Australia trains emergency services and military for GPS and satellite outages

Australia’s emergency services and military personnel are being trained to read paper maps, navigate without GPS support, and sail by the stars in case something knocks out the nation’s space capabilities.

A panel at the 19th Australian space forum in Adelaide on Wednesday was asked to consider what would happen “if we suddenly lost access to critical space infrastructure – no satellites, no GPS, no remote sensing, no secure communications?”

The experts warned that Australians are unaware just how dependent they are on space, and how vulnerable that connection is to enemy attacks and solar flares.

It’s “not science fiction”, Optus satellite and space systems head, Nick Leake, said.

He described ATM networks going down, emergency services losing their situational awareness, aircraft navigation degrading, defence losing secure communications and remote communities being entirely cut off.

Aviation, freight and energy grid communications all rely on satellites, and financial systems could face “immediate cascading failure”, he said. People may only realise their service is being delivered by a satellite when they lose it.

“Most Australians have no idea that space is part of their everyday life,” Leake said.

“This isn’t science fiction. This is how critical satellite infrastructure is. Australia has one of the highest per capita dependencies on satellite infrastructure in the world.

“Right now, it’s largely unguarded.”

Flinders University adjunct professor Jackie Craig AM is an expert in cyber and virtual warfare and an incident management team leader with the South Australian state emergency service.

She said emergency services are “increasingly dependent on increasingly vulnerable systems”.

She said they now teach members to navigate with street directories and maps instead of phones – a once ubiquitous skill that has become lost in the age of Google Maps.

“What we discovered is the young people of the digital revolution can’t actually use a UBD [street directory]. They’re also very poor at reading and using maps,” she said.

“A lot of us can’t navigate.”

She said if the satellite systems went down emergency services would be “back to pencil and paper”, radios, and hard copies of procedure manuals.

Michael Murphy, deputy chief executive of the Royal Flying Doctor Service SA/NT, said if satellite systems went dark tomorrow, they would continue as normal – for about 24 hours, thanks to inbuilt contingencies and redundancies. Then, they would prioritise life-saving missions, relying on manual procedures and alternative communication methods.

He said they could go “old school” with high frequency radio and use the bush telegraph to share information in an analogue way.

“[And] we’ve got heaps of really good landmarks, the river systems, deserts, ranges, borders, water. If you’re familiar with the land, you’ll get around pretty well,” he said.

The Australian Defence Force’s air commodore, Chris Robson, said planning for a loss of satellite support wasn’t “doomsday prepping” or a “scare tactic” but “something we need to be honest about”.

“I don’t think the general public understands,” the space forces group and joint forces space component commander said.

The defence force is already offering sextant training, so members can navigate by the stars, along with terrestrial navigation training. But Robson did not think it would be frequently used.

“I don’t think that you will see too many people sitting on the bridge looking at a sextant,” he said.

The biggest risk was not an enemy attack, he said, but “that big orange glowing thing that on any single day can have a hiccup and take out a significant portion of our space capabilities”.

The panel discussed ways to make the network more resilient, including having satellite redundancy in multiple orbits, more Earth stations, and sovereign satellite capabilities, instead of relying on US giants Amazon and Starlink.