The functionality will be available as a software option for the R&S SMBV100B and R&S SMW200A vector signal generators, giving device manufacturers a production-ready pathway to test and validate receiver compatibility with Pulsar signals ahead of the constellation’s commercial deployment.

Pulsar is designed to complement existing GNSS infrastructure — including GPS — by leveraging LEO orbital geometry to deliver stronger signals, improved accuracy, and enhanced resilience against jamming and spoofing. Where legacy GNSS constellations operate in medium Earth orbit at altitudes above 20,000 kilometers, LEO satellites orbit at roughly 500 to 2,000 kilometers, resulting in significantly stronger received signal power and reduced signal travel time. The tradeoff is that individual satellites pass overhead quickly, requiring a larger constellation to maintain continuous coverage — which Xona is building toward commercial scale.

The practical challenge Rohde & Schwarz is addressing is the test gap that precedes a new signal type’s deployment. Before device manufacturers can build and certify receivers that support Pulsar, they need the ability to simulate Pulsar signals in a lab environment — verifying receiver performance against known signal parameters without requiring an operational constellation overhead. Adding that simulation capability to established signal generator hardware provides an accessible, production-scalable route for validation.

“Navigation technology is entering a period of rapid evolution,” said Matt Hammond, North America Satellite Technology Manager at Rohde & Schwarz. “By adding Pulsar signal simulation to our signal generator portfolio, Rohde & Schwarz is preparing our customers for the next evolution of satellite navigation.”

“Test and measurement solutions play an important role in enabling device manufacturers to evaluate compatibility as new signals become available,” said Bryan Chan, co-founder and VP of Strategy at Xona Space Systems. “Rohde & Schwarz brings deep expertise in precision signal generation that helps make this possible.”

The R&S SMBV100B and R&S SMW200A will join Pulsar’s verified ecosystem program, which recognizes devices and test solutions validated for compatibility with Pulsar signals. Rohde & Schwarz showcased its navigation test solutions at Space Symposium 2026 in Colorado Springs this week.

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Pulsar operates from low Earth orbit as a commercial alternative to GPS, designed to address the jamming, spoofing, and signal-strength vulnerabilities that have increasingly exposed legacy navigation infrastructure’s limitations in both military and civilian contexts.

The facility produces satellites whose signals are up to 100 times stronger than traditional GPS and accurate to two centimeters, operating in low Earth orbit 20 times closer to Earth than existing GPS infrastructure. Pulsar is designed to work with existing GPS devices — a design choice enabled by Xona’s decision to move from C-band to L-band frequencies after determining that most users lack compatible C-band equipment. “Compatibility with existing user equipment was critical to scaling,” said Brian Manning, Xona’s co-founder and CEO. 

The factory opening follows a $170 million Series C closed in late March, led by Mohari Ventures Natural Capital with participation from Craft Ventures, ICONIQ, Woven Capital, NGP Capital, Samsung Next, Hexagon, and other investors. “This factory is how we move from proof-of-concept to active global infrastructure,” Manning said. “We’ve already demonstrated how the technology works, now it’s about manufacturing and deploying our constellation faster than anyone thought possible.”

At full production, the company aims to manufacture more navigation satellites per week than the U.S. currently produces in a year, with a target of deploying the full 258-satellite constellation for the cost of a single GPS satellite on orbit today. 

The defense dimension was central to the opening remarks. “Anything that moves, anything that needs to know where it is, is a potential customer of ours — including the Department of Defense,” Manning said. “We’re not built as a defense contractor necessarily, but we are proud of the work that we do with the U.S. government and other governments.” The Space Force has already awarded Xona a Strategic Funding Increase (STRATFI) agreement combining $20 million in government funding with $30 million in private capital, as military interest in alternative PNT capabilities grows amid increasing reliance on GPS in contested environments. 

Manning also described Xona’s singular position in the regulatory landscape. The company is the first commercial operator approved by the FCC to broadcast on the GPS frequency spectrum alongside sovereign navigation systems. “We were sitting in rooms with China, Russia, Europe and Xona,” Manning told the San Francisco Business Journal. “It was an area that no commercial company has ever gone into.”

The broader commercial picture is one of infrastructure inadequacy meeting an autonomous-systems moment. “This new era of technology is largely here — cars driving themselves, robots, mobile devices, physical AI, wearables, autonomous farm tractors,” Manning said at the opening. “All of these things share one fundamental thing in common: to operate safely, to operate safely at scale, they simply need to know where they are.” “It’s ignoring the underlying challenge that the infrastructure was not built to do what everyone is trying to use it to do today,” he added. “That’s what we’re building — an entirely new infrastructure.” 

Rep. Kevin Mullin (D-CA) spoke at the ceremony, framing the facility in terms of national competitiveness. “The question to the United States is simple — will we lead this era of navigation, or will we follow?” Mullin said. “We’ve seen navigation disrupted in critical shipping lanes, driving gas prices up for everyone.”

Over a dozen commercial receiver partners are already tracking signals from Xona’s first production-class satellite, launched in June 2025. Six additional satellites are planned for a SpaceX rideshare mission in Q4, with broader deployment expected in 2027. Trimble — an investor and customer whose VP spoke at the ceremony — announced a collaboration with Xona in 2025 to integrate its correction services with Pulsar, targeting centimeter-precision positioning across construction, agriculture, and geospatial markets.

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ESA launched the first two Celeste in-orbit demonstration satellites — IOD-1 and IOD-2 — on March 28, marking the agency’s first step toward extending satellite navigation into low Earth orbit. u-blox, working under ESA’s Navigation Innovation and Support Program (NAVISP) Element 2, is conducting a technical evaluation of how LEO signals interact with and augment established GNSS constellations such as Galileo.

The Swiss positioning firm frames LEO not as a replacement for GNSS but as an additional layer — one characterized by higher signal strength and rapidly changing satellite geometry that could accelerate convergence and improve robustness in challenging signal environments. Early integration work is underway on u-blox’s X20 GNSS platform, examining how LEO signals across multiple frequency bands can be incorporated into future receivers.

The scope of the NAVISP project includes characterization of emerging LEO signal transmissions, analysis of LEO-GNSS measurement interactions, and evaluation of how dynamic satellite geometry affects positioning performance.

“Our work within the ESA NAVISP framework allows us to better understand how emerging signal sources can complement GNSS and contribute to robust and reliable positioning performance,” said Jani Käppi, Head of Technology Positioning at u-blox.

The full Celeste demonstration constellation will ultimately comprise 11 satellites testing innovative signals across various frequency bands. ESA’s 2025 Ministerial Council further endorsed a next phase — an LEO-PNT In-Orbit Preparatory phase — and incorporated Celeste as one of three pillars of its new European Resilience from Space initiative. 

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Issued through Army Contracting Command – Aberdeen Proving Ground via a C5 prototyping project, the awards carry a combined estimated value of up to $41 million over a 36-month period of performance. Both vendors will develop MOSA-compliant, modular, and upgradable solutions emphasizing non-radio frequency technologies to address GPS-denied and -degraded environments.

PM PNT’s Modernization product office launched the NorthStar effort in August 2023 with a virtual industry day and request for information that drew 27 vendor responses. Those responses, along with technical evaluations and white paper reviews, shaped the program’s tiered capability structure and drove the decision to split the award between multiple vendors.

“Awarding to multiple vendors encourages competition, speeds up implementation and integration of new technology to meet emerging threats, and reduces cost of engineering change proposals,” said Erik Scott, product manager for PNT Modernization.

Contract kickoffs with both vendors are scheduled for next month, with design reviews and a soldier touchpoint to follow.

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The signal was received at 10:38 CET on April 8, 2026, and verified by ESA teams at ESTEC as well as at GMV’s monitoring station in Lisbon.

The milestone marks successful commissioning of the spacecraft and opens the operational experimentation phase of a program designed to test whether a complementary low Earth orbit navigation layer can enhance Galileo’s accuracy, resilience, and security. Celeste IOD-1 and a second demonstrator, IOD-2, were launched March 28 aboard a Rocket Lab vehicle from Launch Complex 1 in Mahia, New Zealand. The two satellites — built by separate European consortia, with GMV leading one and Thales Alenia Space the other — separated from the launch vehicle approximately one hour after liftoff. LEOP and commissioning activities for IOD-1 were conducted by an integrated GMV and Alén Space team from the mission control center in Tres Cantos.

Operating at altitudes between 500 and 560 km, the demonstrators will validate precise autonomous orbit determination without ground infrastructure dependence and will test navigation signal performance in L- and S-bands from LEO. The program’s rationale is multi-orbit resilience: by integrating a LEO constellation alongside Galileo’s medium Earth orbit architecture, Celeste aims to reduce vulnerability to interference and expand the envelope of advanced PNT services available to European users.

The IOD phase will comprise eleven satellites plus one in-orbit spare across both consortia. GMV holds prime contractor responsibility for six of the demonstrator satellites, covering system definition and design, space and ground segments, user segment, and operations. The two initial demonstrators are focused on securing registered frequency allocations and signal testing through the end of 2025. Eight larger follow-on satellites are under development, with subsequent launches targeting 2027 and the eventual fielding of a full operational fleet.

GMV was selected by ESA in 2024 to lead one of the two parallel Celeste development contracts.

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“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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VIAVI Solutions and Ground Control have announced a partnership to integrate VIAVI’s Secure µPNT STL-1000 receiver module into Ground Control’s RockFLEET Assured maritime tracking and navigation platform, targeting vessels operating in GNSS-denied or contested environments.

The Secure µPNT STL-1000 is a compact, software-defined receiver that operates through VIAVI’s SecureTime altGNSS LEO service tier rather than relying on GPS/GNSS constellations. The module delivers precise timing with holdover capability — meaning it can maintain synchronization through signal outages — and is designed for what the defense sector terms Denied, Degraded, and Disrupted Space Operational Environments, or D3SOE. Its integration into RockFLEET Assured provides a secondary, independent position source alongside or in lieu of conventional GNSS, with the stated aim of sustaining navigation and vessel oversight when primary signals are jammed, spoofed, or otherwise unavailable.

“With jamming and spoofing now a core element of cyber warfare, resilient PNT solutions are no longer optional,” said Doug Russell, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Aerospace and Defense, at VIAVI. “Its compact size and low power consumption makes it ideal for applications that require an extremely small, low-power, secure, resilient embedded PNT receiver.”

Alastair MacLeod, CEO of Ground Control, framed the integration in terms of both commercial and defense exposure. “As the frequency of jamming and spoofing continues to rise, reliance on GPS/GNSS signals alone increasingly exposes both commercial and military operations to risk,” he said. “Integrating VIAVI’s Secure µPNT STL-1000 into RockFLEET Assured delivers a trusted secondary position source, strengthening resilience for mission-critical operations across defense, maritime and critical infrastructure environments.”

RockFLEET Assured is described as a marine-grade Assured PNT (A-PNT) solution. VIAVI, headquartered in Chandler, Arizona, and traded on Nasdaq as VIAV, positions itself as a provider of test, measurement, and optical technologies across defense, aerospace, and communications infrastructure markets.

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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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At this year’s Munich Space Summit, something subtle—but significant—happened. What began two decades ago as a focused gathering of satellite navigation experts has merged with the faster-moving world of NewSpace. The NewSpace policy and industry concept marks a major shift in how the space sector works, transitioning from a government-driven sector to a more commercial, innovation-driven ecosystem, involving private companies, startups, and new business models.

The new Munich Space Summit, combining the Munich Satellite Navigation Summit and the Munich NewSpace Summit, clearly highlighted this shift and what it means for Europe’s space model and its vision for PNT. 

Bringing the Message Home

Bringing NewSpace into the fold means adding some of that agility to the deeply rooted PNT community. The PNT portion of the program brought together top space leaders to discuss how policy, programs and NewSpace pep can help them face pressing global challenges. Florian Hermann of the Bavarian State Chancellery offered some rousing opening remarks, referring colorfully to Germany’s significantly increased space-related spending. “Even in the mainstream in our society,” he said, “people know that we are facing something like a gold rush in space.” The country’s new budget marks a clear political shift toward space as a strategic, economic and security domain.

This joining of hands comes at a moment of intense concern about European defense and security, as war, geopolitical shifts and other threats converge, making Europe feel less secure than at any point in decades. Responding to that concern is the European Commission (EC), here in the form of Christophe Kautz, Director of Satellite Navigation and Earth Observation at DG DEFIS: “Let me be concrete about the new priority on which we are working. The Commission has developed quite large defense programs, and some of that is also going toward space. But in addition to that, we are also adapting what we already do with our space programs.”

Kautz described the EC’s proposal of a major new funding framework to boost Europe’s competitiveness. The Commission envisions a dedicated “space and defense window,” meaning a targeted funding stream for space infrastructure and defense capabilities. There will also be a focus on startups and SMEs, defense tech, as well as industrial scale-up and innovation.

“We’ve laid out what we want to do in the next finance period,” Kautz said, “…We are complementing our existing GNSS services, where we had a focus on the civil side, to make them also workable, or to tune them, toward the security and defense user.”

LEO PNT, he said, is the future and “can also be very useful for security and defense applications. When it comes to Earth observation, of course we’ve had Copernicus for many years, but we want to complement it with what we are calling an Earth observation governmental service, a PRS-like service in the realm of Earth observation.”

The EC is also hard at work on its new IRIS² communications initiative. “And we will have space surveillance and tracking,” Kautz said, “so we’re trying to tune our service portfolio toward security and defense.”

Forces at Play

ESA General Director Josef Aschbacher started his presentation on a positive note: “I just landed this morning from Washington D.C. where yesterday the new NASA administrator was announcing his vision of a Moon architecture, the Moon ecosystem, which is very interesting and where ESA has a lot of participation.”

On the changing geopolitical environment, his tone hardened. “The things we are seeing,” he said, “are drastically changing the landscape of space. We had a very successful [ESA] ministerial conference in Germany last November, and this was really Europe’s collective response to the new geopolitical reality. On the eastern side, of course, we have the war in Ukraine, on the western side we have the United States and the new geopolitical context in which we are living. My message to all the ministers of our ESA countries was Europe has to be stronger, more autonomous and self-reliant, and therefore we need space programs across the board where we are increasing our strength and capacity.”

At the Ministerial Council, member states agreed not only on a record budget of about €22 billion for 2026 to 2028, but also on a “clear defense and security mandate,” something ESA has traditionally avoided.

“We are working closely with the European Commission, and in general, we really want to build up the space economy,” Aschbacher said. “Europe has to change, we have to become faster, we have to rely on the ingenuity of our small and medium-sized enterprises.”

The European Union Agency for the Space Program (EUSPA) Executive Director, Rodrigo da Costa, expressed his approval of the new format. “In this new geopolitical situation, the response of the space sector is very important, to operationalize all of the space services for the security dimension, for the governmental users, which can be of a military nature.

“Our key focus,” he said, “has always been on how to serve a maximum amount of people, and I think we are there. The security users add another dimension, because they will be building key missions, key operations based on the services that we provide. This is required. As an ecosystem, as a sector, we are changing our focus, to serve this very particular set of users.”

Challenges Enumerated

Kautz reminded attendees it’s not going to be easy: “We have great ideas, and sometimes we are quite good at transforming these into something concrete. We do have some extremely good systems, but there are gaps. We do not have the investment power that they have in other parts of the world. This is linked perhaps to the way we are structured in Europe, some things that inhibit our investment capabilities. We are working on this.”

The European Investment Bank (EIB), launched a dedicated space financing initiative to support Europe’s space industry. The strategic fund mobilizes private and public capital behind space technology, infrastructure and companies.

“So there is some movement,” Kautz said, “and this is something that we need, to help turn our ideas into economic reality. I think we also have issues related to our regulatory environment. At least from the Commission’s perspective, we think we need an internal market for space. The proposed Space Act should lead us into this direction.” The EU Space Act, expected to take effect in 2030, sets unified rules for space activities, boosting investment, innovation, and strategic autonomy across Europe’s space sector.

Aschbacher added another complaint to the list: “We are fragmented. We are 27 EU countries, more than 20 ESA member states. We have to join forces, especially when we are under pressure.”

Aschbacher will be aware of recent reports suggesting Germany and possibly Italy may pursue their own national systems for sovereign communications, essentially duplicating the capabilities of the EU’s IRIS², which is aimed at providing shared secure connectivity.

“We seem to be going in the wrong direction,” he said. “The time is critical. If we go too far, in not linking up these different systems, it will be too late.”

Still Competitors, Still Collaborators

From across the great water, a lone American said his country still holds some security-related priorities in common with its allies. An old friend of the conference, Harold “Stormy” Martin is Director of the National Coordination Office (NCO) for Space-Based PNT within the U.S. Government. He assured the audience that while, “the world situation is not beautiful right now, President Trump’s PNT policies make it clear that the U.S. takes GPS jamming and GPS spoofing very seriously. We’re developing interference mitigation and detection measures.”

The event highlighted how NewSpace energy—speed, innovation, SME participation, and flexible architectures—is reshaping Europe’s space model and strengthening its vision for Galileo, LEO PNT and a more resilient space infrastructure designed to support economic growth, service continuity, and greater confidence in critical operations.

The post From GNSS to PNT Systems: Europe’s Strategic Pivot at the Munich Space Summit appeared first on Inside GNSS - Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design.

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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