having a building over it. There are two main systems, one from Google, one from Apple.
So maybe that's why the UK talks about Israel's "right to defend itself" as a justification for flattening Gaza - they also want to "defend themselves" by attacking other states.
does anyone know what exactly they are jamming? if a satellite spies on cellular and wifi activity, can you directionally jam it on that spectrum without causing collateral?
if it's an active frequency hopping radar can you react in time to ruin its image?
can a ground based laser track it well enough to dazzle its optical sensors?
Most satellite signals are high frequency, but low power (it's amazing how little power you need for a LoS radio signal). So generally they're easy to overwhelm, especially as GPS receiving antennas tend to be multi-directional. GPS transmits on several fixed frequencies and is relatively bitrate, too. The military signals are apparently more robust, but full details are more scarce.
There’s been talk of Russia potentially attacking a NATO country within weeks. The way the media have coordinated in saying this leads me to believe this has come from intelligence and they’re trying to prepare us.
And that country would probably be Poland. Russian hardliners want to reunite the USSR of which Poland was a member state. Plus Poland is the greatest threat to Kaliningrad.
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[ 0.43 ms ] story [ 13.2 ms ] threador a whole new technology invented other than radio waves for data transmission
are any satellites using laser downlink yet or is line-of-sight too temperamental with weather and planes?
“disrupting, degrading and denying hostile threats in space”
Not even pretending to be building and defending anything positive in space.
Not this quackery again
Oh no! Not our precious banking apps! What a weird thing to call out specifically. It's also kind of strange to talk about how critical satellites have become to people's lives only to conclude with "Now we're taking out the satellites other countries depend on."
Also, cool username =)
Not even over the phone? I'd be furious. Cell phone die, get lost, get stolen, get run over, etc. I'd personally hate to feel so entirely dependent on my phone being there 100% of the time. I don't even always carry mine with me.
Your banking app is almost certainly using a company like (horrible and evil) Yodlee, which is given data by your banking app under the guise of "organizing your transactions into categories". Yodlee then quickly de-anonymizes it, by the identifiers which are identical and given to firebase, and various other orgs. Yodlee has been caught doing this before, and they still operate.
Lots of other companies do this, so if your banking app has any callbacks to anywhere but the bank itself, it's nothing but trouble.
After deanoymoization, such data is of course sold to everyone, including intelligence agencies, domestic and foreign.
Digital banking in some form is pretty unavoidable for me unless I want a "live in the woods" type lifestyle and all the consequences of it. And I don't even live in the UK where they've embraced it more. My mortgage was sold to a very distant company and we've had mail problems. My dog recently needed middle of the night surgery and they wouldn't start without payment that exceeded normal cash reserves + daily.
Yes, all these things suck, but shooting digital banking in the knee without a solution to all that isn't helpful.
Is it usual for companies in the UK to just not pay their employees?
They call out "tracking the movement of the UK's nuclear armed submarines or other sensitive military operations, such as those involving special forces." but that could mean they jam military satellites that are doing that, or it could mean they're jamming satellites that might be capable of doing that. What would that mean for something like a weather satellite?
I have no idea what that quote is trying to say...
It's light on the details of what they're disrupting and how, but there is zero suggestion in the article that they are disrupting digital banking, the Internet, or consumer services at all for for other countries.
So, who's the UK actually attacking?
Russia makes whole regions inaccessible to GPS and it’s ultimately for the same underlying reason: soft kill systems and area denial scale better than kinetic options and are deniable.
It’s disappointing to see the majority of conversation here is moralizing and grandstanding rather than analysis.
No, they do not. Attacking nato is suicidal behavior. Pretending like the war with ukraine is "expansionist" in intent instead of establishing a sphere of influence is just disingenuous. Was it stupid? Yes. Does it mean Russia is going to invade poland? Fuck no. Stop reading propaganda. You're smarter than your leaders. Act like it!
On the ground, you might be able to use the broadcast positioning system: more or less GPS but instead of satellites, the broadcast signal comes from existing TV towers... TV towers may well be targetted at some point in a war, but there's likely more valuable targets at the beginning of a war.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM
[2] https://www.gps.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/CGSICMeeting...
Using fire to signify a message is thousands of years old. The earliest use of beacons in the UK dates back to the medieval period, primarily as a means of communication to warn of impending invasions or other dangers. Positioned on hilltops and along coastlines, these beacons were part of an early warning system signalling the presence of a threat, such as an approaching enemy fleet.
One of the most famous early examples is the network of beacons used during the Spanish Armada in 1588. As around 150 Spanish battleships approached, beacons were lit along the southern coast of England, from Cornwall to London. As a result of this rudimentary but effective system Lord Francis Drake had the time to mobilise the country’s defences and defeat the Spanish fleet before they were able to reach the English shore.
[1] https://www.paintersforstal.co.uk/news/the-history-of-beacon...
Pretty sure the Spanish Armada was <150 total ships, of which only a small subset would be the big galleon things. (And then my knowledge hits a wall, idk what the difference between a galleon and ship-of-the-line/battleship is)
I'm not sure how much to trust the rest of that website.
For most things the fallback is going to be everything we used to use. Maps, stellar navigation, inertial navigation that sort of thing.
Guided weapons wise, terrain mapping is pretty common for cruise missiles. Storm Shadow, for example uses GPS, terrain and inertial guidance systems. Trident uses inertia and stellar navigation.
As for why it hasn't proliferated into civilian use? Mostly it has its just the old things. You can perfectly well drive your car with a road map and sign posts. Pilots still train to use dead reckoning and beacons. Etc.
I had an old colleague who in a previous life worked on an incredibly accurate positioning system that was effectively a brief case that knew where it was at all times. The story he told was the DoD made them an offer they couldn't refuse, and everything became secret. I'm pretty sure the company in question is still in business.
I'm not trying to say it's not legal but it might not exactly be legal?
Real accuracy is a matter of application. For mainstream civilian use the 20-30cm offered by Galileo/GPS is beyond real accuracy. It gets even better for specialized civilian use or with the aid of differential GNSS (low single digit cm). You'd have to think real hard for a reason to need better precision on a global scale especially if that involves any extra cost.
Can't say how much of a priority accurate positioning would be for civilians during an armed conflict.
In a true Kessler scenario where LEO is denied for an extended period of time, I expect a variation of that strategy is how we would replace GPS for most civilian use cases. Likely by using cell towers to triangulate, possibly enhanced with additional transmitters to improve accuracy and coverage. Pure cell tower triangulation would have much worse coverage than GPS, obviously especially in rural areas where cell service is often already poor, but also anywhere that getting a signal from multiple towers isn't easy or possible. Cell towers are never distant enough to use the relativity-based timing tricks GPS relies on, so multiple signals would be required to triangulate. We'd likely end up with substantially less precise positioning, maybe something more on the order of the 10-20m of error we used to see with GPS before the US stopped limiting civilian access to the deaccuratized version. Cell tower triangulation also obviously doesn't work for aviation or oceanic shipping, where trident-like inertial+stellar nav would probably be the only workable option.
That presumes we're not already in it. When historians 100 years from now look back on this period, what's going to be the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand? What's going to be the Reichstag fire of 2027?
https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/may/10/...
https://interestingengineering.com/military/us-military-nail...
We're also going to need a prompt launch capability to replace attrition losses. There should be warehouses full of spare navigation, reconnaissance, and communications satellites ready to mount on a reusable booster and launch within hours. Concerns have been raised over a "Kessler syndrome" due to orbital debris but in lower orbits with significant atmospheric drag this won't be a serious problem.
Take an analog watch. Say it is 9am, point the 12pm/midday point of the watch at the horizon directly below the sun, the half way distance between the hour hand and 12pm is the fairly close direction of the pole. So in that case, the 10:30am point would be the pole.
In the northern hemisphere it points South, in Southern hemisphere it points North.
It is an old Army/SAS trick for keeping baring without a compass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf0erXl4pwQ
Once a stealth technology is integrated into civilian life, it's no longer stealth, and you lose the element of surprise if you have to use it in warfare. If somebody _does_ feel they have a clever secret work-around, the incentive is pretty high to keep it a secret.
Modern cruise missiles and stuff like Storm Shadow, Taurus etc. already rely on sensor fusion - GPS, inertial navigation, radar, optics and probably a ton more to always keep track of the position.
Assuming Starlink is a no-show for whatever reason, airliners and ships will have to revert back to stationary navigation aids aka your good old light towers and radio beacons.
(I’m mildly curious what their ground stations in Central Europe look like from this perspective).
For fairly obvious reasons, militaries that have it would rather it stay in their hands, for fear of creating a non-state peer competitor that can do cheap long-range strikes on strategic targets.
It's fairly likely it'll fall into private hands anyway though, because anyone who can afford the prices for commercial satellite imagery could build such a thing.
Can already see the poor headlines of "Snapdragon chips used to bomb schools!"
... Star navigation, INS, magnetic navigation...
But nothing like we have today.
Which systems are actually getting deployed, and in what pieces of equipment? No idea, I imagine that's super duper classified.
https://shop.osmaps.com/
We will have to kiss goodbye to any future space launches, existing satellites are likely to get knocked out and ultimately our frontier space era will grind to a hault.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz23G_UXCGA
There are also about half a dozen rival GPS like satellite systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Simi...
The location system in your phone often uses a resilient, non-GPS backup based on cataloguing the locations of WiFi routers. Not due to enemy action but your Starbucks having a building over it. There are two main systems, one from Google, one from Apple.
Veritasium did a video on it recently https://youtu.be/tz23G_UXCGA
if it's an active frequency hopping radar can you react in time to ruin its image?
can a ground based laser track it well enough to dazzle its optical sensors?
GPS jamming is for recievers.
It wasn't. Poland was formally independent country, but practically under control of Moscow.