Quantum maps, GPS traps, and big launches ahead.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Today is November 24, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC PLAYING] T-minus. 22nd to LLS T-dred. Open aboard. [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] Five. AST Space Mobile plans to launch its Bluebird 6 satellite from the Satish Devon Space Center in India on December 15. Four. ST Engineering has been selected by FADA to deliver a SAR satellite as part of the UAE National SAR Constellation Program. Three. China has launched a commercial trial of satellite internet of things, or IoT services. Two. China plans to send an unmanned spacecraft to Tiangong Space Station on November 25 to support the crew that are left without a return vehicle. One. Luxembourg's Space Agency has awarded a contract to the Canadian Space Mining Corporation to develop a novel space-based quantum grabimetry sensor system known as QASM. [MUSIC PLAYING] Lift off. [MUSIC PLAYING] And today, I am joined by Dave Bidner from our sister podcast, The Cyber Wire, and cybersecurity executive and friend of the show, Brandon Karp, for our monthly space and cyber segment to talk about GPS spoofing. What is it? Why is it important? And what's being done about it? Well, you can find out more after today's intelligence briefing. [MUSIC PLAYING] Happy Monday, everybody. Thank you for joining me. Let us dive into today's top five stories, shall we? First up, Luxembourg's Space Agency has awarded a contract to the Canadian Space Mining Corporation, known as CSMC, to develop a novel space-based quantum grabimetry sensor system known as QASM. And QASM stands for Quantum Atomic Subsurface Mapper. And it will be a dual-use sensing platform designed to detect and characterize subsurface resources, such as critical minerals and water, from orbit on the Earth. And it is a dual-use sensing platform designed to detect and characterize subsurface resources, such as critical minerals and water, from orbit on the Earth and other planetary bodies. The project represents a milestone in EU-Canada cooperation on quantum technologies for space exploration, integrating Canadian innovation with European technical and institutional leadership. Early laboratory demonstrations of the QASM system are scheduled for 2026 with field testing and validation to follow, paving the way for a potential in-space demonstration in the next few years. Chinese state media is reporting that China plans to send a unmanned spacecraft to Tiangong Space Station on November 25 to support the crew that are left on there without a return vehicle. The Shenzhou 22 spacecraft is being sent to China's space station to replace the Shenzhou 21, which, as you might know, was forced to return to Earth six months before schedule after another vessel docked at the station was damaged. It still remains unclear how China plans to handle the damaged Shenzhou 20 vessel, which experts have suggested could be undocked from Tiangong and de-orbited over the Pacific. And staying in China for our third story, local media is reporting that the nation has launched a commercial trial of satellite Internet of Things or IoT services. The trial aims to diversify the supply in the satellite communication market and support the safe development of emerging industries, such as commercial aerospace and the low altitude economy. The commercial trial will reportedly last for two years and support eligible enterprises in conducting satellite IoT services in accordance with laws and regulations. Singapore's ST engineering has been selected by the space focused entity under EDGE group, FADA, to deliver a synthetic aperture radar satellite as part of the UAE's National SAR Satellite Constellation Program, CERB. This program is aimed at enhancing the UAE's Earth observation capabilities and includes the design and delivery of both the satellite and the mission control infrastructure necessary to capture high resolution radar images for critical applications, such as disaster response, environmental monitoring, and national security. ST engineering will also design and deliver the infrastructure that are required for its operation. And AST Space Mobile has announced the launch date for its Bluebird 6 satellite. The Bluebird 6, which is a US licensed satellite, is aiming to launch on December 15 from the Satish Devan Space Center in India. Bluebird 6 is the first of AST Space Mobile's next generation satellites and will feature the largest commercial phased array in low Earth orbit at nearly 2,400 square feet. AST says it represents a three and a half times increase over Bluebirds 1 through 5 and supports 10 times the data capacity. The company says that it is planning five orbital launches by the end of Q1 2026, with launches occurring every one to two months on average to reach 45 to 60 satellites launched by the end of 2026, and support continuous coverage across the United States and select markets. And that wraps up the top five stories for the start of this Thanksgiving week here in the United States. And now our audio editor, Trey Hester, joins me with a look at some of the other stories that are making headlines today. Hi, Trey. What do you have for us? Greetings, Maria. We've added three additional stories to the selected reading section of our show notes today. They covered the intended building boom in the Arctic, the different space strategies across Europe, and NASA's selection for liquid hydrogen supply. Thank you, Trey, and a reminder that links to all of those stories and the original sources of all the other stories mentioned in today's episode can be found on our website. space.n2k.com. Just click on today's episode title. If you're a regular listener to T-minus, then you know that every day at the end of each show, I read the names of all of the people who work on this show. People like Trey. It is a big team effort to get this show published every day. And you, dear listener, also play a very important role, because every time you share an episode of T-minus with your colleagues or on social media just for fun, that not only helps us grow, but more importantly, it also shows how our work is useful and interesting to you. So if you enjoy T-minus, don't keep us hidden. Share our show in your social and professional networks, as that helps us grow and it makes T-minus even better every day. And thank you for being a part of the T-minus crew. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] Today, I'm joined by Dave Bittner from our sister podcast, The Cyber Wire, and cybersecurity executive and friend of T-minus, Brandon Karp, for our monthly space and cyber segment. It is my pleasure to welcome Brandon Karp to the show. He is the leader for International Public Private Partnerships at NTT. Brandon, welcome. Thank you. It was good to be here, Dave. And of course, Maria Vermazes, host of the T-minus Space Daily podcast. Maria, thank you. Thanks for having me, Dave. Glad to be here. And I, Brandon-- You are a graduate of the US Naval Academy. And as such, have actually spent time out at sea. So our topic today is GPS maritime spoofing. And what we're seeing around the world when it comes to our adversaries, taking advantage of the GPS system and their ability to jam it or block it or do the things they want to do. Can I just start with you, Brandon, for folks who aren't familiar with GPS and the reliance of it from folks at sea? How would you describe that? Yeah, sure. So from a high level, starting with what is this thing that we all do rely on and every aspect of our daily lives and economy today relies on this brilliant innovation from the US military developed around the 1970s that was really designed to drop a precision guided munition on Moscow during the Cold War. Not to put too far to point on it. Which was the whole point of this thing. Mine's always great talking to Brandon. I'm just going to get right to it. And then the private sector started realizing, hey, we can do a lot with this. And early days GPS, the resolution was down to a few meters. And then over the last 20 years, the US military opened up more reserve frequencies that allowed our iPhones to geolocate us to within really centimeters, incredibly high fidelity location that has opened up literally trillions of dollars of economic value have been attributed to GPS. So talk about a great investment for the US government to put into the economy. We've literally gained trillions of dollars. But when it comes to specific areas of the economy, think any sort of transportation, whether it's aviation or maritime, having the ability to precisely geolocate where you are on Earth to navigate around things like hurricanes or typhoons or things like sea state that is beyond the capabilities of your ship, to do things like autonomous navigation, where you now have ships who are pretty much-- these days, the large maritime trade ships pretty much drive themselves. They have a small crew who are there to really bring it in and out of port, other than that, these ships really kind of just drive themselves. All of that relies on and requires the accurate GPS signals from our position navigation and timing satellites. And Maria, on the space side of things, that's what we're talking about here. This is a constellation of satellites, right? There are several different ones. GPS is the US-owned one. I'm sure Brandon was going to get to that. But there are many different ones. Galileo is famously the one that Europe has, and then China has its own. And I'm sure there's others that I'm forgetting. And there's always more being added. But they're sort of in the industry is called either P&T, Position, Navigation, and Timing, as Brandon said, or GNSS is another one, sort of as the generic. But often, when you say GPS, people know what you mean. So yeah, but there are a lot. And there are going to be increasingly more, because many global economies are realizing that these are extraordinarily valuable, and they're being increasingly tied to many different markets, where you might not-- in ways you might not expect. I'm always surprised to find where else it's turning up and what else is totally dependent on these satellites being accessible and working correctly. So let's talk about the implications for the maritime industry and indeed the military. I mean, we've got, as you say, Brandon, these ships that are relying on GPS. But it is evidently easy or not too hard to jam or spoof, which can throw ships off course. Yeah, most definitely. The signal characteristics themselves are actually incredibly basic. And just with some commercial off-the-shelf technology, you can replicate a-- specifically a GPS signal. And again, as Maria mentioned, there are multiple different constellations. All of them have their own signal characteristics. But the GPS signal itself is an incredibly low power signal. It's not very complex in terms of the modulation. It uses a very basic form of modulation. So again, this is something that you could probably buy maybe $50 of off-the-shelf equipment and create a spoofed GPS signal. In fact, I've even heard of some companies who are doing precision robotics, doing this inside their own labs of spoofing these signals or replicating these signals, which is technically illegal. Technically illegal. Technically illegal. But it's so easy to do that when you need to create some sort of robotics laboratory, you can really do it with literally probably about $50 of equipment. Now, the problem there is that not only our military ships and equipment-- and by the way, we didn't mention, but military ships heavily reliant on GPS, not just where you are, but also deconflicting where you are with other ships, but also your munitions. As we talked about the original intent of GPS, these days, smart munitions all rely on GPS. And so what you're seeing is increasing incidents of GPS spoofing and jamming, which are different things. And we could talk about the difference there. But GPS spoofing and jamming really kind of took off by the Russians in the Eastern Mediterranean during the conflict in Syria in the mid to late 2010s, has really expanded in the war on Ukraine, around the Black Sea, and Ukraine. We've seen it in the Western Pacific, around Taiwan, and even in some of the straits, like the Straits of Malacca. And we are starting to see it in areas like the Red Sea, the Straits of Hormuz, et cetera. And even recently, some reports of manipulated GPS signals off the coast of Venezuela. We've heard rumors of whenever Vladimir Putin is on board a ship, they spoof that ship's location. So I guess to make it a more difficult target to find? Or something like that? Yeah, short, certainly. And his dacha in the mountains of Russia similarly, no GPS signals will work anywhere near that location. And we have seen this, of course, with foreign leaders or dictators who understand how easy it is to manipulate these signals, but also how much the US and US allies rely on these for our military intelligence operations. And how pretty much everything we have today, in terms of those more technical operations, rely on an accurate geolocated signal. And so right now, this is starting to occur regularly. And as I mentioned, it's pretty inexpensive and easy to do this. Brandon, can I ask you to walk us through the different modes of jamming or swooping? Because I think we often-- and I know I often get confused. And when I read various mainline news stories about some person doing something with a Bluetooth device to do something to GPS, and I'm going, well, what exactly happened there? And my understanding is there's actually a couple different ways to achieve this. And they all can be a bit different. So can you walk us through them? Sure. So the first I'll talk about is really kind of the least sophisticated form of jamming, which is really just putting a whole bunch of noise out into the atmosphere. So imagine you and I are having kind of like a little whispered conversation, and then someone else just turns on a radio super loud. And you can't hear yourself think. That is barrage jamming. That is just the simplest form of jamming. You're just putting so much noise into the atmosphere that whoever's trying to receive the correct signal can't really hear the right signal, can't distinguish the signal for the noise. And that's the simplest form, really easy to generate that. And you're just putting a whole bunch of energy out there into the world. And there are techniques for getting around that. Again, that's relatively unsophisticated. And so there are some interesting modulation techniques that you can actually still extract the signal from that kind of a noise. But that is still a very effective technique. And when it comes to GPS, you're just denying the availability of a user of GPS. No one's going to have GPS there. Now, a little more sophisticated is when you talk about more spot jamming, which is you-- if you know the frequencies that someone is going to communicate on, which GPS is an open standard now, everyone knows those frequencies, even if it's moving frequencies, you can instead of putting out just noise across the whole spectrum, put out noise specifically over those frequencies. And in that way, you're actually being much more efficient with the energy that you need and the resources you need to jam. And you're being much more effective in terms of jamming the specific frequencies being used by whatever user. But still jamming, you're just denying availability of that signal for someone to collect on it. Now, the much more sophisticated type is actual GPS spoofing. And GPS spoofing is where you actually copy the GPS signal itself. You copy the modulation, you copy the frequencies, you copy the power level that someone expects to see, because devices are actually pretty smart. And there are ways of seeing, OK, this signal I'm receiving seems too powerful. And so let's just ignore it or filter it out. And so a really effective, sophisticated GPS spoofer is going to copy that modulation, copy the frequency, copy the power level, and replicate that out into the environment. And give you just a slight timing delay. And really, that's how the GPS signals work. It's looking at the timing between you and multiple satellites, you and multiple satellite transponders. And if an adversary is spoofing that signal and slowly introduces a timing offset and slowly increases that timing offset over time, the adversary is going to pull your GPS location away from where it's supposed to be, manipulating where you think you are in the world. That's so cool. I hate it. That's my reaction. Like, that's so smart. And you can look up-- you can look up, I mean, open source GitHub repos that do this, algorithms that do this. Any sort of software-defined radio has the ability to do this. So one of the potential perils here that I've seen covered is that an adversary can, as you say, lure a ship away from, say, an international shipping lane into an area where they shouldn't be, therefore giving that adversary an excuse to board that ship or fire upon it. Certainly, right. And when you think about maritime, every country who has coastal regions has this thing called an exclusive economic zone, and then this thing called territorial waters. Your exclusive economic zone is within 200 nautical miles of your coast, and then territorial waters is within 12 nautical miles of your coast. Certainly, military operations are very sensitive not to infringe upon that 12 nautical miles. Foreign nation military ships are not allowed to transit within that territorial waters of a foreign nation without being invited. But that exclusive economic zone gives that nation-- the nation permission to do their fishing and mining and oil drilling, et cetera, without being infringed upon. And so certainly, the GPS spoofing would affect that, would affect a military's ability, like ours, who's doing something like a freedom of navigation operation, which is where we move a ship between, say, Taiwan and mainland China, and say, this is a free economic zone. Anyone can transit here. We are participating in that freedom of navigation operation. But if the GPS signals are spoofed in that area, it makes the US military much more concerned that we might accidentally infringe upon the territorial waters of a foreign nation. And so they might be more sensitive to that, or pull further away. Also, just accurate navigation. Ships are navigating based on charts and shoal waters and other potential hazards. And not having confidence in where you are creates a massive amount of risk that these ships might just not accept. Brandon, when you were describing just the jamming and spoofing techniques, the thought that I had was we often shorthand talk about these satellite hacking problems. And it sounds like, yet again, it's really more a terminal, a ground terminal thing. Is my read on that correct? I mean, what is the mitigation here for somebody who's dealing with this in contested waters or whatnot? Yeah, it is kind of a terminal. You jam a receiver, not a transmitter. When you jam something or spoof something, you are spoofing or jamming against the receiver, not the transmitter. The GPS constellation is just a whole bunch of transponders in medium Earth orbit. So yeah, I mean, the problem is that the protocol itself, the modulation, the technology is so fundamental that it's just so easy to replicate. But even if you did something much more complex, I mean, it could still be hacked. You can manipulate a cell signal using CDMA pretty easily. You see that all the time with the cellular collection stingrays and things like that. So that's even a more complex signal that's pretty easy to spoof. So there are these things called navigation message authentications, which essentially, think of it like a digital signature, right, where you can maybe sign the signal. But that requires the receiver to have a little more processing power. And so you're putting a tax on the terminal, on the receiver, to actually do some calculation, to take some CPU time, to authenticate these messages. Really, that's to me really kind of the only solution here. There was digital signatures using kind of the techniques from authenticating communications and network technologies and applying that to these GPS signals might be, I think, the best solution. That certainly has worked very well in terms of secure authentication in networks, secure software updates, et cetera, making sure that the message you're receiving is actually coming from who you think it's coming from. To me, that's a proved and a well-established solution in the network space. Probably applies quite well here also. You mentioned earlier that the military, at some point, had opened up access to GPS. And I remember when that happened, suddenly devices got a lot more accurate, as you say. We're down to centimeter accuracy now. Does the military have their own separate fallback on this, or are they still using the same system that all the rest of us use? The military is very much using the same system that all the rest of us use. There has been a lot of talk and some funding going towards the next generation of GPS. And Maria, certainly, I'm curious what you've heard about this. It's early days for those. There's a number of companies on those contracts. But as of right now, military is totally reliant on the legacy GPS architecture. Yeah, I was just thinking of that. Because just as you mentioned it, Dave, I was trying to-- I was racking my brains. I'm like, I know I've been hearing a lot about this. And it still does sound very preliminary to Brandon's point. But I want to say I've also been hearing about putting PNT in lower orbit, which is an interesting idea. I guess the idea there'd be more redundancy. But just because of where it would be versus in medium Earth orbit, I'm just kind of like, how would that work? Someone's figuring it out. But it's like, why low Earth orbit in that case? What would be the advantage there, aside from proliferation, I would assume? Yeah, I've heard that as a defense against some other elements, which is that's not necessarily defending against jamming and spoofing. Or kinetic stuff. It's more kinetic stuff. It's more attacks against the space-based architecture itself. In lower Earth orbit, you need a lot more satellites. But those satellites can be a lot less exquisite, because they're a lot closer. I mean, a lot, a lot closer. I mean, low Earth orbit, we're talking like 300 miles. Medium Earth orbit is like 12,000 miles or something. So the amount of power you need to transmit down to ground, much less. But then again, you need a lot more satellites to provide that proper coverage. But I've heard talks about putting it on some of these mega constellations, et cetera, as well. Yeah, but I mean, some of the other techniques here are going away from space-based solutions altogether. There are terrestrial-based solutions. And one of them is a legacy technology called low-ran, which was originally invented during the Cold War using a much lower frequency communication, but an over-the-horizon frequency range that would allow-- I mean, it's really hard to jam that, really hard to spoof that. But unfortunately, that also requires much larger equipment, at least back in the day, to properly receive those signals. So there are other ideas out there. There's some quantum stuff that I've been reading about in terms of navigation and laser-based inertial navigation. I mean, tons of different technologies that people are actively investing in right now to try to solve this problem. Our thanks to Brandon Karp for joining us for our monthly space cyber check-in. And if you have a question that you would like him to answer, send it on over to us. Space@n2k.com is our email, and we will share your question or thought or idea with him. [MUSIC PLAYING] We'll be right back. Welcome back. If you go down in the woods today, you're sure for a big surprise. If you go down in the woods specifically between early near Redding and fally near Henley, just west outside of London, please do keep a keen eye out for a brown teddy bear and a checked shirt, navy shorts, and matching bow tie. And his name is Bradfield Bear, by the way. For Bradfield Bear is the mascot for the kiddos at Wallampton School. And the year seven and eight kids sent him and his Badger Buddy Bill on a little trip to the stratosphere attached to a weather balloon. For science, of course. And the idea was that they had a little camera watching Bill and Bradfield as they soared super high, high up into the sky. And the idea was they would also come down slowly, slowly to the ground, he were being slowly. Bradfield Bear certainly made his way back to the ground, but not slowly. When the weather balloon hit some unexpected turbulence and Bradfield and Bill went a rock and a roll in, well, Bill hanged on tight. But Bradfield decided today was a day that he'd have his picnic and decided to get the heck out of there and fast. The kids were all watching on a live stream of their mascots from the stratosphere when they saw Bradfield quickly detach approximately 27 kilometers above the earth. And from there, well, Bradfield is on some kind of fantastic walkabout adventure because no one has yet been able to find him. So again, if you are west of London and early and folly are local to you, keep a lookout for the intrepid skydiving Teddy Bear Bradfield. And if you find him, please let the kids at Wallampton School know because they miss their space adventuring bear. And would love to hear all about his sudden keen interest in high altitude skydiving. And that is T-minus brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast, your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. You like our show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fail to survey in the show notes or send an email to space@n2k.com. We're proud that N2K Cyberwire is part of the daily routine of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector. From the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies. N2K helps space and cybersecurity professionals grow, learn, and stay informed. As the nexus for discovery and connection, we bring you the people, the technology, and the ideas shaping the future of secure innovation. Learn how at N2K.com. N2K's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliott Peltzman and Tre Hester with original music by Elliott Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. Peter Kilpe is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thank you for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [MUSIC PLAYING] T minus. [EXPLOSION] [MUSIC]