How will Australia’s emergency services cope if satellites go down? With a sextant and a street directory

The defence force is already offering sextant training, so members can navigate by the stars, along with terrestrial navigation training. Photograph: Dino Fracchia/Alamy View image in fullscreen The defence force is already offering sextant training, so members can navigate by the stars, along with terrestrial navigation training. Photograph: Dino Fracchia/Alamy How will Australia’s emergency services cope if satellites go down? With a sextant and a street directory Military and SES personnel being taught analog communication and navigation techniques as experts warn solar flare could knock out ‘critical space infrastructure’ Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast Australia’s emergency services and military personnel are being trained to read paper maps, navigate without GPS support, and sail by the stars in case something knocks out the nation’s space capabilities. A panel at the 19th Australian space forum in Adelaide on Wednesday was asked to consider what would happen “if we suddenly lost access to critical space infrastructure – no satellites, no GPS, no remote sensing, no secure communications?” Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email The experts warned that Australians are unaware just how dependent they are on space, and how vulnerable that connection is to enemy attacks and solar flares. It’s “not science fiction”, Optus satellite and space systems head, Nick Leake, said. He described ATM networks going down, emergency services losing their situational awareness, aircraft navigation degrading, defence losing secure communications and remote communities being entirely cut off. Aviation, freight and energy grid communications all rely on satellites, and financial systems could face “immediate cascading failure”, he said. People may only realise their service is being delivered by a satellite when they lose it. “Most Australians have no idea that space is part of their everyday life,” Leake said. ‘This feels fragile’: how a satellite-smashing chain reaction could spiral out of control Read more “This isn’t science fiction. This is how critical satellite infrastructure is. Australia has one of the highest per capita dependencies on satellite infrastructure in the world. “Right now, it’s largely unguarded.” Flinders University adjunct professor Jackie Craig AM is an expert in cyber and virtual warfare and an incident management team leader with the South Australian state emergency service. She said emergency services are “increasingly dependent on increasingly vulnerable systems”. View image in fullscreen Australians are not aware of how dependent they are on space, and how vulnerable that connection is to solar flares, experts say. Photograph: Solar Dynamics Observatory/AP She said they now teach members to navigate with street directories and maps instead of phones – a once ubiquitous skill that has become lost in the age of Google Maps. “What we discovered is the young people of the digital revolution can’t actu