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GGSC High-Concern Risk Analysis
Consolidated Narrative — Work Assignment 3
Prepared for: United Nations Global Geodetic Centre of Excellence (UN-GGCE)
Prepared by: Ben Wortley (Lead Consultant, UN-GGCE ToR2)
Date: 7 May 2026
Scope: All entities and events at ggsc:HighConcern or ggsc:CriticalConcern
Source datasets: KG Holon, Event Graph Holon, 19 Country Risk Projections
Scope Note
This document draws on the full GGSC holon dataset — Knowledge Graph, Event Graph, and country risk projections — to identify and analyse every entity, value stream, event, and country agent classified at High or Critical concern as of 7 May 2026. Critical concern is treated as a more severe subcategory within the High concern band; both are discussed together under thematic headings, with Critical-rated items called out explicitly where the distinction matters.
The document is organised around themes rather than the five product domains, because the most significant risks cut across domain boundaries. The product-domain structure is used as a reference frame, not a constraint.
I. The Dominant Near-Term Threat: Active GNSS Signal Compromise
The Scale of the Problem
The most acute, immediate, and operationally consequential risk to the GGSC in the review period is not a funding shortfall, a station outage, or an institutional failure. It is deliberate, sustained, state-sponsored attack on the signal integrity of the global navigation satellite systems that the GGSC product chain depends on and delivers.
Since February 2022, every major maritime and aviation safety body has documented a transformation in the GNSS threat environment. EASA has issued three revisions of Safety Information Bulletin 2022-02, expanding the list of affected flight information regions each time. IATA's own flight data shows a 220% increase in GPS signal loss events affecting aircraft between 2021 and 2024. The GPSPATRON maritime analysis documents the expansion of active interference from two regional hotspots — the Baltic and Black Sea — to five: Baltic, Black Sea, Eastern Mediterranean, Red Sea/Gulf of Aden, and the Persian Gulf.
The numbers from individual incidents give a sense of the scale. In April 2024, 117 ships simultaneously appeared via AIS at Beirut Airport — not because of a technical malfunction but because falsified GNSS signals displaced their apparent positions across the Eastern Mediterranean. On 23–24 March 2024, a jamming source traced to Russia's Kaliningrad exclave disrupted more than 1,600 aircraft over Eastern Europe within 48 hours. In June 2025, over 3,000 vessels were disrupted in the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz within a fortnight, linked to electronic warfare operations associated with the Iran–Israel conflict. On 25 December 2024, Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 crash-landed in Kazakhstan following GPS signal loss — a case in which GNSS interference has been cited as a possible contributing factor, pending formal accident investigation findings.
These events collectively classify as ggsc:CriticalConcern in the risk model because they represent an immediate systemic threat requiring urgent action — not a gradual degradation to be monitored, but an active and ongoing attack on infrastructure that underpins every GGSC product.
Russia's Acknowledged Role
Russia occupies a structurally unique position in the GGSC risk landscape. It is the only country agent classified at ggsc:CriticalConcern, and the only one whose risk profile is both adversarial and deteriorating simultaneously.
The adversarial dimension is now formally acknowledged. In June 2025, Russian officials confirmed that jamming operations in the Baltic Sea are deliberate and would continue due to military requirements. This moves the interference from deniable to declared — which is significant not because it changes what is happening on the ground, but because it forecloses the diplomatic avenue of attributing the disruptions to technical failures or rogue actors. The interference is Russian state policy.
The deterioration dimension runs in parallel. Western sanctions imposed after February 2022 severed Russia's access to radiation-hardened electronics that constitute up to 90% of the components needed for next-generation GLONASS-K satellites. Multiple GLONASS-K satellites launched in 2022 and 2023 remain in flight test status years after launch. Operational satellites are running beyond their warranted lifetimes. Russia's response — to deepen integration with Chinese-made components and to formalise BeiDou–GLONASS interoperability in a 2022 treaty with Beijing — introduces a geopolitical dependency cluster whose implications extend beyond Russia's bilateral risk profile.
The Institute of Applied Astronomy (IAA) in St Petersburg, a historical contributor to VLBI analysis supporting both EOP and ICRF maintenance, has become institutionally inaccessible as Russia's isolation from international geodetic bodies deepened. This makes Russia simultaneously an active threat to GNSS signal integrity and a diminished contributor to the scientific products the GGSC is designed to produce.
Iran and the Persian Gulf
Iran's risk profile is exclusively adversarial — it operates no GGSC infrastructure and contributes no geodetic products — but the June 2025 Persian Gulf disruption (3,000+ vessels in under a fortnight) earns it a ggsc:HighConcern classification as an acting country agent.
The Iran–Israel conflict has created a persistent electronic warfare environment in one of the world's most critical maritime passages. The Red Sea and Gulf of Aden were already experiencing GNSS disruptions linked to Houthi operations in 2024–2025. The Persian Gulf escalation in June 2025 represents the largest single maritime GNSS disruption event documented in the five-year review period, surpassing even the Eastern Mediterranean 2024 spoofing events. The Strait of Hormuz — through which approximately 20% of global oil trade passes — is now a confirmed GNSS-denial zone during periods of regional conflict.
Why Orbital Product Risk is Classified Critical
The ggsc-vs:OrbitClockVS value stream — orbit and clock combination — carries ggsc:CriticalConcern not merely because of the interference events described above, but because of the structural dependency they exploit. GPS signals weaken dramatically as they travel 20,000 kilometres from orbit; they are inherently easy to overpower or falsify. The current civil GPS signal has no authentication mechanism — a spoofed signal is indistinguishable from a genuine one at the receiver unless the receiver has additional anti-spoofing capability. Galileo introduced a signal authentication feature in 2024; GPS does not have an equivalent. This asymmetry means that the most widely deployed GNSS constellation (GPS, owned by the United States) remains fundamentally vulnerable to the spoofing attacks that have already caused a fatal aviation crash.
The orbit and clock combination pipeline itself is functioning. The problem is that its output — accurate, reliable satellite orbit and timing products — depends on a signal environment that is increasingly unreliable in five of the world's major maritime and aviation regions simultaneously.
II. EOP Integrity: The UT1-UTC Single-Thread Dependency
Why UT1-UTC is Critical
The ggsc-vs:EOPProcessingVS value stream carries ggsc:CriticalConcern for a reason that is technical rather than geopolitical, but no less urgent for that.
Of the five Earth Orientation Parameters — Celestial Pole Offset, UT1-UTC, Length of Day, Polar Motion, and precession/nutation — UT1-UTC is uniquely critical and uniquely fragile. It is the parameter that relates atomic time (as kept by atomic clocks distributed globally) to the rotation of the physical Earth. It is dynamic and unpredictable, and it can be determined with the required precision by exactly one space geodetic technique: Very Long Baseline Interferometry.
This is not a redundancy gap in the conventional sense, where a backup system exists but is less capable. VLBI is the only technique capable of determining UT1-UTC independently of the GPS satellite constellation. GNSS, SLR, and DORIS can determine polar motion and Length of Day with reasonable precision, but UT1-UTC requires VLBI. If the global VLBI network degrades significantly — through station closures, funding loss, or geopolitical disruption — UT1-UTC accuracy degrades with it, and no other technique can compensate.
The IVS Fragility
The International VLBI Service for Geodesy and Astrometry carries ggsc:HighConcern in the KG holon for two compounding reasons: the uncertain status of the IAA St Petersburg Analysis Centre (a historical IVS correlator and analysis contributor whose participation became uncertain after February 2022), and the geographic incompleteness of the VGOS next-generation network.
VGOS — the VLBI Global Observing System — is the purpose-built successor to the legacy S/X VLBI network. It is designed to deliver UT1-UTC with lower latency, higher precision, and greater geographic uniformity. It is not complete. As of the review period, significant geographic gaps exist in Africa and parts of Asia. An incomplete VGOS is substantially more capable than the legacy network it is replacing, but it cannot yet deliver the uniform global coverage that UT1-UTC determination at the required precision demands.
The combination of the IAA uncertainty and the VGOS incompleteness means that the EOP critical product chain — specifically the segment that determines how the Earth is oriented in space at any given moment — is operating with reduced redundancy, reduced geographic coverage, and reduced institutional participation relative to its design specification. This earns ggsc:CriticalConcern at the value stream level, even though no single visible failure has yet occurred.
III. NASA and the US Infrastructure Risk
The DOGE Effect
The ggsc-ev:ITRF-2025-01 event — the DOGE-initiated NASA budget review commencing in February 2025 — is one of the two most consequential single-country risk events in the review period (the other being Russia's invasion of Ukraine). It differs from the Russian risk in character but not necessarily in ultimate consequence for the GGSC.
The United States is the single largest national contributor to the supply chain. NASA's Space Geodesy Programme operates the NASA Space Geodesy Network (NSGN) — the largest portfolio of collocated VLBI/SLR/GNSS/DORIS stations of any single nation — and the NASA Global GNSS Network (GGN). The Crustal Dynamics Data Information System (CDDIS), hosted at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, is the primary international archive for IVS and ILRS data. NASA Goddard also hosts the IVS Coordinating Centre. The United States Space Force operates the GPS constellation.
The DOGE reviews of early 2025, combined with workforce reductions across federal agencies and ongoing budget uncertainty, introduce a slow-onset systemic risk to all of these functions simultaneously. The risk is not that the US will abruptly withdraw from the GGSC — it is that station maintenance will be deferred, institutional expertise will be lost through attrition, and data centre operations will run on reduced capacity, in ways that are invisible until a product quality threshold is crossed.
The June 2025 Draft Environmental Impact Statement for real-estate arrangements at the Kokee Park Geophysical Observatory (KPGO) in Hawaii — a critical VLBI/SLR node and one of the most important collocated ITRF stations in the Pacific — signals that even the physical tenure of key stations is under active review. KPGO carries ggsc:AtRisk status with a named reifier in the knowledge graph precisely because its continued operation cannot be assumed from programmatic inertia.
There is no replacement mechanism for NASA's contribution. No other nation or combination of nations operates a comparable network, and no international body has the mandate or resources to commission one rapidly. This asymmetry — large, concentrated national contribution with no contingency plan — is the structural definition of a supply chain single point of failure.
GRACE-FO and the Gravity Continuity Gap
The ggsc-ev:GGM-2025-01 event carries ggsc:HighConcern because it documents a future risk rather than a current failure, but the historical precedent makes it urgent.
GRACE-FO — the joint NASA/DLR mission launched in May 2018 — is now seven years into a five-year design lifetime and has no confirmed funded successor. The original GRACE mission ended in October 2017. GRACE-FO was not launched until May 2018 — an eleven-month gap that required interpolation across the global gravity field time series. During that gap, ice sheet mass balance records, sea level attribution, and hydrological monitoring all operated on extrapolated rather than observed data.
The Global Gravity Model carries ggsc:HighConcern not because GRACE-FO is currently failing, but because every month that passes without a funded successor programme makes a repeat gap more likely. DOGE-related NASA budget pressure (2025) directly increases the probability that a GRACE-C mission will not receive timely investment. A gravity monitoring gap of 12–24 months would degrade not just climate science applications but also the long-period gravity field models that underpin ITRF scale and origin determination.
IV. The Reference Frame Risk Landscape
ITRF: Positive Trajectory Under Institutional Pressure
The International Terrestrial Reference Frame carries ggsc:HighConcern at the value stream level — a more nuanced rating than either of the two preceding sections, because the ITRF itself is currently healthy while its institutional substrate is under pressure.
ITRF2020 was released in April 2022 and is the most accurate TRF realisation in the IERS's history. The US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency aligned WGS 84 to ITRF2020 in January 2024, and the GPS control segment implemented the update on 4 March 2024 — a technically significant improvement for the global user community. ESA's GENESIS co-location satellite mission, confirmed for development in 2024, will directly address the last major unsolved accuracy gap in ITRF (origin and scale determination from space), targeting 1 mm TRF accuracy when it flies.
What earns ITRF ggsc:HighConcern is the gap between the quality of the current product and the reliability of the institutional arrangements that produce it. The ILRS simulation study presented at EGU 2025 demonstrated that loss of relatively few SLR stations can cause significant degradation of the combined global TRF. Both the NSGN station portfolio (under DOGE pressure) and Russian stations (geopolitically inaccessible) represent meaningful degradation risks to the network that ITRF depends on. The observation ingestion value stream — the collection and archiving of raw geodetic observations — carries ggsc:HighConcern precisely because this network fragility makes the pipeline from observation to product less reliable than the product's current quality implies.
The IERS Chokepoint
The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service carries ggsc:MediumConcern in the knowledge graph, but its structural position warrants specific attention in a High Concern analysis. The IERS Central Bureau, hosted at the Paris Observatory, is the authoritative source for all five EOP product lines and the formal definition of the ITRF. The current hosting arrangement concentrates authority over these products in a single national institution — a supply chain governance gap the GGSC should address as part of WA4 architecture work. The risk is not imminent — French geodetic agencies are well-funded and institutionally stable — but the geographic concentration of authority over these products in a single national institution is a supply chain governance gap that the GGSC should address as part of WA4 architecture work.
V. The Governance Vacuum
ggsc-c:INT as High Concern
The international agent — representing the collective governance layer of the GGSC — carries ggsc:HighConcern in its country risk projection. This is the most important risk classification in the entire dataset, because it describes the environment in which every other risk operates.
The GGSC has no international governance body with operational authority, member state funding obligations, or enforcement mechanisms. The UN-GGCE, established in March 2023 and hosted at the UN Campus in Bonn by Germany, is a necessary and welcome development. It produced the Hidden Risk Report (June 2024), the first comprehensive risk analysis aimed at policy decision-makers, and the 1st Joint Development Plan for Global Geodesy (August 2024), the first coordinated strategic roadmap for the supply chain. These are genuine advances. They are not sufficient.
The fundamental governance architecture of the GGSC — voluntary in-kind contributions, best-effort data sharing, consensus-based product development across the IVS, ILRS, IGS, IDS, and IERS — was designed for an era of sustained geopolitical cooperation. That era has ended, at least provisionally. The model has no mechanism to compensate for the loss of a major contributing nation's network, no mechanism to negotiate continued data access when bilateral relations deteriorate, and no mechanism to enforce the maintenance standards that the supply chain requires.
The UN-GGCE's own quantification of the funding gap — €60–90 million per year for the entire global GGSC, representing less than 0.05% of the annual revenue generated by services the chain enables — is not merely a striking statistic. It is an indictment of the governance framework. A critical global infrastructure that generates hundreds of billions of euros in dependent economic activity annually receives less than 0.05% of that in maintenance funding. This structural underfunding is self-perpetuating: it produces low political visibility, which produces low political investment, which produces low funding.
The WRC-2031 agenda item — the IVS's effort to protect geodetic VLBI frequency bands from commercial and military spectrum pressure — illustrates the governance gap concretely. The protection mechanism operates on a six-year cycle that began in 2025. The spectrum environment is changing on a month-to-month basis. The institutions that protect the GGSC's technical foundations are operating on timescales designed for a slower world.
The Capacity Development Deficit
The ggsc-vs:CapacityDevelopmentVS value stream carries ggsc:HighConcern for reasons that are both structural and geographic. Africa has the most significant geodetic coverage deficit of any populated continent — a single exceptional observatory at Hartebeesthoek (South Africa), a handful of GNSS stations, and no confirmed VGOS deployment. The VGOS network, designed to replace the legacy S/X VLBI infrastructure with uniform global coverage, has no stations confirmed for sub-Saharan Africa. Uganda's Mbarara GNSS station carries ggsc:MediumConcern not because it is failing but because it exemplifies the systemic risk: developing-nation stations are funded on margins that make them vulnerable to equipment failures, workforce gaps, and institutional discontinuities that better-resourced national programmes absorb routinely.
The JDP's Phase 1 capacity development activities are the primary mitigation pathway. Without sustained investment in geodetic training, equipment, and institutional development in underrepresented regions, the GGSC's geographic coverage will continue to erode as older stations age and are not replaced.
VI. Cross-Domain Interactions
The preceding sections treat risks thematically, but the most consequential scenario is not any single failure — it is the convergence of multiple High and Critical risks simultaneously. Several such convergence points are visible in the current dataset.
The correlated multi-technique degradation scenario. Solar Cycle 25's peak activity in 2024–2025 elevated ionospheric disturbance across VLBI observing bands, GNSS frequencies, and DORIS tracking simultaneously. The GGSC's multi-technique combination strategy is specifically designed to provide redundancy when individual techniques are degraded. It is not designed for the scenario in which all techniques are degraded at once, which is exactly what a major space weather event during GNSS jamming campaigns produces. The June 2025 Persian Gulf GNSS disruption coincided with the tail of Solar Cycle 25's peak. This is not a coincidence one can plan for, but it is a convergence one should model.
The US–Russia axis. The two largest national contributors to GGSC orbit and reference frame products are simultaneously under stress: the US through budget instability, Russia through geopolitical isolation and active adversarial behaviour. There is no third nation capable of absorbing either contribution at scale, let alone both. Germany, France, and Australia are stable and constructive contributors, but their combined infrastructure portfolio does not approach the scale of either the US or Russia at peak contribution. This means that the reference frame and EOP value streams are simultaneously facing reduced input quality and reduced network redundancy.
The GLONASS–BeiDou concentration risk. GLONASS's trajectory — degrading constellation, no viable replacement timeline under sanctions, increasing Chinese component dependency, formal BeiDou–GLONASS interoperability agreement — is creating an effective two-constellation global GNSS environment: GPS (US, under institutional pressure) and BeiDou (China, rapidly improving). A GNSS ecosystem that depended on three or four independent constellations for redundancy is converging toward one in which strategic decision-making by two nations — the US and China — dominates availability. This is a structural concentration risk that no individual nation's country risk DataBook fully captures.
VII. Risk Trajectory Summary
Across all High and Critical concern entities and events in the dataset, the directional trends are as follows.
GNSS signal integrity (Critical): deteriorating. Jamming and spoofing incidents are increasing in frequency, geographic scope, and severity. Russia has acknowledged ongoing operations. Iran has demonstrated the capacity for large-scale disruption. No effective multi-lateral deterrence mechanism exists.
EOP/UT1-UTC (Critical): stable but fragile. The IERS continues to produce authoritative EOP products. The VGOS transition, while incomplete, is progressing. The IAA loss is a wound the IVS has adapted to. The risk is not imminent failure but the reduced resilience that results from operating with a network that is below its design specification.
ITRF reference frame (High): improving technically, deteriorating institutionally. ITRF2020 is excellent; GENESIS will make the next realisation better. The institutional substrate — NASA station network, IVS/ILRS networks — is under increasing pressure.
Gravity model continuity (High): stable for now, risk deferred. GRACE-FO is operating. The risk is the absence of a committed successor programme in the face of budget pressure.
Governance and funding (High): insufficient for the risk environment. The UN-GGCE is a necessary but not yet sufficient response. The JDP provides a roadmap that has not been resourced at the level the risk requires.
VIII. Structured Risk Summary
yaml
risk_summary:
generated: "2026-05-07"
scope: "ggsc:HighConcern and ggsc:CriticalConcern"
total_critical: 6
total_high: 13
critical_items:
- id: ggsc-vs:OrbitClockVS
label: "Orbit and Clock Combination value stream"
driver: "Active GNSS jamming/spoofing across five regions"
country: RUS, IRN
- id: ggsc-vs:EOPProcessingVS
label: "EOP Processing value stream"
driver: "UT1-UTC single-thread VLBI dependency; IAA loss; VGOS gap"
country: RUS, INT
- id: ggsc-ev:ORB-2022-01
label: "Russia invades Ukraine — GNSS jamming begins at scale"
date: "2022-02-24"
country: RUS
- id: ggsc-ev:ORB-2024-01
label: "March 2024 mass GPS jamming — 1,600+ aircraft"
date: "2024-03-23"
country: RUS
- id: ggsc-ev:ORB-2024-04
label: "Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 crash — spoofing implicated"
date: "2024-12-25"
country: RUS
- id: ggsc-ev:ORB-2025-01
label: "Persian Gulf — 3,000+ vessels disrupted"
date: "2025-06"
country: IRN
- id: ggsc-ev:ORB-2025-02
label: "Russia formally acknowledges Baltic jamming"
date: "2025-06"
country: RUS
high_items:
- id: ggsc-c:USA
label: "United States of America"
driver: "DOGE-driven NASA Space Geodesy Programme budget instability"
- id: ggsc-c:INT
label: "International / Multi-national governance layer"
driver: "Governance vacuum; best-effort model insufficient; <0.05% funding"
- id: ggsc-c:IRN
label: "Islamic Republic of Iran"
driver: "Persian Gulf electronic warfare; adversarial GNSS actor"
- id: ggsc-org:NASA-GSFC
label: "NASA Goddard Space Flight Center"
driver: "DOGE budget review; NSGN/GGN/CDDIS continuity risk"
- id: ggsc-org:IVS
label: "International VLBI Service"
driver: "IAA St Petersburg uncertain; VGOS network incomplete"
- id: ggsc-org:ILRS
label: "International Laser Ranging Service"
driver: "Station-loss fragility (EGU 2025 simulation)"
- id: ggsc-vs:ReferenceFrameVS
label: "Reference Frame Realisation value stream"
driver: "NSGN under pressure; station-loss fragility"
- id: ggsc-vs:ObservationIngestionVS
label: "Observation Ingestion value stream"
driver: "Ground network fragility; few stations can degrade TRF"
- id: ggsc-vs:CapacityDevelopmentVS
label: "Capacity Development value stream"
driver: "Africa VGOS gap; developing-nation station vulnerability"
- id: ggsc-obs:Kokee
label: "Kokee Park Geophysical Observatory"
driver: "Navy/NASA KPGO EIS; real-estate transition risk"
- id: ggsc-obs:Greenbelt
label: "Goddard Geophysical and Astronomical Observatory"
driver: "Co-located with NASA GSFC; DOGE budget exposure"
- id: ggsc-ev:ITRF-2025-01
label: "DOGE NASA budget review"
date: "2025-02"
country: USA
- id: ggsc-ev:ORB-2022-02
label: "GLONASS deterioration under sanctions"
date: "2022"
country: RUS
- id: ggsc-ev:GGM-2025-01
label: "GRACE-FO — no confirmed successor mission"
date: "2025"
country: USA, DEU
- id: ggsc-ev:STR-2024-02
label: "Solar Cycle 25 peak exceeds forecast"
date: "2024"
country: INT
- id: ggsc-ev:EOP-2022-01
label: "IAA St Petersburg VLBI disruption"
date: "2022-02"
country: RUS
priority_actions:
- priority: 1
action: "Establish multi-lateral GNSS interference deterrence mechanism"
addresses: [ggsc-vs:OrbitClockVS, ggsc-c:RUS, ggsc-c:IRN]
- priority: 2
action: "Develop NASA Space Geodesy Network continuity protocol independent of US budget"
addresses: [ggsc-org:NASA-GSFC, ggsc-obs:Kokee, ggsc-obs:Greenbelt]
- priority: 3
action: "Complete VGOS network — prioritise Africa and Asia deployments"
addresses: [ggsc-vs:EOPProcessingVS, ggsc-org:IVS]
- priority: 4
action: "Commit GRACE-C successor funding before GRACE-FO operational end"
addresses: [ggsc-ev:GGM-2025-01]
- priority: 5
action: "Establish GGSC funding compact proportionate to dependent revenue"
addresses: [ggsc-c:INT, ggsc-vs:CapacityDevelopmentVS]Sources
All findings in this document are drawn from independently verifiable sources. Primary references:
Prepared by Ben Wortley — UN-GGCE ToR2 Consulting Engagement
ben@merchantsofmalta.com
© 2026 Ben Wortley