Space Force is having companies like Astranis build GPS

The U.S. Air Force began deploying the Global Positioning System — more commonly known as GPS — nearly 50 years ago, satellites which have become critical infrastructure for both the military and the economy. Since then, GPS is estimated to have generated more than $1.4 trillion in economic benefits, according to a Commerce Department study. But the agency warned that an “outage could potentially have an economic impact of $1 billion a day.” Pentagon leaders believe those losses are a conservative estimate, leading the U.S. Space Force to kick off a roughly $2 billion satellite program known as the Resilient Global Positioning System. Called R-GPS for short, the program is intended to provide an alternative, backup network for the current satellite system. ″[GPS is] vitally important to everything we do day-to-day, from the stock market, for timing of every transaction, to the crops we field,” Lt. Col. Justin Deifel, leader of R-GPS at the Space Force’s Space Systems Command, told CNBC. “It’s like water and electricity. … It’s a utility of the economy and a utility of a warfighter that we need to make sure is available,” Deifel added.