To avoid becoming dependent on GPS.

Ride-hailing service — Photo: Gustavo Azeredo

In an article published in O Globo, the CEO of CGEE, Anderson Gomes, articulates the importance of mastering the Positioning, Navigation and Time (PNT) system, which enables telecommunications services, financial systems, precision agriculture, air transport, logistics and energy.

When we check our location on our cell phone or follow a route on an app, we rarely think about the infrastructure that makes these services possible. Less obvious is its importance for telecommunications, financial systems, precision agriculture, air transport, logistics, and energy. We're talking about Positioning, Navigation, and Time (PNT).

OGPS has become synonymous with this technology, but it is only one of the global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). It is controlled by the United States, just as Galileo belongs to the European Union, BeiDou to China, and Glonass to Russia. Without its own system, Brazil depends on infrastructures whose operation, maintenance, and governance are defined outside the country.

The PNT, however, is broader. It allows for the determination of positions, the guidance of movements, and the distribution of precise time references, indispensable for synchronizing networks, recording financial transactions, and coordinating digital infrastructures. It is an invisible infrastructure of the digital economy. This raises a strategic question: to what extent can a country with the territorial size of Brazil depend on systems controlled by other nations? It is not a matter of ceasing to use them, but of preventing this dependence from turning into vulnerability. In critical sectors, failures, interference, or access restrictions can produce chain reactions. Therefore, the international debate involves resilience, diversity of resources, and the maintenance of essential services in adverse situations.

Building national capacity means developing an architecture suited to our needs, combining global systems with space and ground resources. Traditional systems primarily use satellites in medium Earth orbit (MEO), but there is growing interest in constellations in low Earth orbit (LEO). Closer to the surface, they can offer stronger signals and complement existing architecture, increasing precision and robustness. The European Space Agency's Celeste mission is already evaluating a LEO layer complementary to Galileo and shows that new architectures are being tested.

Without its own system, Brazil depends on infrastructures whose operation, maintenance, and governance are defined externally. This is the perspective that guides the studies of the Center for Management and Strategic Studies (CGEE). Through the Space Technologies Observatory, the Center analyzes alternatives for a Brazilian National Telescope (NTP) capability, including a regional solution supported by low-Earth orbit satellites and integrated with existing infrastructures. Focused on Brazilian and South American needs, it would allow for a strategy compatible with our capabilities and demands.

Developing a national technological sovereignty capacity can also mobilize different segments of the National Science, Technology and Innovation System. This chain involves satellites, high-precision clocks, electronics, telecommunications, software, cybersecurity, and signal processing, in addition to stimulating the development of skills in critical technologies. Technological sovereignty does not mean producing everything internally, but mastering essential elements and reducing dependencies that could compromise the country's strategic functions.

The National Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy 2024-2034 recognizes the space sector as strategic for Brazilian sovereignty. CGEE has joined the technical group that will contribute to the Action Plan for the Development and Operation of the National Space Technology System and its governance model. The challenge involves implementation, financing, coordination, and continuity. Infrastructures of this magnitude require a long-term vision and coordination between government, universities, research centers, and companies.

Brazil possesses scientific expertise, space experience, an industrial base, and applications that justify this effort. It is now necessary to transform dispersed capabilities into strategy and participate in building the technologies of the digital and space economy.

Anderson Gomes is the president of the Center for Management and Strategic Studies and vice-president of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences for the Northeast and Espírito Santo regions.

This article was originally published in O Globo.