The University of Texas Hacked Starlink’s Signal So It Can Be Used as a GPS AlternativeIn addition to providing high-speed internet connectivity to even the most remote corners of the Earth, the over 3,000 satellites that make up the Starlink network have the potential to do even more, like replace the two dozen satellites that power the Global Positioning System.Although Starlink’s thousands of satellites each maintain a non-geostationary position in low-Earth orbit, and GPS satellites follow one of six different orbits that circle the planet twice every day, they both share a common feature: they beam signals down to the surface of the Earth.Read moreGo Funko Yourself This HalloweenRemembering Enterprise: The Test Shuttle That Never Flew to SpaceTodd Humphreys and a team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin’s Radionavigation Laboratory realized that Starlink could also serve as an accurate and reliable backup to the Global Positioning System, but SpaceX eventually decided that it was not a priority for the company, and stopped cooperating with the researchers.That’s a far cry from the potential millimeter accuracy that can be achieved with the GPS system when using advanced receiver equipment (the hardware the US military relies on) but Humphreys, who recently shared their team’s work on decoding the Starlink signal structure in a non-peer-reviewed paper, believes that if SpaceX chose to cooperate, simple software updates and additional data encoded in the synchronization signals could improve the positional accuracy to less than a meter, comparable to the accuracy of GPS consumer hardware.For obvious reasons (they were created as military tools first and foremost) services like GPS and GLONASS prioritize security, but as long as SpaceX has no interest in competing as a navigation service, using Starlink for that purpose could be problematic."