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Comment by woliveirajr | Hacker News Reader

> Esa is also in contact with the Indian space agency which is using the same clocks in its sat-nav system. So far, the Indians have not experienced the same failures.

Since the same technology and the same manufacturer is being used, it's a weird problem to have after the satellites are already in space.

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My SWAG is that it's not a clock problem, it's a power supply problem.

All the satellites probably use the same clock power supply, regardless of which clock they chose to put into the satellite.

That would explain why you have the Indian clocks by the same manufacturer all working, and why two completely different clock technologies (hydrogen maser and rubidium) are both failing.

It's not Indian clocks it's Switzerland clock, the compagny is spectratime in the town of Neuchâtel.

If they double everything they won't make this bad idea of sharing the same power supply.

They're all the same clocks but the ones owned by India are working fine, so Indian clocks is a good description.

Would it be paranoid to contemplate sabotage?

After all, a global system has clear military value. In contrast the Indian system is limited in coverage to India and nearby nations.

No, I believe your reasoning is sound.

Given the level of political sabotage it saw when already at drawing stages I would not be surprised.

You don't think it's a pretty big leap from political pressure (aka what all countries do to each other all the time) to sabotage, a literal act of war and something that would, if discovered, at the very least put Nato into serious jeopardy?

no, in this case I don't think it is a huge leap.

for mankind?

Nah. Especially not after Stuxnet.

But that was targeted at Iran, this would be targeted at the majority of Nato.

Edited to add: also, the fact that Stuxnet was discovered would be good reason to think you wouldn't attempt this. You'd need to be bullet proof certain that it would never be discovered.

It wouldn't have to be the US. It could also be Russia or China (perhaps less likely).

The sabotage doesn't have to be James Bond shooting a PPK into a wiring harness or dumping a test tube of mystery onto clock circuit boards.

The Americans spent a decade and a lot of money on the first gen system in the 80s (we're on like the forth or fifth gen of GPS sats now) and the sabotage could be as simple as making it a classified state secret that mounting the physics package such that the electrodes are vertical causes microfractures in the physics package due to launch vehicle pogo resulting in 6 month lifetime on orbit, max. Or maybe mounting the physics package horizontally. Or it was spin stabilization that killed it or ...

Or you thought kapton would be a great plastic film for high voltage high temperature insulation for the physics package but (mumble mumble secret squirrel stuff here) as documented in classified air force memo #classified, insert finger wagging here oh no you can't get more than 6 months lifetime on orbit shouldda used teflon (or vice versa)

It could be as simple as a pdf that should have been posted to arxiv.org about some engineering peculiarity of Rb cells getting classified and buried. Maybe because it cost the US government a billion bucks to learn it the hard way back in the 80s.

Those things aren't impossible, but also I don't see how any of those things class as "sabotage". Facebook didn't sabotage Google+ by not revealing to them how to make a successful Facebook.

my thoughts too, Stuxnet but for GPS satellites. Too much of a threat to the US GPS system? Maybe a target for Russia but unlikely because they have no competing system. The only thing that leads away from it being US orchestrated is that they found Stuxnet, so if they found this you could be pretty sure that US/EU relations would be very shaky. Of course perhaps then Russia make it look like a US attack to divide a wedge between allies.

>> Russia ... have no competing system

Russia has GLONASS, China has BeiDOU, India IRNSS, Japan QZ

apologies, I thought GLONASS was military use, I then checked and got stuck in wikipedia, meaning to come back and edit my comment, too late now though.

If you have a recent smartphone, you might be a GLONASS user and not even know it!

If it's an Android smartphone, recent versions of MobiWIA - Eclipsim's GPS Status & Toolbox app divide the satellite signal bar display into four sections (GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, and Galileo). Since my phone only supports GPS and GLONASS, the latter two don't show any bars.

> Russia but unlikely because they have no competing system.

Russian GLONASS had full constellation in 1995, then during late 90s it had breakages, but was fully restored by 2011 again.

EU Galileo has full constellation planed for 2020.

GLONASS's information and analysis centre is awesome.

https://www.glonass-iac.ru/en/

I wonder what design on the Soviet WWW would have looked like.

How is it a threat to the US GPS infrastructure? Does it not add another potential layer of redundancy for positioning systems? Assuming that the EU/NATO is still our ally...

The US has already leaned hard on European officials to abandon the €1.1bn (£772m) project.

Last year, the EU press spokesman for Galileo, Gilles Gantelet, declared that under the strain of American pressure, "Galileo is almost dead".

While US pressure has not killed off the Galileo project entirely, concessions made by European officials mean Galileo will now be a much weaker rival to GPS than the system they had envisioned.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/dec/08/world.internation...

Galileo will lead Europe into conflict with the US, which has security concerns about the building of a navigational network to rival its own system.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1893022.stm

The United States has security worries about the development of Galileo.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3121682.stm

Doesn't make any sense to me. If you wanted to avoid the threat from such a system, then you'd develop the techniques to sabotage it and then not actually do it until you needed it. If you sabotaged it now, then you'd just give them a heads-up that the system was vulnerable, and give them time to fix it.

Unless it was considered worth the effort to try and see if they could just jeopardize the system financially. For example, nation states have the capability to compromize industrial operations with specific viruses. If a uranium enrichment centrifuge can be targeted I don't think any system can be guaranteed to be infection free.

What makes you think they do not need it now?

The lack of any mention of a major military conflict on nytimes.com, cnn.com, and news.google.com is a pretty good indication. You don't need to care about a half-finished GNSS system if you're just bombing ISIS.

Unless you wanna kill it before it is deployed. For example if the U.S. was aware that a nation state was about to pull out on funding for it and wanted to keep the economic dominance of GPS.

Sat January 14, 2017

Poland welcomes thousands of US troops in NATO show of force

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/14/europe/poland-us-troops-nato-w...

Are you proposing that the US would hack Galileo as part of stationing a few thousand soldiers on an ally's territory?

C'mon man keep up; all hacking now is the Russians. Just like a few years ago it was all the Chinese.

Ukraine?

They'd jam GLONASS and block GPS in the area as well, if that were the case.

Ukraine is a major military conflict? Mexican drug related violence kills more per month than what is going in Ukraine for the past 3 years.

Mexican drug wars are violent but do not involve competing state militaries, so I would not call it a major military conflict. It's a criminal problem being solved using the military.

There are no competing state militaries, whilst Russia is involved it's military isn't there in any major capacity.

As far as the fighting goes the Ukraine is negligible considering all the armed conflicts around the world.

In the same vein, alcohol kills more per month than drug gangs. Doesn't make either of those a war, regardless of rhetoric.

Good point. "now" being of course in the next 5 years.

While there is some possibility (a few percent chance?), in these cases I think the majority chance is Hanlon's Razor.

It's probably just a mistake on the ESA's part -- space is hard.

Agreed, as a software developer I often see confounding multiple problems. Sometimes they are related to a third origin, sometimes they are just two separate problems that happened at the same time by chance. Usually they appear when all the low hanging fruit (easy bugs) are gone. Software is not hardware, I know, but my guess is these satellites are buggy as hell.

Not a conspiracy-lover, but this is what came to my mind instantly considering there is a still-ongoing investigation about another ESA project - the failure of ESA's Schiaparelli landing, which slammed into Mars back in October 2016.

Every country but the US has had very bad luck with Mars landings. Its a non-trivial problem to solve and even the US's expertise and funding leads to failure sometimes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars

The idea that there's a conspiracy at work is ridiculous. We're not exactly at the "Star Trek" stage of humanity here. Landing on Mars is still risky.

Time to spin it the other way: the only reason the US landings on Mars are successful is because of secret government technology developed out of a covertly funded program from the 1950s as part of antigravity research.

I agree it's very unlikely that sabotage is what's going on, but what you're saying is the one compelling argument in favor of sabotage. "Everyone but that one actor has very bad luck" is exactly what sabotage looks like.

Except that actor has the most advanced space program in history. Its like saying Michael Phelps is part of a conspiracy to keep other swimmers from winning. Uh no. The world isn't one on even playing field. Some people are better than others and thus get better results.

Please remember that the Schiaparelli lander was an experimental lander. The intention was to test the landing technology. So yes, it failed to land, but it was not exactly unexpected...

https://youtu.be/HTVgPw7TR_k?t=31m13s [30c3]

"NSA/NRO sattelite parked next to major Middle-Eastern telecommunications sattelite"

Yes they are listening in, this isn't new the US and Russia have been launching SIGINT satellites since the late 60's....

yes it's paranoid. nobody sabotages all of humanity's major triumphs this way, it's just not done and with good reason.

I say this as someone who likely subscribes to at least 20x as many conspiracy theories (defined as the existence of one or more people conspiring) as you do.

> nobody sabotages all of humanity's major triumphs this way

It may be "humanity's triumph" for you and me, but there are people who couldn't care less about that - people, for whom the only relevant thing is its impact on their political and economical standing. Such people are the ones who tend to find their way to positions of power.

I said ”this way”. To me it is paranoid, yes. In my opinion nobody does this. (Don’t give them any ideas, either.) These are multiply redundant time sources aboard satellites in a multibillion euro program. Nobody is sabotaging them (in my judgment†), and we don't need to even bring the idea of this into the discussion. I won't reply to any more replies about this.

† Again as a disclaimer: I don't have a horse in this race and I subscribe to a ton of conspiracy theories (way more than you). This is just not one of them.

GPS is a military project controlled by the US. With just a switch of a button the civilian receivers will be practical worthless for navigation. They can't do that on Galileo or GLONASS. I imagine Russia can dial down GLONASS precision for civil use cases, too.

At least Galileo is a competitor, and the political/military discourse about it is still ongoing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)...

Well, considering the energy put in by US and Russia to divide European union, I will not be surprised... Divide and rule, isn't it?

It wouldn't be paranoid

However by reading the description provided it do seems more likely it's due to mistakes

Because things do behave differently "on production" and tests (and launches and space) do sometimes makes things worse

The India program only started launching a couple years ago. Galileo has been launching since 2006. Perhaps the clocks fail only after x amount of hours in space or some other condition based on age. The oldest Galileo sat clock has a decade of wear on it. I imagine there are some worried people in the Indian space program right now after hearing this news.

From the article:

Most of the maser failures (5) have occurred on the satellites that were originally sent into orbit to validate the system, whereas all three rubidium stoppages are on the spacecraft that were subsequently launched to fill out the network.

Rubidium clock failures are being seen in "operational" Galileo satellites. First operational Galileo was launched in 2011.

And, first operational Indian navigational satellite was launched in 2013. So, there's not much difference in the timeline or aging of Rubidium atomic clocks between ESA and ISRO satellites.

Anyway, ISRO will be switching to indigenous atomic clocks for next generation navigation satellites[1].

[1] http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/india-devel...

Most simple problems are weird if you hardware isn't accessible by any means, e.g. what do you do if it suddenly stops responding? You can't simply press the reset button, all you can do is wait and hope for the best. It's an engineers nightmare.

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