This may include adverts from us and 3rd parties based on our understanding. California - Based firm TrustPoint Inc announced today plans to expand its engineering team, develop core technologies including satellite payload testing - and extend key partnerships. This has been a blow to the European satellite Galileo as governments look for backup alternatives. But the US are seeking to rival Europe's Galileo system with their new rival project after TrustPoint raised 1.5 million in funding from venture capital firm DCVC. TrustPoint founders Chris DeMay, former Astro Digital vice president, and Patrick Shannon, Archimedes business founder and chief technology officer, said alternatives are needed as current systems are inaccurate, slow, unencrypted and can become jammed.
The company stressed that GNSS systems alone are not accurate enough for a lot of emerging augmented applications, such as drone delivery, self-driving cars, urban air transport and commercial drones.
Their new alternative seeks to provide governments and commercial customers with improved service, security and reliability.
TrustPoint promised that their system will bring better accuracy, faster time to first fix, as well as anti-jamming capabilities.
Patrick Shannon, TrustPoint co-founder and CEO, said in a statement: For the past decade, NewSpace startups have revolutionised a host of applications, like launch, earth observation and communications.
Our effort to create a fully autonomous GNSS service is the logical next step in this trend, a highly crucial layer of security for today's GPS users and an enabler for commercial applications in the autonomous navigation sector. DCVC partner Chris Boshuizen, who led the firm s investment into TrustPoint, said in a statement: It s easy to envision TrustPoint's innovative and fast-evolving commercial service alongside government GNSS, or even as the primary solution. Initial services for Galileo satellites have been in use and on offer to governments since 2016.
The fully operational Galileo system, which will consist of 24 operational satellites plus six in-orbit spares, is expected to go completely live in 2026.
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but the UK, after investing in the project, pulled out after the EU began excluding Britain from its security aspects of its development.
The UK has ruled out the possibility of joining the EU s project and will continue to use the US Global Positioning System GPS for situation, navigation and timing services.
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The ball appears to be on US court as the race for GNSS and space domination continues.