David Mitlyng for Xairos

Scrubbed
Once again the Artemis 1 moon mission is delayed and likely won’t launch this year.
Even without a Category 4 hurricane, Artemis was supposed to launch in August.
In that time they scrubbed three times while SpaceX has launched six times in Florida alone.
Oh, Artemis. You never had a chance, not with such overprotective and risk-averse parents.
Same with GPS.
GPS satellites cost over $350M with nearly decade-long delivery schedules.
A commercial company could launch multiple successive generations with that.
But despite the $4.1B total price tag there are still vulnerability concerns.
And the improvements are all geared towards military users; commercial time and position accuracy hasn’t changed in decades.
Government agencies simply aren’t known for innovation, speed, and efficiency.
Something better is needed.

Last Week's Theme: Going Nowhere Fast

• The Xairos Advisory Board is now in place: welcome to Dr. Raphael Pooser (Quantum Advisor), Nino De Falcis (Timing Advisor), Adam Sturmer (Business Strategy Advisor), and Chris Green (Finance Advisor)!
• Held the first in a regular set of Q&A sessions meant to keep our investors abreast of our developments. Check out a summary presentation here.
• Last call! Closing our seed round soon with a higher valuation coming in Q4.
• Lots of good meetings at IEEE Quantum Week 2022, and now preparing for meetings at Quantum Industry Day, ICSO 2022, and APSCC 2022. Please drop us a line if you are attending and want to meet.
• With the Proof-of-Concept (POC) complete (check out this short demo video), now planning for future developments.

• On January 21, 2022, Air Traffic Control issued a Notice to Airman “of problems with GPS reception spanning about 8,000 square miles in the Denver area,” including interference around Denver International Airport impacting aircraft from the ground up to 40,000 feet above sea level. So what happened? The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) investigation will be released in an upcoming report “GPS Interference Happens,” and has so far announced:
  • “the incident lasted for 33.5 hours
  • impacts varied across infrastructures and applications; some users who were physically shielded from the interference source were able to maintain service
  • some wireline and cellular providers who had timing backup systems were unaffected
  • wireline and cellular providers with no backups suffered, as did some with rubidium backup clocks; the clocks drifted away from each other over the course of the outage and caused cell towers to isolate.”
• In response to Russia’s cyber disruptions of satellite service in Ukraine, Europe announced that they are looking to strengthen their space resilience.
• Starlink helped provide critical communications into Ukraine, and now are looking to provide connectivity for Iran after authorities shut down the internet.
• The US Senate unanimously passed a three-year re-authorization of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, so now the resolution goes to the US House of Representatives.

• Quantum Industry Day, October 4, Zurich, Switzerland
• ICSO 2022, October 6 - 7, Dubrovnik, Croatia
• APSCC 2022, October 18 - 20, Seoul, Korea
• Tough Tech Summit, October 27 - 28, Boston, MA
• International Timing and Sync Forum, November 7 - 10, Dusseldorf, Germany
• Photonics West and Quantum West, January 28 - February 2, San Francisco, CA
• Time and Money Conference, January, New York
• Workshop on Synchronization and Timing Systems, March 13 - 16, Vancouver, Canada

One comment we hear a lot: “Isn't GPS good enough?”
All networks and power grids rely on timing from GPS; if it ever went down, the damage could be catastrophic.
How bad? On January 26, 2016, we almost found out.
The US spends nearly $2B a year to ensure that the catastrophic doesn’t happen.
But radiation hardening and on-orbit spares can’t protect against local jamming and interference.
There are over 100,000 outages reported a year in Europe alone.
Jamming in Eastern Europe impacted flights out of Finland, and a recent mysterious case impacted flights out of Denver International Airport.
But it remains a nice juicy target for adversaries.
Because of this, many countries have already started their own sovereign GPS replacements.
But what is less known: there is now a movement for GPS-independent national resilient timing systems.

To learn more, please email us or schedule a meeting here.