My latest at Forbes: GPS can be jammed with $300 worth of off-the-shelf hardware. That’s not a theoretical threat anymore. It’s already happening in conflict zones around the world, which is why militaries, airlines, and shipping companies are urgently looking for alternatives.
Q-CTRL, an Australian quantum startup, may have the answer. The company is now shipping a quantum navigation system about the size of a loaf of bread. It works by detecting microscopic variations in Earth’s magnetic field and cross-referencing them against a pre-mapped database. No satellites, nothing to jam, nothing to spoof. It also works over open water, at night, and through cloud cover, which rules out many competing approaches.
The technology also addresses a key weakness in current GPS backups. Inertial navigation systems drift over time, with errors compounding the longer you travel. Quantum navigation doesn’t drift. In real-world testing, Q-CTRL’s system was 100 times more accurate than inertial navigation and already meets aviation’s required navigation performance standard of 0.3 nautical miles.
With roughly two million larger commercial drones expected to be built annually by 2030, and defense and aviation partnerships including Airbus already in place, Q-CTRL is entering a market that’s only going to matter more.