Xona Wants to Take On GPS With Its Own Satellites
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GPS is free, imprecise and easy to disrupt, and that is exactly what Xona is building a business on: The California start-up Xona Space Systems is sending six satellites into orbit on a SpaceX rocket later this month. They are meant to put the first commercial precision alternative to GPS into testing, TechCrunch reported. The service is called Pulsar and is eventually supposed to consist of 258 satellites.
Centimeters Instead of Meters
Pulsar promises positioning accurate to within a few centimeters, compared with several meters for GPS. The satellites orbit at about 1,000 kilometers, far closer to Earth than GPS satellites at more than 20,000 kilometers. As a result, the signal is supposed to arrive much stronger, even inside buildings and urban canyons. Xona describes its signals as encrypted and authenticated and about 100 times more powerful than conventional satellite navigation. The satellites do not need expensive onboard atomic clocks; they continuously align their time with reference stations on the ground. Existing GPS receivers are supposed to be able to use the signals after a software update.
Four of the six new satellites are based on a prototype Xona launched in 2025 and are built by the Belgian satellite maker Aerospacelab. Xona developed the other two itself, and they form the foundation of the future constellation. Tests with customers are set to begin once the satellites pass over the middle latitudes several times a day. Xona aims to cover the United States, Europe, Japan and South Korea by 2028. An early pilot customer is the timing specialist TimeBeat, which wants to synchronize its devices worldwide through Pulsar.
Protection Against Jamming
The need is real. GPS and the government systems from Europe, China and Russia are often not precise enough on their own for applications such as self-driving cars or farm robots. Above all, they are easy to jam or spoof. In war zones such as Ukraine, where drones and A.I. combat data shape daily life, that has long been standard practice. In the Baltic region, too, airlines and ships have struggled with disrupted GPS signals for years. Brian Manning, Xona’s chief executive, is convinced that Pulsar’s stronger signals will make it much harder to jam.
Xona was founded in 2019 by five graduates of Stanford’s aeronautics and astronautics program. Tyler Reid, the chief technology officer, previously worked on self-driving cars at Ford. In total, the start-up has raised just over $300 million (about €267 million) from investors, plus $20 million from the U.S. Space Force.
Europe Is Building Its Own Options
Xona is not alone. The European Space Agency is working on low-orbit navigation satellites through its Celeste program to complement Europe’s Galileo system. Whether Pulsar can compete with free government systems remains to be seen. Mr. Manning himself admitted that he initially thought the idea of a commercial GPS was “dumb,” because the money in GPS has so far been made from hardware rather than from the service itself.
