The first precision commercial alternative to GPS is preparing to go live when six satellites designed by the startup Xona Space Systems launch into orbit this month.
A service that competes with free signals provided by governments around the world may seem foolhardy, but Xona is hoping to add navigation and timing to the list of de facto government space monopolies disrupted by venture-backed startups.
Xona was founded in 2019 by a team of five engineers who originally met at Stanford University’s aerospace engineering graduate program. One, Tyler Reid, went on to earn a PhD, writing his thesis on the possibilities of using satellites in low-earth orbit to improve navigation.
GPS and analog satellite networks built by Europe, China, and Russia provide huge value, but are also easy to jam and aren’t precise enough to be used alone for applications like farming robots or self-driving cars. Over “pizza and beer chats,” the friends mulled whether fixing those problems could be a business.
“My knee jerk was like, this is dumb,” Xona CEO Brian Manning told TechCrunch during a recent visit to the company’s headquarters. “Why would anybody replace GPS? It’s free, right? And I started digging into it. People think of GPS as a free service, but the market isn’t the service. The market’s the hardware, and you have billions of devices being sold every year; those things aren’t being given away for free. There’s an immense market that is desperately looking for better performance.”
That didn’t mean the road to delivering such a service was simple. Improving GPS with a stronger signal that offers more precise timing and location data remained a technical challenge. The company needed to develop a unique architecture that would allow its satellites to keep time without expensive atomic clocks onboard, taking advantage of the spacecraft’s proximity to Earth and close communication with ground-based sources of truth.
The other technical challenge the company solved was making sure its signals could be received by existing GPS receivers with a relatively simple software modification. That gives Xona immediate access to the market and smoothes the way through the regulations for broadcasting navigation signals.
Later this month, a SpaceX rocket is scheduled to launch six satellites for Xona. Four are similar to a prototype the company launched last year that proved its technology; those satellites are built around a satellite platform from Aerospace Labs. The other two satellites were built entirely by Xona at its Burlingame, California, headquarters, and are intended to be the foundation of the company’s 258-satellite operational constellation, called Pulsar.
Pulsar will offer centimeter-level precision for geolocation, instead of the meter-level precision provided by GPS, and its signal is strong enough to be detected inside buildings and in urban environments. Manning also believes its signal is powerful enough to deter would-be jammers and spoofers, too.
Xona can begin beta-testing Pulsar with real customers once its satellites are in orbit and passing overhead the mid-latitudes about eight times a day.
Ian Gough, the CEO of TimeBeat, a company that specializes in electronic timing, says the initial pilot will allow his engineers to check and correct the timing provided by its devices around the world. By 2028, Xona hopes to offer full coverage in the U.S., Europe, Japan, and South Korea.
Xona has raised just over $300 million from venture investors since its founding, including $20 million from the U.S. Space Force. While the company is focused on offering a commercial service, the U.S. government is clearly interested in the technology, as jamming and spoofing of satellite navigation services become increasingly common in conflicts.
While there are literally billions of potential users for a new precision timing signal, Xona is also looking ahead to a world of growing autonomy. Reid, whose thesis inspired the company and who now serves as its CTO, worked on self-driving cars at Ford and saw that a service like Pulsar would be needed to realize the potential of autonomous vehicles of all stripes.
Xona’s headquarters boasts an incredible view of planes landing at San Francisco International Airport. Watching the jets come in, Manning points out that among “all the forms of mass transportation, the gold standard for safety is civil aviation. We see Xona and what we’re building being able to play a big part in that … to provide the service to a car, so you can feel as safe taking your hands off the wheel as you are laying back in an airliner.”