In the first four months of 2025, nearly 123,000 commercial flights in Europe had their satellite navigation disrupted, according to figures published by GPS World.
The worst of it has been over the Baltic. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, GPS signals across Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland and the Gulf of Finland have been jammed, spoofed or degraded as a matter of routine. Civilian aircraft hundreds of miles from any front have been fed false positions, wrong altitudes and bad timing data.
A weak signal
The weakness is built in. GPS satellites orbit about 20,200 kilometers up, and by the time the signal reaches the ground it carries about as much power as a 20-watt light bulb spread across a hemisphere. A handheld jammer costing less than $50 can swamp it across an area several kilometers in radius. Vehicle-mounted systems can reach aircraft receivers dozens of kilometers away.
Spoofing is harder and worse. A spoofer broadcasts a fake GPS signal, and the receiver calculates a false position without any warning. A jammed aircraft usually alerts the crew and switches to backups. A spoofed one can fly a course that looks normal on its instruments while drifting off the real one.
Timing is the quieter risk. Financial exchanges, telecom networks and power grids rely on GPS time, with precision measured in nanoseconds. CISA, the Department of Defense and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have all published guidance for infrastructure operators.
In January 2026, coastal states around the Baltic and North Seas, along with Iceland, sent an open letter to the maritime community warning that GNSS interference had become a safety problem. They called for alternative land-based radionavigation systems to stand in during outages.
Moving to low orbit
Every alternative navigation constellation now in development sits in low Earth orbit, between roughly 340 and 1,200 kilometers up. That puts the satellites 17 to 60 times closer than GPS, and received signal power rises sharply with proximity.
Xona Space Systems, a California startup, launched its Pulsar-0 satellite in June 2025. The company says its signals arrive with about 100 times the power of GPS. At Jammertest 2025 in Norway, the Pulsar X5 signal cut a jammer’s effective radius by 6.3 times compared with GPS L5. Xona also authenticates both its navigation data and ranging signals so receivers can tell a real satellite from a spoofer.
The money is following. Xona announced a $170 million Series C in March 2026, on top of $92 million disclosed in June 2025, and plans a 258-satellite constellation. It expects its first production satellites to start launching in late 2026. A competitor, TrustPoint, launched its third satellite in June 2025.
The assured navigation market is projected to grow from $400 million a year in 2022 to $3.5 billion by 2032.
Drones go without
The war in Ukraine has pushed drone makers further. A LinkedIn analysis of the fighting argued that drones relying only on satellite navigation are finished, since heavy electronic warfare has defeated even advanced eight-element antennas. After a Superkam drone was shot down on the Sumy axis, investigators found a precision altimeter and an onboard computer, which pointed to terrain-matching navigation.
Newer drones fuse inertial sensors, altimeters, camera imagery and map data so that no single failure leaves them lost.
Sources
- Improving Drone Systems Against Signal Jamming
- The PNT Vulnerability: GPS Jamming, Spoofing, and the Commercial Market for Resilient Navigation
