“Celeste is a program that started not even two years ago, and we are already aiming to launch our first two satellites, what we call the IOD-1 and the IOD-2,” Giordano said. The satellites, now in orbit, are CubeSats flying at around 510 kilometers altitude.

“The objective of the mission is to demonstrate technology,” Giordano said. “This IOD [in-orbit demonstrator] phase is fundamental for us to master the technology, the techniques that we want to apply for future systems.” The satellites are designed to validate new positioning signals, multi-frequency capabilities, and integration with next-generation networks.

Giordano highlighted the wider scope of the Celeste program. “The two companies in charge of development are GMV and Thales Alenia Space France. They’re not just building the satellites. They’re also responsible for the ground segment and system-level development, including the very important specification phase, which will start as soon as the satellites are flying.”

Starting now

Celeste will operate across multiple frequency bands, Giordano said, “moving from UHF to other bands and potentially targeting indoor applications. Of course, L-band is a fundamental and master band we all need to provide. S-band has two phases: there is the S-band allocated to RNSS [radionavigation satellite services], used by GNSS systems today. But we may explore potentially usable MSS (mobile satellite service) bands, and will leverage 5G and terrestrial networks. “We also have C-band, one of the more appealing bands for resilience,” Giordano said, emphasizing the versatility and future-proofing of the system.

The IOD phase lays the groundwork for an operational LEO-PNT network. “At Ministerial ’25,” Giordano said, “ESA proposed the in-orbit preparation phase [IOP] that will follow.” First IOP satellites could be launched in the 2027-2028 timeframe. “When it comes to 5G and the current IOD satellites, we’re only testing the very basics, the physical layer,” Giordano said. “We will go beyond that in the IOP phase, where we plan to implement the full-scale 5G network capabilities.”

Looking ahead, Celeste is open to adding additional small constellations and experiments, offering opportunities for European industry and third-party participation. Giordano said, “We have a very strong ambition to bring into space operational services at European level in 2032, and we cannot do it with just demonstration satellites.”

With IOD-1 and IOD-2 now in orbit, ESA has taken its first tangible step toward a resilient, multi-band European LEO-PNT system, promising enhanced positioning, navigation, and timing services for the decades ahead.

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The Munich Space Summit remains one of the premier gatherings on the European space calendar, showcasing the accomplishments of leading industry players and policymakers. The Americans show up, too.

Despite current geopolitical strains, Europeans and Americans in the PNT and space communities continue to meet as collaborators, colleagues and, in many cases, longstanding friends. Conferences such as the Munich Space Summit are stronger for that transatlantic exchange.

One of the event’s key sessions, featuring program updates from the major satellite navigation providers, was moderated by Richard Fischer, publisher at U.S.-based Autonomous Media, the company behind Inside GNSS, Inside Unmanned Systems, Inside Autonomous Vehicles and xyHt.

“What strikes me most this year,” Fischer said, “is that the conversation around GNSS has clearly moved beyond constellation updates alone. Across the community, there is growing recognition that GNSS is critical infrastructure. It is no longer enough to think only in terms of accuracy and coverage. The language now is resilience, trust, authentication, continuity and assurance.”

Among the most anticipated appearances at the Summit was that of Christopher Erickson, the new U.S. Department of Transportation Director of PNT and Spectrum Management, succeeding longtime and widely respected GPS leader Karen Van Dyke. Erickson offered a sweeping overview of the current state of GPS, underscoring the extent to which U.S. positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) policy now involves a broad cross-section of government.

“It is very much a whole-of-government effort,” Erickson said. “NASA is addressing navigation beyond GEO and into the cislunar domain, developing plans for how position, navigation and timing will be provided in those environments. At the Department of Transportation, my office works across all transportation modes, including rail, highways and maritime, while the Federal Aviation Administration, of course, plays a central role in aviation. The Department of State is responsible for many of our international engagements with other global navigation satellite system providers, and the GPS system itself resides within the Department of Defense.”

It was the kind of summary that reminded the audience that GPS is no longer merely a satellite constellation, if indeed it ever was. It is a governance framework, a modernization program, a diplomatic instrument, a military capability, a civil utility and, increasingly, a resilience problem set. Erickson’s remarks made clear that no single office can now speak for the totality of the U.S. effort in PNT resilience. 

His overview continued in similar depth, and audience members received a concise but revealing tour of how GPS modernization, resilience planning and civil policy are being approached in Washington. Erickson was sharp, direct and notably comfortable speaking without presentation slides.

Off the Cuff

“One reason I did not feel it was essential to bring slides,” Erickson said, “is that GPS is, by design, a very deliberate and carefully managed system. If you have seen a GPS update in the last 18 months, you have likely seen many of the core elements already. That reflects our emphasis on stability, integrity and accuracy. We are cautious about implementing changes until we fully understand their implications.”

That observation may have drawn a few smiles, but it also underscored something important about GPS modernization: Progress in this domain is rarely theatrical. It is measured, highly scrutinized and often slower than outside observers would prefer. Yet, that caution is not accidental. It is built into the culture of a system on which aviation, defense, mapping, timing and countless commercial applications depend.

He then turned to the future of the constellation and the question of what comes after GPS IIIF.

“There are several avenues under consideration,” Erickson said. “We conducted a study known as R-GPS, or Resilient GPS, to examine how we might evolve the system while taking advantage of new capabilities and new thinking. That included looking at smaller satellites, shorter design lives, opportunities for multi-manifest launch, and ways to make the overall architecture less of a large, slow-moving enterprise and more agile, flexible and responsive, while preserving the accuracy and integrity on which users depend.”

He suggested a future architecture may not require every satellite to carry the same full set of functions.

“We also examined whether every satellite in a future architecture would need to carry the same full suite of capabilities,” he said. “If not, how might we distribute functions more effectively? How could space-based assets be used to complement one another? And how should such capabilities be distributed across orbit to deliver the most resilient and effective system?”

GPS may be deliberate in its evolution, but the strategic thinking around it is anything but static.

“We concluded that our primary focus should remain on MEO,” Erickson said. “At the same time, we launched the NTS-3 experiment, the first end-to-end navigation satellite experiment conducted by the United States in several decades. NTS-3 is exploring reprogrammability, ground responsiveness, user equipment implications, additional authorized signals, commercially relevant encryption approaches, and broader options for resilience. We hope to have initial results from that work later this year.”

Erickson also pointed to the Department of Transportation’s evaluation of complementary PNT technologies, an area of growing interest as governments seek to reduce overdependence on any single source of timing and navigation.

“We are close to releasing our first report covering approximately seven complementary PNT technologies,” he said, “and we are preparing to begin evaluating an additional group. In these efforts, we are procuring services from the companies involved and then assessing the technologies rigorously, from multiple operational and technical perspectives. The goal is to identify what these systems can do, where they perform well and where they may be appropriate within a broader PNT architecture.”

That is one of the most closely watched areas in U.S. policy today. The question is no longer whether alternatives or complements to GNSS exist. It is how they should be tested, how they should be compared and, most important, where they fit in a real operational framework. Erickson’s description suggested a government trying to move beyond abstract interest toward structured evaluation.

Another area gaining importance is PNT situational awareness.

“We have also begun a cross-government effort to create a shared data library,” Erickson said. “We already have several visualization tools and are continuing to expand and refine them. At the same time, we are engaging with international partners to share data and explore how to produce more comprehensive situational awareness products that can help inform decision-making as the interference environment evolves.”

Fischer then took the discussion in a broader direction, asking Erickson how the United States is thinking about the balance between maintaining an open global GNSS service and addressing the very real security concerns now moving to the top of the European agenda.

“If you are providing an open service,” Erickson said, “there are limits to what can be delivered solely by the service provider, and a significant portion of resilience necessarily resides with users and user equipment. That said, one important area I did not touch on earlier is authentication. It was not built into the civil service at the outset, largely because the scope of GPS’s eventual adoption was not fully anticipated. Today, however, we are working on out-of-band civil signal authentication that will be available to receivers with internet connectivity, and we are also advancing modernized civil authentication. Those efforts are proceeding in coordination with the U.S. Space Force as requirements are finalized and implementation moves forward.”

Forward with L5, but When?

The L5 signal is one of the most important modernization steps in GPS. More than simply an additional frequency, it represents a major advance in robustness, reliability and performance for safety-critical and precision applications. For aviation, surveying and other demanding user communities, L5 promises higher transmitted power, a stronger signal structure and characteristics specifically aligned with safety-of-life applications. First transmitted in 2005, however, it still has not been declared fully available for open-service users.

“We certainly have enough satellites on orbit transmitting L5 to support an initial capability,” Erickson said in response to an audience question. “By the time the tenth GPS III satellite is in the constellation, we expect to have 21. However, that is not the entire picture. The U.S. government has faced considerable pressure to declare the signal healthy, including under conditional approaches. But because L5 occupies a safety-of-life band, and because of what that means for our obligations with respect to integrity, we are not yet fully comfortable with the state of the overall enterprise.”

He made clear that the issue is tied not just to space assets, but to the ground segment and broader operational readiness.

“It is closely tied to the development of the ground system,” he said. “While I cannot provide a date today, we are continually reevaluating the situation and working toward bringing L5 forward as soon as we can do so responsibly.”

That answer led naturally to the larger issue of resilient PNT and the current U.S. posture.

“But stepping back to R-GPS,” Fischer asked, “what did the effort clarify, and how is the United States now thinking about resilient PNT more broadly?”

“That is an important question,” Erickson replied. “What you are seeing from the United States is an exploration of the boundary between what government should appropriately provide as foundational infrastructure and where the commercial sector should take the lead. The current administration has a strong interest in leveraging commercial capability wherever that is practical and effective.”

The question has resonance beyond the United States. When the European Union announced Galileo’s free High Accuracy Service, some commercial correction-service providers raised concerns that a government-backed free offering might disrupt existing markets. Ultimately, the market adapted, but the debate over where public provision should end and commercial opportunity should begin remains an active one.

“We are still working to define that appropriate boundary,” Erickson said, “what government should provide and what commercial industry is best positioned to provide in the context of resilient position, navigation and timing. I expect that this will eventually lead to a restructuring of broader PNT strategy. At present, however, we are in a data-collection and evaluation phase. NTS-3 is part of that. Our complementary PNT assessment effort is part of that as well. We are gathering the information needed to shape a coherent U.S. approach to resilient PNT moving forward, and I think we will see that picture come into much sharper focus over the next one to two years.”

The Timing’s Right

Timing, the “T” in PNT, is often overshadowed by navigation and positioning. Yet, it underpins telecom networks, power grids, financial systems and the digital infrastructure of modern life. Without precise timing, positioning solutions degrade, communications networks fall out of sync and critical infrastructure can quickly become unreliable. In Munich, timing was not overlooked.

Dana Goward, president of the Virginia-based Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, moderated a special Summit session on resilient time provision as a foundation of modern infrastructure. A longtime friend and collaborator of Inside GNSS, Goward is a familiar and respected figure in the transatlantic PNT community.

We caught up with him between sessions, where he explained the strategic framework he and others have been advancing.

“Timing is, and historically has been, a sovereign responsibility in support of both economic strength and national security,” Goward said. “At the RNT Foundation, and in some respects at the U.S. Department of Transportation as well, we have described a minimum resilient PNT architecture that includes what we call the resilience triad: signals from space, signals from terrestrial broadcast systems, and terrestrial fiber-based timing.”

The panel reflected that framework. Participants included Per Olof Hedekvist of Sweden’s RISE Research Institutes, an advocate for terrestrial backup systems such as eLoran; Stefan Baumann of IABG, who is active in resilient PNT testing, evaluation and system integration; Lisa Wörner of DLR, whose work includes resilient timing research, GNSS interference mitigation and alternative timing sources; and Tyler Reid, co-founder and CTO of Xona Space Systems.

Goward’s broader mission is to help policymakers understand the problem is solvable—and the tools to address it are already available.

“We have the technology, and in most cases it is not prohibitively expensive,” he said. “In many instances, elements of the solution are already in operation. What is needed is to bring them together coherently. At that point, the issue becomes one of leadership and governance.”

It is a message he has repeated often, and deliberately.

“We like to think of our work not as repetitive,” he said, “but as consistent. Staying on message matters.”

Storming Back

Another familiar and respected presence at the Munich Summit was Harold “Stormy” Martin, Director of the U.S. National Coordination Office for Space-Based PNT. As always, he offered pointed observations on the state of policy and implementation in the United States.

“We are in a relatively strong position in the sense that the policy guidance is clear,” Martin said. “Space Policy Directive-7, which was issued at the end of President Trump’s first term, speaks directly to resilience. Executive Order 13905 likewise calls on departments and agencies to strengthen resilience. So, the direction from the top-level policy framework is well established.”

By any measure, GPS remains one of the most consequential—and in some ways unexpected—success stories in modern infrastructure.

“There was never a plan for GPS to become the sole source of timing and navigation for federal departments or for critical infrastructure,” Martin said. “That does not appear in any White House policy document. Rather, we are in some respects dealing with the consequences of GPS’s extraordinary success. GPS and other GNSS services have been reliable, widely available and increasingly inexpensive to use. Receiver costs have fallen dramatically, and that has made GNSS the simplest choice for many budget-conscious decision-makers. Over time, alternative systems were reduced or eliminated, and some sectors now find themselves reliant on GNSS as their only remaining source of navigation and timing.”

That reality, he said, has created a strategic vulnerability that policymakers are now trying to address.

“It is an excellent system, and it has served us extremely well,” Martin said. “But every system has vulnerabilities. The signal originates roughly 12,000 miles away in space. It can be jammed. It can be spoofed. Those are not hypothetical issues.”

Current policy, he noted, places the emphasis on resilience, but implementation is inseparable from budget realities.

“Our policies are clear in telling organizations that they need to become more resilient,” Martin said. “The challenge, of course, is that these efforts remain subject to appropriations, and funding can be difficult to secure. Part of what we are trying to do is educate new decision-makers and create incentives for investment. You can already see some early steps in that direction. The FCC has issued a Notice of Inquiry on complementary PNT. That is part of building the record around what can be done to encourage industry to provide complementary PNT technologies that, together with GPS, can support a resilient and secure national PNT system of systems.”

How urgent is the issue? Martin suggested that current events are making the case more effectively than any abstract policy argument could.

“There is an old saying in Washington: Never let a good crisis go to waste,” Martin said. “If you look at the levels of jamming associated with conflicts in the Red Sea, in the Russia-Ukraine war and elsewhere, it becomes much easier to show leaders that this is not a theoretical concern. The objective is to strengthen our systems before that kind of disruption has domestic consequences.”

Getting Answers

A central part of the federal government’s effort to understand GPS vulnerability and evaluate alternatives has been the work conducted through the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Volpe Center. The so-called Volpe study has examined weaknesses in GPS-dependent operations while assessing candidate backup and complementary PNT technologies.

“Testing is essential,” Martin said. “And when we talk about mature technology, that includes practical readiness. One benchmark is whether a provider can bring equipment to a test site within six months. That is the kind of criterion that helps distinguish conceptual promise from deployable capability.”

The testing program is ongoing, and some reports are expected soon.

“The good news is that this is an achievable problem set,” Martin said. “We have policy guidance. We have demonstrated that credible technologies exist. The next step is determining how to invest. I have been making that case for 10 years, and I am more encouraged now than I have been in a long time.”

That closing note of cautious optimism matched the mood in Munich. The technical problems remain substantial. The policy questions are far from fully resolved. The funding picture is still uncertain. Yet, there is now a stronger shared vocabulary around resilience, a clearer understanding of the stakes and, perhaps most important, less hesitation about acknowledging that dependence on GNSS alone is no longer sufficient.

As temperatures outside dropped and snow began to fall over the Bavarian capital, the atmosphere inside the Summit remained warm and energetic, animated in no small part by speakers such as Erickson and Martin, and by the wider community now working to define what a resilient PNT future should look like. The concerns are real, the systems are under pressure and the architecture of the next phase is still being worked out. But in Munich, the conversation felt notably more mature than it did even a few years ago.

That, in itself, was one of the stronger signals to come out of the Summit.

And when this issue of Inside GNSS is presented at the Assured PNT Summit in Washington on April 7, it is likely that many of the same themes will be waiting there: resilience, authentication, complementary systems, timing assurance and the growing recognition that PNT must now be treated not simply as a technical service, but as strategic infrastructure. 

Munich did not resolve those questions. But it did provide a clear and timely snapshot of how seriously they are now being taken on both sides of the Atlantic. 

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Speaking the day after Xona announced its oversubscribed $170 million Series C, Reid did not dwell on venture optics. He talked instead about signal power, indoor penetration, interoperability and deployment. That matters, because for years the case for low Earth orbit PNT has been technically compelling but not yet commercially proven at scale. Xona’s new raise suggests that may be changing, and Reid’s comments in Munich made clear that the company wants the market to understand this moment not as another capital event, but as the transition from concept to operational proof.

The Burlingame, California-based company says the round was led by Mohari Ventures Natural Capital and included participation from Craft Ventures, ICONIQ, Woven Capital, NGP Capital, Samsung Next and Hexagon. The money, Xona says, will fund both constellation deployment and manufacturing scale-up at its new factory in Burlingame. On its own, that is a significant financing story. But heard against the backdrop of Munich, the announcement sounded less like a startup celebrating a raise and more like a company trying to establish that resilient positioning, navigation and timing is finally being recognized as an infrastructure market rather than an engineering niche.

That is the larger significance of the round. Xona is arguing that the next era of navigation will not be built simply by modernizing legacy GNSS at the margins. It will come from a new PNT architecture—commercially manufactured, rapidly deployed and designed from the outset for stronger signals, authentication and integration with today’s installed receiver base.

At the center of that vision is Pulsar, Xona’s LEO PNT system. In its product materials, the company describes Pulsar as a backward-compatible service that broadcasts alongside existing GNSS signals, with compatibility across receivers using L1 or L5 and, in many cases, an upgrade path through firmware rather than entirely new hardware. Xona says Pulsar’s X1 and X5 signals are intended to deliver 2 cm by 4 cm positioning accuracy, less than 10 nanoseconds of timing, and received power up to 100 times stronger than GPS L1 C/A.

In Munich, Reid gave that headline claim a more grounded form. “We typically are seeing at that apex about 20 dB difference compared to us versus GNSS,” he said. “So that 20 dB is 100 times stronger signal.” This statement reinforces one of the most important aspects of Xona’s thesis: stronger signals are not just about better nominal performance. They are about resilience, penetration and utility in places where conventional GNSS becomes fragile.

Reid pushed that point further when he described what Xona has already been seeing from its early on-orbit testing. “We’ve shown that we can penetrate indoors and you can get as good as a three-meter level position with just the one satellite in space,” he said. Even allowing for the caveats he included—that this reflects a stationary user and observations from multiple looks during a satellite pass—the implication is noteworthy. 

That compatibility claim remains central to the company’s overall strategy. Alternative PNT concepts often falter not because the performance case is weak, but because the transition cost is too high. Xona is trying to remove that barrier by presenting LEO PNT not as a replacement that forces the market to start over, but as an adjacent upgrade that works with the GNSS ecosystem already in the field. The company says more than a dozen commercial receiver partners are already tracking Pulsar signals, with testing underway in sectors including critical infrastructure, construction, agriculture and IoT.

Here again, Reid’s Munich comments help sharpen the point. Speaking in response to a question about time scales and interoperability, he said, “We have that defined in our ICD to support multiple timescale offsets so that these systems do become interoperable.” That is an important detail. It suggests that Xona understands one of the fundamental barriers to adoption: the market does not want an isolated new layer. It wants a service that can integrate with existing timing references, existing receivers and existing workflows without imposing a wholesale reset on infrastructure operators and equipment makers.

The timing of the funding announcement also gives it added weight. In the release, Xona explicitly ties its case to the growing fragility of GNSS-dependent infrastructure, citing interference in the Strait of Hormuz, the vulnerability of GPS to jamming and spoofing, and the difficulty governments have had in adding resilience through conventional acquisition cycles. The company points as well to slow and over-budget modernization efforts in the United States. That framing is, of course, self-interested. But it also aligns with a broader shift in the PNT community: resilience is no longer a secondary requirement. It is increasingly becoming the requirement that defines system value.

Xona’s answer is scale. The company says its Burlingame facility will support deployment of the full approximately 300-satellite Pulsar constellation “in just a few years,” a pace it contrasts with traditional aerospace contracting. Xona is selling a model in which navigation infrastructure is built more like a modern commercial platform than a classic sovereign space program.

That shift may ultimately be the most consequential part of the story. For decades, GNSS has been defined by exquisite but slow-moving national systems, where capability improvements arrive over long timelines and resiliency upgrades can take years to materialize. Xona is making the opposite argument: that navigation can be manufactured, iterated and replenished at commercial speed. In the release, the company says its model could produce more navigation satellites per week at full production than the United States currently produces in a year. 

Reid’s comments in Munich reinforced that execution message. “We announced yesterday that we’re fully funded to deploy the first tranche of satellites to get the first commercial service,” he said. In a sector that has seen no shortage of elegant architecture slides, that line may be as important as any performance metric. It moves the conversation from theoretical constellation economics toward a near-term operating plan. Reid added that Xona will launch six satellites this year, followed by another dozen or more next year, with an initial service phase aimed in part at industrial time transfer. Those details make the financing round feel consequential in a way that venture announcements often do not. The capital is not being raised to continue talking about the future of PNT. It is being raised to start building that future at scale.

The company is also trying to show that this is not a U.S.-only play. Alongside the Burlingame buildout, Xona says it is expanding in Montreal and growing a London office, while partnerships with Furuno and Topcon are meant to extend the company’s reach into timing, industrial and international markets. That global framing is important. The demand for resilient timing and positioning is not limited to defense or autonomous vehicles. It increasingly reaches into telecom, power systems, industrial automation and any sector where precise synchronization and trusted location have become operational dependencies.

The Furuno partnership is particularly revealing because it highlights timing as an early commercial beachhead. In that announcement, Xona says the collaboration will focus on incorporating Pulsar capabilities into Furuno’s existing product domains with an initial emphasis on industrial timing. Xona argues that stronger signals and nanosecond-level precision can be brought into systems already trusted today, suggesting that timing may emerge as one of the first markets where LEO PNT proves immediate value before full navigation-scale deployment is complete.

Even so, this round feels like more than another venture milestone. Seen from Munich, and heard through Reid’s remarks on stronger signals, indoor penetration, interoperability and deployment readiness, it marks a moment when the LEO PNT conversation appears to be shifting from architecture diagrams and simulation arguments toward factories, launches and market timing. For a field that has spent years talking about vulnerability, backup and modernization, that is a meaningful change. Xona’s bet—and now its investors’ bet—is that the future of PNT will belong not simply to the strongest legacy signal, but to the systems that can deliver precision, trust and resilience at the speed the modern world now expects.

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Supported by the European Space Agency (ESA) NAVISP program, the STAGER (‘Sophisticated GNSS Threats Protection’) project addresses the growing challenge posed by deliberate and accidental disruptions to satellite navigation services, an issue of increasing concern for both civil and military sectors.

STAGER introduces a two-part solution designed for dense deployment around critical infrastructure. The first component is the SILENT node (spoofing identification and localization for enhanced navigation and timing), a compact monitoring unit capable of detecting and characterizing GNSS interference signals.

Built using commercial off-the-shelf, multi-constellation GNSS receivers and antennas, the unit continuously monitors satellite signals and surrounding RF activity, using several complementary techniques to detect anomalies in the GNSS signal environment. These include analysis of carrier-to-noise density ratio (C/N0) behavior, automatic gain control trends, RF spectrum monitoring, and the dispersion of carrier-phase double differences.

Together, these methods allow the SILENT unit to distinguish between nominal conditions, jamming events, and spoofing attacks. The system can also estimate the angle of arrival of interfering signals, enabling localization when multiple units are deployed across a region.

AI in the fold

The second component is VAULT (vulnerability assessment and understanding the impact of localized GNSS threats), a server-side application that aggregates and analyzes data from the SILENT network. VAULT classifies interference events using artificial-intelligence techniques, including support vector machine and variational autoencoder models, and then estimates the location of the interference source by combining angle-of-arrival measurements with power-difference-of-arrival analysis.

Beyond detection and localization, VAULT evaluates the operational impact of interference events. Using terrain data and RF propagation models, the tool estimates the affected service volume and identifies airspace or operational procedures that may be degraded by the interference source.

The system was validated through laboratory testing and open-air trials, including experiments during the Jammertest 2025 campaign. Results demonstrated reliable detection of spoofing and jamming signals and successful localization of interference sources using measurements from multiple monitoring units. In validation tests, localization errors ranged from sub-kilometer levels to several kilometers depending on geometry and measurement conditions.Presenting the results of the project at a recent ESA-hosted event, the STAGER team said their concept supports a scalable approach to GNSS resilience. By combining low-cost monitoring nodes with centralized analysis and modeling tools, the system could enable dense monitoring networks around airports, ports, or other critical infrastructure

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Conventional GNSS integrity architectures rely primarily on dedicated reference station networks to monitor satellite performance and detect anomalies. RIGOUR used opportunistic measurements collected from large numbers of GNSS receivers found in standard smartphones or vehicle navigation systems.

Although mass-market receivers provide noisier measurements than professional reference stations, the aggregation of very large datasets can compensate for reduced measurement quality. Statistically robust information about satellite behavior and signal conditions can be extracted when using observations from thousands of users in real time.

The project team developed a dedicated simulation platform and a GNSS integrity processor (GIP) capable of combining measurements from large numbers of distributed users. The RIGOUR demonstrator simulated 10,000 receivers operating in rural, urban and dense local environments, representing both mass-market and high-end devices with varying sampling rates and signal configurations.

The results are in

RIGOUR assessed two complementary GNSS integrity services. The first, satellite (global) integrity, aggregates measurements from geographically distributed user receivers to detect satellite faults and generate protection parameters, producing indicators such as sigma user differential range error (UDRE) values used to compute positioning protection levels.

The second concept, local integrity, exploits dense clusters of GNSS users in areas such as urban streets to identify environmental effects including multipath, blockage and interference. By looking at the errors measured by many nearby GNSS users, the system can detect local signal problems and adjust the safety margin for that area, without impacting users elsewhere.

Large-scale simulations under nominal and degraded conditions showed the processor could detect moderate-to-large satellite anomalies and improve observability through widely distributed user measurements. Detectability of certain faults depended on the availability of low-variance measurements, suggesting that measurements from rural environments can significantly enhance monitoring performance. Meanwhile, the local integrity concept demonstrated benefits in dense environments, although additional modeling and sensor-fusion approaches may be needed to address severe urban effects such as non-line-of-sight signals.

RIGOUR demonstrates that as the number of connected navigation devices continues to grow, big-data approaches could complement existing infrastructure and support new integrity services for applications ranging from transport to autonomous systems.

This project was funded under ESA’s NAVISP program, aimed at strengthening the European PNT industry.

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ESA Outlook

By any metric, ESA enters 2026 with unprecedented momentum. At his annual press briefing in Paris, Director General Josef Aschbacher outlined the new year against the backdrop of a historic €22.3 billion ministerial subscription secured at the ESA 2025 Ministerial Council in Bremen, a level of political and financial commitment that, for the first time, fully matched ESA’s own programmatic proposal. That mandate is now being translated into hardware, services and, increasingly, strategic autonomy in positioning, navigation and timing (PNT).

Navigation remains one of ESA’s most important portfolios, not least because it sits at the intersection of civil, commercial and security users. Galileo continues to be the backbone of Europe’s sovereign PNT capability, and Aschbacher confirmed that 2026 will see another major step forward with the L15 Galileo launch in the fourth quarter, adding further satellites to the constellation and reinforcing service continuity and performance.

Galileo already delivers some of the most precise open and encrypted navigation signals in the world, but ESA is looking beyond medium Earth orbit (MEO) to harden and extend those capabilities. A central highlight of the briefing was Celeste, ESA’s LEO PNT in-orbit demonstration, scheduled for launch in the first quarter.

Celeste is intended to enhance resilience, robustness and accuracy by exploiting LEO’s geometry and signal strength advantages. By flying closer to users, LEO PNT satellites can deliver stronger signals, better urban and indoor penetration, and greater resistance to jamming and spoofing.

The project is also emblematic of a broader shift toward distributed, multi-layered space infrastructures that are harder to disrupt and easier to replenish, a theme that recurred throughout Aschbacher’s remarks on resilience and autonomy.

Launchers Rising

None of this matters without reliable access to space, and ESA’s launcher story in 2026 is one of regained confidence and accelerating cadence. After years of disruption, Ariane 6 and Vega-C are flying again, restoring Europe’s independent access to orbit and marking a clear return to operational momentum.

Ariane 6 has moved rapidly from its inaugural launch to a growing series of successful missions, an unusually fast progression by historical standards. In a sector where first flights often carry significant technical risk, Ariane 6’s clean early record reflects a mature design and a tightly integrated ground-to-rocket system.

The next milestone is the Ariane 64 configuration—Ariane 6 with four boosters—which is expected to fly on a commercial mission this year and will serve as a critical qualification step toward full operational cadence. Beyond Ariane and Vega, ESA’s European Launcher Challenge, heavily oversubscribed relative to requested funding, is laying the groundwork for the next generation of European launch systems, driven by industry innovation but underwritten by public commitment.

Looking ahead, Europe is preparing for a markedly busier launch schedule. A mix of navigation, science, security and commercial missions, including further Galileo deployments, will keep positioning, navigation and timing firmly in focus, while demonstrating that Europe’s launcher ecosystem is once again scaling up. Together, these developments signal not just a technical recovery, but a renewed strategic confidence in Europe’s ability to sustain autonomous access to space and support the growing demands of security, connectivity and economic resilience.

So, Galileo is not standing still, LEO-based augmentation is coming, and Europe is investing heavily to ensure its navigation and timing capabilities remain accurate, resilient and sovereign in an increasingly contested space environment.

To the Capital of Europe

While Europe now appears fully committed to pursuing its own sovereignty in space, it remains an ally of the United States, maintaining strong cooperation on shared space security and GNSS interoperability. However, recent ups and downs in that relationship have given Europe pause. With a clear adversary on its eastern flank and a longstanding partner to the west signaling that Europe must shoulder more responsibility for its own defense, European policymakers are confronting a more complex geopolitical reality.

To be clear, strategic autonomy for the old continent is not a rejection of alliances, but a necessary complement to them. The growing recognition of the shifting balance between partnership and self-reliance hung over this year’s European Space Conference in Brussels, not like a cloud but like a light bulb, switched on.

Opening the show at The Square was Andrius Kubilius, European Commissioner for Defense and Space, who reviewed his first year in office amid rising geopolitical pressure. Navigation was a core pillar. Marking 10 years of Galileo, Kubilius said the system is expanding into security-critical services. He highlighted Galileo’s new Open Service Navigation Message Authentication (OSNMA) service to counter spoofing, and the imminent Galileo Public Regulated Service (PRS), describing it as “a robust, autonomous European system our soldiers can rely on.” Meanwhile, further launches and work on the next-generation constellation solidify Galileo’s role as a strategic enabler.

Geopolitics shaped the Commissioner’s starkest warnings. “No single member state is stronger than Russia,” he said. “If you protect only your own country, your own army, we shall not plan to fight as Europe. Only our unity can deter Putin and defend the European Union.” Kubilius cautioned that while national space investments are rising, fragmentation weakens collective deterrence, urging interoperability by design so sovereign systems can operate.

Priorities under Defense Readiness 2030 include the European Space Defense Shield, Eastern Flank Watch, drone and air defense, early warning, LEO PNT and an Earth Observation Government Service. Kubilius emphasized Europe’s dependence on its ally the United States for space threat data and called for independent surveillance and a partnership of national Space Commands to mobilize European assets in crises or war.

About the newly proposed €131 billion EU budget for defense and space, the Lithuanian said, “And I want a lot of that to go to space. And I know that you want also,” raising more than one chortle in the audience. He closed by highlighting Galileo, Copernicus, and IRIS² as outstanding European achievements, saying, “These are projects that benefit an entire continent that no member state could build alone,” to which all surely agreed.

Galileo Deep Dive

Galileo has been delivering services since 2016, but the system is still evolving. In a closed-door interview in Brussels, Guerric Pont, Head of Galileo Exploitation at EUSPA, told Inside GNSS, “Galileo has now marked the shift from a development program to operational service.” One of the most important recent milestones is the declaration of the OSNMA service, which was recently demonstrated in the Baltic region. Pont stressed its practical importance for public authorities and critical infrastructure.

Recent satellite launches have also marked a turning point. Galileo’s first mission on Ariane 6 was a success, and Pont paid tribute to the launcher’s performance: “We got an injection accuracy that was twice better than what we got when we launched on Falcon 9.” The newly deployed satellites are now being maneuvered into their final orbital slots, with payload testing underway.

Again, technical advances in Europe are today inseparable from geopolitics. Pont recalled how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine abruptly exposed Europe’s dependence on Soyuz. “We saw this when Russia invaded Ukraine, all of a sudden we had the launcher crisis because Soyuz was finished.”

He contrasted Europe’s cautious approach to risk with commercial models, noting, “If you see the Musk model, if I may call it that, his risk appetite is, ‘I will go for it, it will blow up, I’m OK.’ In Europe, we are kind of scared of failure.” In their own time, the home-grown Ariane and Vega programs are now restoring Europe’s launch autonomy.

Galileo will continue to roll out new capabilities. The PRS is expected to be formally declared soon. The Emergency Warning Satellite Service (EWSS) will allow authorities to broadcast authenticated alerts during disasters. A new Signal Authentication Service (SAS) will verify that signals are not coming from malicious transmitters. And High Accuracy Service (HAS) Phase 2 aims to dramatically cut convergence times.

“Independence is now more necessary than ever,” Pont said, “to make sure the European economy will not collapse depending on third parties and in an evolving political context.” Still, he said, Galileo was designed for cooperation, not isolation: “It was built from day one to be interoperable with GPS, enabling users to combine constellations for better performance.”

Pont also cautioned against viewing GNSS as a standalone solution. Instead, a modern PNT approach should integrate navigation, Earth observation and telecommunications.

OSNMA on Trial

Back at the show, various sessions, conversations, networking coffees and roundtables were bearing fruit, with one standout exchange focusing on how space-based services are becoming mission-critical for European border operations.

Marta Krywanis, Senior Research Officer at the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex), highlighted the growing operational relevance of Galileo and OSNMA, the first globally available civil authentication service.

She started by describing how rapidly changing threat patterns are reshaping Frontex missions. “Our reliance on space will deepen and diversify because the threats at the borders are changing so dynamically,” she said, pointing to hybrid warfare, migration and geopolitical shocks as drivers of growing demand for real-time, integrated data.

Krywanis also outlined concrete operational challenges, from secure command and control to rapid data fusion and cybersecurity. “Security must be embedded in design to ensure resilience and trust in data for our operations,” she said, noting autonomous surveillance systems and unmanned vehicles depend on reliable GNSS and Earth observation to function effectively.

Fiammetta Diani of the European Union Agency for the Space Program (EUSPA) called Galileo OSNMA a key enabler in Europe’s drive to secure space, and said close cooperation between agencies is essential to turn space capabilities into dependable operational tools on the ground and at sea.

A key example is the Black Sea pilot project, officially the “Galileo-enabled Asset Tracking Demonstrator Pilot Project,” where Frontex, EUSPA and the Romanian Border Police tested OSNMA-authenticated Galileo tracking on vessels. The demonstrator explored secure and resilient positioning under real operational maritime conditions, validating how OSNMA can help authorities distinguish authentic signals from potential spoofing attempts.

Diani emphasized the broader significance of the effort: “This pilot shows how European space capabilities, especially Galileo, can directly support critical missions such as border surveillance.” And that’s the truth. She added that projects like this help shape future operational use of authenticated navigation and integrated space data.

The takeaway: As border operations grow more complex and contested, space-based tools like Galileo OSNMA are no longer optional enhancements; they are becoming foundational to Frontex’s ability to operate, maintain situational awareness, and respond effectively to evolving threats.

Recent reporting by Inside GNSS highlights how immediate these threats have become, with Baltic and North Sea states formally blaming Russia for sustained GNSS disruption. Coastal nations are now treating interference with satellite navigation as a security threat, signaling a shift toward stricter enforcement and accelerated development of backup navigation systems.

Moving Toward Resiliency

In another discussion on the challenges facing GNSS, Christophe Grudler, Paul Flamant, Francisco-Javier Benedicto Ruiz, and Rolf Kozlowski compared notes on resilience, sovereignty and the future of European positioning.

Grudler, Member of the European Parliament and co-chair of the Sky and Space Intergroup, opened on a positive note. “Galileo is a big European success and we need to say it every day,” he said, “but we need to understand, jamming and interference are now concrete threats on European soil.”

Grudler regretted that the Galileo PRS is still not fully deployed, saying, “If everything had been well done, we should have had all our European military airplanes, boats and soldiers using PRS today. It is not the case. And a robust and secure signal like PRS may have prevented some recent incidents.” For Grudler, the lesson is geopolitical as much as technical. Without placing blame, he shared some well-earned words of wisdom: “Digital and technological sovereignty require political courage and long-term vision.”

Flamant, Head of Unit for Satellite Navigation at the European Commission, stressed continuity as much as innovation. “The most important thing we have to do today is to keep our users satisfied,” he said, pointing to Galileo’s first generation while praising the second generation as “a quantum leap.” On interference, he was blunt: “The radio frequency spectrum is polluted by enemies or by malicious, intentional people.”

Flamant spoke positively of the PRS, which he said is coming very soon, and he framed LEO PNT pragmatically, noting, “We have to consider with ESA the different possible architectures, and we are still analyzing what would be the best missions for such a system.” On GNSS sovereignty, he challenged the idea of a paradigm shift: “With Galileo, sovereignty is already built in, and it has been from the beginning,” agreeing with his EUSPA colleague Pont.

ESA Director of Navigation Benedicto emphasized engineering depth and diversification. “The first and utmost priority is to make sure that the services we are providing today are robust,” he said, pointing to PRS, Galileo second generation, and EGNOS upgrades. He described ESA’s multilayer vision, where EGNOS, Galileo, and LEO PNT converge into a single “EU PNT” experience for users. In the context of ESA’s Celeste program, Benedicto said resilience would come through diversity of signals, orbits, frequencies, to be joined, in the future, by optical and quantum technologies.

Managing Director of DLR GfR Kozlowski brought the concerns of Galileo Control Centre in Oberpfaffenhofen into focus. He talked about new global maps of jamming and spoofing hotspots. “We are able with these to sometimes detect incidents days before they reach the news,” he said. “This is knowledge which has to be distributed all over the world,” noting its value for both civil aviation and armed forces.

The conversation circled back to geopolitics and the United States, with Grudler recalling early American skepticism of Galileo and concluding that collective European action is the only path to sovereignty. Flamant concurred, stressing coordinated investment over fragmentation. Everyone agreed that rising jamming and spoofing incidents, and security pressures, are accelerating the move toward a resilient, sovereign, multi-layered European navigation system.

Call to Arms

From navigation resilience to military readiness, the conversation steadily shifted from technology to deterrence. In the big hall, Italian Air Force Chief of Staff General Antonio Conserva called space a frontline of modern security, warning Europe is entering a fundamentally new strategic era. “High-intensity warfare is back in Europe,” he said. “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should be a wake-up call for all of us.” If they hadn’t been before, the attendees were certainly awake now.

Conserva described a world marked by great-power competition, technological acceleration, and persistent instability, noting that space now sits at the center of deterrence and credibility. “Space is no longer a benign backdrop to stability,” he said. “It is congested, contested and competitive, and it is becoming a warfighting domain.”

Space is already relevant to conflicts on Earth, he said, because attacks on satellites and GNSS-enabled infrastructure can disrupt communications, navigation and decision-making. Europe is finally responding: “We are witnessing an unprecedented European awakening to reality.” He pointed to the EU Space Strategy for Security and Defense and growing investment as proof that space is now recognized as “an operational dimension of our sovereignty.”

But awareness is not enough. “We must now translate momentum into capability,” Conserva said, citing three urgent priorities. First is space domain awareness. “In a warfighting domain, you cannot protect what you cannot see,” he said, arguing for a federated European sensor network to eliminate blind spots and provide verified military-grade information.

Second is resilience. “This is an operational need, not merely an industrial slogan,” he said, emphasizing assured access to services such as communications, Earth observation, and navigation even when under attack. He highlighted the importance of dual-use systems and layered architectures, noting Europe must be able to rapidly reconstitute degraded capabilities. “The ability to replace a degraded asset in hours instead of months acts as a formidable deterrent,” he said.

Third is credible capability and collective deterrence. Industrial fragmentation weakens Europe strategically and called for coordinated responses to hostile activities. “If we respond in a coordinated way, backed by credible capability, our deterrence will hold,” Conserva said.

On partnerships, he said, “The partnership with the United States remains central and crucial to space security,” while also urging deeper cooperation with NATO on interoperability and threat sharing. He closed with a call for unity and pragmatism: “The future of space security will belong to those who can understand faster, endure longer, and act together.”

Following the General, Benedikta von Seherr-Thoss, Managing Director for Peace, Security and Defense at the European External Action Service (EEAS), delivered a blunt assessment of Europe’s security environment, stressing that while calls for stronger European defense are not new, what has changed is the urgency. She appeared to agree with the current American administration when she said, “Europe needs to be able to deter and defend itself, and it must take responsibility for its own defense.”

She emphasized that Europe’s expanding space and defense capabilities are meant to reinforce NATO and transatlantic interoperability, with a stronger European pillar designed to complement the Alliance and strengthen collective security. As for the drivers behind this shift, von Seherr-Thoss pointed to Russia as a lasting threat.

Space, she argued, must be treated as a core element of the effort to reduce dependencies, fill capability gaps, and acquire key military capabilities.“Conducting war without services from space is not possible,” she said, highlighting secure communications, geospatial intelligence, navigation, and targeting as mission-critical enablers.

Von Seherr-Thoss also stressed dual use. “This means understanding defense requirements and integrating them in design,” she said, “so that all capabilities are available when we need them.”

Von Seherr-Thoss outlined a rapidly evolving threat landscape that now includes cyberattacks, jamming, kinetic actions, and more ambiguous behaviors such as close satellite maneuvering. She warned that the consequences on the ground of threats in space could be devastating, pointing to scenarios in which commanders lose communications or forces lose navigation.

Addressing these risks, she argued for tighter cooperation between governments and industry, stressing the need to reduce vulnerabilities while building resilience across Europe’s space systems. She also cautioned against fragmented national approaches, urging unity as Europe moves toward initiatives such as the European Space Shield. This is a new flagship initiative within the EU’s Preserving Peace—Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030, aimed at enhancing the protection and resilience of Europe’s space infrastructure, including systems such as Galileo and IRIS².

Men in Uniform

In a (literally) star-studded event, a “meeting of space commanders,” Major General Isaac Crespo Zaragoza, Commander of the Spanish Space Command, said what everyone by this time already knew: “There’s no military operation that can be done the way we train without space. Command and control, maneuver, intelligence, fires, and force protection all rely on orbital systems.”

As dependence grows, so do vulnerabilities, Crespo said, warning that adversaries are now actively seeking to disrupt space-enabled services. “We are not talking about only knowing what’s going on in space,” he said. “We are talking about space security.” He called for systems designed with built-in resilience and self-protection, alongside stronger Space Situational and space domain awareness.

Positioning, navigation and timing remain a critical gap. European forces still rely heavily on GPS, Crespo said, highlighting, as did MEP Grudler, delays in operationalizing the Galileo PRS. Spain currently fields no military assets using PRS, largely due to unfinished terminal development and integration.

Beyond PNT, Crespo referenced resilient SATCOM, IRIS², combat cloud connectivity, space-based early warning, and the emerging idea of a European space shield. But he cautioned that Europe must move beyond technology demonstrations. “Most of the European Union programs are focused on developing some technologies from TRL to seven or six, but at the end we don’t have any capability being delivered,” he said.

For Europe’s space commanders, it would seem, the timeline for deterrence has collapsed; space war is here. Major General Michael Traut, Commander of German Space Command, warned the strategic challenge is no longer abstract or distant. “The appointment is not for 2029, it’s now,” he said, arguing that Europe must rapidly, if not immediately, develop a shared operational picture and common standards.

But sensing alone is not enough. “It’s not only a question of being able to observe things, so we need to be able to actively act in space,” he added, calling for resilience, on-orbit operations, and even offensive capabilities as part of credible deterrence. “If you were a Roman gladiator, would you want to enter the arena with just a shield?” he asked the audience. At least one of the attendees thought, “No.”

Going back to the conference opening, we remember the European Commissioner’s call for “a partnership of national Space Commands.” Others have gone farther, referring to a veritable fully centralized EU Space Command. For his part, Traut emphasized that cooperation must still rest on strong national foundations. “Our first step should be to build up those solid and powerful national capabilities, but to include from the first step of designing them that they should be interoperable,” he said, pointing to Germany’s plans for resilient satellite constellations designed to integrate with IRIS² and other allied systems. A more achievable goal, he said, might be to start developing a common idea on how to command and control space operations together.

Crespo also highlighted the practical barriers to European integration. “I don’t see in the short future that nations will be able to transfer the authority of specific military space capabilities,” he said. Instead, space domain awareness could be a starting point. “The first thing is to cooperate and to set up a common approach,” he said, noting nations are already sharing data to build a recognized space picture.

Crespo cited what he sees as more urgent capability gaps. “Even if I know everything that is happening in space, I cannot protect the system even if they are being threatened, because I don’t have any assets in space to do so,” he said. Like Traut, he believes nations need to go beyond simple awareness to field operational tools.

Rounding out the conversation were Commander Major General Vincent Chusseau of the French Space Command and Commander Major General Luca Manieri of the Italian Space Command. All converged on a single conclusion: Europe must move faster to align national capabilities, Galileo and PRS, and emerging EU initiatives into a coherent operational framework. The path forward lies in interoperability first, shared awareness second, and ultimately, possibly, coordinated command and control, because in space, readiness can no longer wait.

Also, despite the push for greater European autonomy, the commanders were equally clear that independence does not mean isolation. Space security remains inherently allied.

Traut urged a balance between national and perhaps coalition or Union capabilities, and, above all, cooperation. “Space, regardless of all political turbulence going on, is still a team sport. Our American military colleagues keep saying that, even very recently; we meet every second month somewhere on this small planet. They keep saying it and we will keep saying it. Space is a team sport.”

Clearly Europe’s drive to strengthen Galileo, operationalize PRS, and build resilient national and EU capabilities should be aimed at reinforcing, not replacing, transatlantic cooperation. Interoperability with U.S. systems and continued coordination with American Space Command remain, for now, essential for deterrence and stability.

Soft Landing

Though he is not a GNSS/PNT man per se, we grant the final word to Jens Plötner, State Secretary at the German Ministry of Defense. Drawing down from the exchange of military insights, his general views seem perfectly and appropriately applicable to space-based GNSS/PNT matters.

Plötner shifted the focus from diagnosis to responsibility, arguing that Europe’s future in space will be defined less by rhetoric than by resilience. “True European sovereignty increasingly lies in our collective ability to withstand external pressure, coercion and disruption,” he said.

Germany, he explained, is backing that principle with sustained investment, committing €35 billion through the 2030s to build a military space architecture encompassing satellite communications, intelligence, space situational awareness, missile warning, and active defense. Crucially, he said, “This effort is designed not only as a national end in itself, but as a cornerstone of a broader European space capability, aimed at strengthening interoperability across the EU and NATO.”

Plötner emphasized that growing stronger does not mean acting alone. Germany is already working alongside France, Italy, Norway, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the United States through the Combined Space Operations Initiative and the U.S.-led Operation Olympic Defender. He described cooperation with allies as foundational, noting multinational sensor networks, shared imagery, and pooled capabilities can deliver far more than isolated national programs can.

Rather than duplicating efforts, Plötner urged member states to pool and share existing capabilities and ongoing developments. His message was ultimately one of alignment. Europe’s task now, he concluded, is to translate unity into architecture, connecting national investments into a resilient system that safeguards space, supports collective defense, and keeps trusted partnerships at the center of security.

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These elements cannot be treated independently. “Imagine you have a system that provides good service continuity,” he said, “but it’s not resilient. In the end, the users will not be there. Or, say, you do a lot of innovation but you don’t have service continuity. You won’t have the trust of the users or the institutions.”

Europe starts from a position of strength: “We should be proud,” Romay said. “EGNOS and Galileo are performing very, very well and have earned confidence by providing the performance, continuity, and high accuracy.”

New challenges

Romay described a changing threat landscape. “We are not facing the same situation we were 10, 15 years ago. Today when we talk about interference, jamming or spoofing, it’s not a theoretical risk. It’s an operational reality. So resilience is now a core requirement. It’s fundamental.”

New capabilities must be introduced without compromising trust. “There are new users coming in,” Romay said. “There are new applications, there are new markets, so we can’t forget new user requirements and needs as we integrate signals, receivers and sensors.”

In this context, The European Space Agency has launched its LEO-PNT initiative (Celeste) to strengthen resilient satellite navigation services. Romay said, “Celeste is an important asset for Europe. It is not a replenishment of the current system, it is a complement. It will enhance resilience, enhance the flexibility of the system and will add some innovation capacity. LEO-PNT can be a dynamic component of the European navigation system, because the life cycle of these satellites is much shorter.”

Romay also cited the Public Regulated Service (PRS), Galileo’s encrypted service for secure governmental positioning. “PRS is coming,” he said, “and we need to have receivers, to be able to use PRS in different environments.” GMV is working on this. “So we have a big challenge in front of us,” Romay said.

Given his company’s deep involvement in Europe’s satellite navigation project, Romay knows what it takes to deliver resilient, trusted systems for users across the continent and the world, and we mark his words.

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Supported by the European Space Agency (ESA), the RIPTIDE Phase 2 project has field-tested an integrated ‘Monitor & Protect’ demonstrator tailored to operations in the Black Sea and Lower Danube Basin.

Led by GMV Innovating Solutions Romania, with the Romanian Space Agency Research Centre and the Romanian Maritime Hydrographic Directorate, the project addressed jamming and spoofing risks affecting ports, shipping lanes and coastal infrastructure. The goal was to design, implement and validate an alternative PNT capability that complements GNSS.

RIPTIDE Phase 2 implements a demonstrator that integrates GNSS monitoring, trusted or verified navigation messages distributed via AIS/VDES ASM, and VDES-R/R-Mode ranging. At the authority level, coastal interference monitoring is combined with VDES transmitters that provide alternative ranging signals and trusted navigation data. At the vessel level, multi-constellation GNSS is augmented by VDES-R positioning and onboard interference detection, enabling autonomous operation when GNSS is degraded.

Targets achieved

Project results were presented at a recent ESA-hosted event by Florin Mistrapau, Vladimir Kosjer and Calin Ciobanu of GMV Romania, together with Petrica Popov of the Romanian Maritime Hydrographic Directorate and Irina Stefanescu of the Romanian Space Agency Research Center.

Partners undertook requirements engineering, system architecture definition, laboratory integration and Black Sea trials. A core element is the Monitor & Protect workflow, which cross-checks GNSS interference indicators, navigation message integrity and PVT consistency. When anomalies are detected, the system switches to VDES-R positioning, maintaining continuity of service.

Live trials aboard MHD’s Ocean 2 research vessel confirmed resilience under real GNSS jamming and spoofing conditions. VDES-R/R-Mode delivered position errors below 10 metres during strong interference, while Monitor & Protect cross-checks detected spoofed and degraded GNSS scenarios. Performance was further validated through emulated localized degradation and coordinated attack campaigns using Skydel-based spoofing, achieving technology readiness level (TRL) 6.

Analysis also revealed correlation between carrier-to-noise density, pseudorange quality and VDES-R positioning accuracy. Beyond maritime navigation, the consortium identified a list of potential applications including search and rescue, emergency management, aviation and drones, and road and rail transport.

Funded under ESA’s NAVISP program, RIPTIDE Phase 2 shows how combining alternative ranging, trusted data distribution and intelligent monitoring enhances maritime resilience, offering a blueprint for hybrid PNT systems capable of maintaining safe navigation during GNSS interference.

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Over the past several months, the company has accelerated development and trials of its ranging mode (R-Mode)-based PNT solutions, aimed at providing robust backup navigation and timing when GNSS signals are degraded or unavailable.

In 2026, international bodies such as the IMO and national transport authorities are set to continue to assess potential GNSS backup systems for maritime navigation. Meanwhile, Europe’s ongoing emphasis on PNT resilience and infrastructure protection has created renewed interest in solutions that reuse existing assets rather than relying solely on new constellations or sensors.

Syntony’s approach involves exploiting existing maritime radio infrastructure, including medium frequency (MF) and very high frequency (VHF) transmitters, providing signals that can be used for positioning and timing independent of satellites. Using advanced signal processing and synchronization techniques, R-Mode enables vessels to derive position fixes from terrestrial MF and VHF broadcasts originally intended for communication or navigation aids. While R-Mode has been discussed in research circles for years, Syntony has been among the few companies pushing it toward operational service readiness.

Staying on track

Syntony sees R-Mode as a true complementary PNT layer. Rather than augmenting GNSS accuracy, the company’s solution is designed to maintain continuity of navigation and timing during outages caused by interference, spoofing or local signal blockage – risks faced, especially now, by Northern European maritime authorities and port operators, but also by similar actors worldwide. Timing integrity, in particular, is a growing concern as digital maritime procedures depend on synchronized systems for communications, traffic management and safety services.

Recent trials conducted in cooperation with European maritime stakeholders have demonstrated meter-level positioning performance and stable timing outputs suitable for navigation support and system synchronization. These results suggest that terrestrial PNT can move beyond theoretical resilience concepts into deployable operational tools, especially in coastal waters, ports and busy sea lanes where GNSS disruptions are most likely to have economic and safety consequences.

In a sector where GNSS has long been taken for granted, Syntony’s work highlights a pragmatic shift. By pursuing resilience through diversity, using both terrestrial radio and satellite signals, the company is helping build a layered PNT architecture to better cope with today’s interference-prone environment.

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Under the European Space Agency (ESA) NAVISP program, Qascom, with partner OHB Italia, has completed development and testing of a lunar surface PNT beacon and reference station demonstrator, validating key technologies for the future lunar communication and navigation system (LCNS).

Unlike terrestrial GNSS, lunar navigation must operate with sparse infrastructure and under extreme environmental constraints. While early LCNS architectures will rely primarily on orbiting satellites, surface reference stations are expected to provide critical local enhancements.

Qascom’s ‘Moon Station’ acts as a fixed beacon on the lunar surface, generating ranging signals for nearby users while also computing and broadcasting differential corrections to improve positioning accuracy. At the same time, it supports LCNS monitoring by collecting satellite observables directly from the surface.

Partners designed a complete flight-model and developed an elegant breadboard (EBB) demonstrator integrating the most critical subsystems. The proposed payload architecture combines an LCNS navigation receiver, a configurable navigation beacon transmitter and communication modules enabling links to lunar users, LCNS satellites and Earth.

Designed assuming deployment near the lunar South Pole, the station has a mass of roughly 180 kg and peak power around 440 W. Considerable effort was devoted to thermal and operational analyses, defining survival, active and operative modes to ensure functionality through the lunar day-night cycle, where temperatures can drop below -150°C.

The end-to-end testbed enabled realistic experimentation with S-band navigation signals, ranging observables and differential corrections, as well as performance comparisons using weighted least squares and extended Kalman filtering.

Aiming for the Moon

Project results were presented at a recent ESA-hosted event by Qascom technical manager Luca Canzian and Stefano Garlaschi, responsible for navigation engine development, along with OHB Italia’s Isacco Pretto, who coordinated the overall Moon Station design.

Differential corrections were shown to significantly reduce user range errors, particularly when exploiting pilot signal components. When combined with digital elevation models and EKF processing, simulations achieved meter-level positioning accuracy and substantial improvements in vertical performance across areas spanning hundreds of kilometers.

The team also demonstrated meaningful reductions in orbit-determination-induced errors, with surface-generated corrections remaining effective over several minutes for both static and mobile users.

Canzian described the demonstrator as an important milestone toward operational lunar PNT infrastructure. By extending SBAS-like concepts to the Moon, combining orbital navigation assets with surface reference stations, the project points to a resilient, high-integrity navigation framework for future robotic and human exploration.

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