Xona to Launch Six Satellites for Commercial GPS Alternative Pulsar

The satellites are scheduled to launch on a SpaceX rocket later this month. Four are similar to a prototype Xona launched last year to prove its technology and are built around a satellite platform from Aerospace Labs. The other two were built entirely by Xona at its Burlingame headquarters and are intended to form the foundation of the company's 258-satellite operational constellation, Pulsar. Once the satellites are in orbit and pass over the mid-latitudes about eight times a day, Xona can begin beta-testing Pulsar with real customers.

GPS and analog satellite networks built by Europe, China and Russia provide huge value, but they are easy to jam and are not precise enough to be used alone for applications such as farming robots or self-driving cars, according to TechCrunch. Xona was founded in 2019 by five engineers who met at Stanford University's aerospace engineering graduate program. One of them, Tyler Reid, wrote a PhD thesis on using satellites in low-earth orbit to improve navigation. Over pizza and beer chats, the friends considered whether fixing those problems could become a business.

Xona CEO Brian Manning told TechCrunch that his initial reaction was that the idea was dumb. 'Why would anybody replace GPS? It's free, right?' he said. '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.'

Delivering that service required technical work. Xona needed a unique architecture that would let its satellites keep time without expensive atomic clocks onboard, taking advantage of their proximity to Earth and close communication with ground-based sources of truth. It also needed to ensure its signals could be received by existing GPS receivers with a relatively simple software modification, which gives it immediate access to the market and eases the regulatory path for broadcasting navigation signals.

Pulsar will offer centimeter-level precision for geolocation, compared with the meter-level precision provided by GPS. Its signal is strong enough to be detected inside buildings and in urban environments, and Manning believes it is powerful enough to deter would-be jammers and spoofers. Ian Gough, CEO of electronic timing company TimeBeat, said 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 United States, 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 interested in the technology as jamming and spoofing of satellite navigation services become increasingly common in conflicts. Reid, whose thesis inspired the company and who now serves as 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.

At Xona's headquarters, which overlooks planes landing at San Francisco International Airport, Manning pointed to civil aviation as the gold standard for safety among forms of mass transportation. '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,' he said.