“These signals could be roughly 400,000 times more immune to jamming. “Jamming GPS is quite accessible to even amateurs - even casual actors can intentionally or unintentionally jam GPS,” Ianucci says. Ianucci says GPS signals accidentally get jammed all of the time. This would help prevent the signal from being jammed, intentionally or unintentionally, which is something that’s relatively easy to do to traditional GPS. Since these satellites are in low-Earth orbit (around 350 miles from earth’s surface) and therefore closer to the planet than traditional GPS satellites (which orbit at a distance of around 12,000 miles), they could theoretically produce a stronger signal for navigation than GPS can. “Everybody’s gotta have internet service.”

“What we’re talking about is a system where the positioning mission does not need to bear the financial burden of supporting tens of thousands of satellites because they have a primary mission, which is internet service,” Ianucci says. Iannucci tells Digital Trends that setting up a navigation system from scratch in low-Earth orbit would be too costly, but using the Starlink satellites to do it would make it affordable. Peter Iannucci and Todd Humphreys of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin have been studying how this could be done, and recently published a paper on their research.

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