AI Summary
5 min readHow GPS shaped our world
In early 1990, Ira Flatow was riding in a red pickup truck along the San Andreas Fault with US Geological Survey scientist Al Lind. Between them sat a small wooden box with red Nixie tube numbers that jumped around as Lind turned the steering wheel. "Believe it or not," Lind said, "there's this satellite overhead that is transmitting our exact location to us." A year later, the Gulf War broke out, and the world's global positioning system emerged from obscurity. A whole generation has never known a world without it.
The mystery at the Russian port
Author Katherine Dunn came to GPS through a strange route—"through some bad Russians," as she puts it. In 2018, she stumbled on an article about ships arriving at Novorossiysk, a Russian port on the north edge of the Black Sea near Crimea. When these ships arrived, alarms started blaring, saying there wasn't reliable GPS. The crews looked out the window—they were at port, they knew exactly where they were. Then they looked at their screens, which showed they were on the tarmac at Russian airports.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:21) **Ira's First Encounter with GPS** - Ira shares his 1990 story of seeing a prototype GPS receiver in a USGS truck, which amazed him by showing live position changes as they drove over the San Andreas Fault.
- 2 (01:45) **Introducing the Mystery: GPS Spoofing in Russia** - Author Katherine Dunn explains how she got hooked on GPS through a strange incident involving Russian ships appearing at airports on GPS screens.
- 3 (04:27) **The "Putin as an Airport" Explanation** - The bizarre GPS spoofing was traced to a Russian government tactic to protect Putin from drone attacks.
- 4 (05:58) **How GPS Can Be Manipulated: Jamming vs. Spoofing** - Dunn explains the two main ways GPS signals can be disrupted, with spoofing being the more technically difficult "hijacking" of the signal.
- 5 (07:14) **The Cat-and-Mouse Game of GPS Defense** - Military and civilian systems are locked in a rapid cycle of attack and counterattack, especially visible in the war in Ukraine.
- 6 (08:55) **How GPS Actually Works: The Secret Sauce of Time** - Dunn explains the core technology: satellites with atomic clocks broadcasting precise time, which your phone uses to calculate position via trilateration.
- 7 (10:43) **The Military Origins of GPS** - The system was born from the need for precision bombing during the Vietnam War, culminating in a 1973 Pentagon meeting that designed the system.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
GPS is such an essential part of our lives that it’s easy to forget there was once a world without it. But, like many tech advancements of the 20th century, GPS was originally created by the U.S. military. So how did it become a part of daily civilian life? And how vulnerable is it to manipulation?
Katherine Dunn has written all about this and more in her book, “Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World.”
Guest:
Katherine Dunn is a science journalist and author of “Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World.”
Transcript will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.
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